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oi.uchicago.edu oi.uchicago.edu Christians and Others in the Umayyad State oi.uchicago.edu ii ********** Late Antique and Medieval Islamic Near East (LAMINE) The new Oriental Institute series LAMINE aims to publish a variety of scholarly works, including monographs, edited volumes, critical text editions, translations, studies of corpora of documents — in short, any work that offers a significant contribution to understanding the Near East between roughly 200 and 1000 C.E. ********** oi.uchicago.edu iii Christians and Others in the Umayyad State edited by Antoine Borrut and Fred M. Donner with contributions by Antoine Borrut, Touraj Daryaee, Muriel Debié, Fred M. Donner, Sidney H. Griffith, Wadād al-Qāḍī, Milka Levy-Rubin, Suzanne Pinckney Stetkevych, Donald Whitcomb, and Luke Yarbrough 2016 LAMINE 1 LATE ANTIQUE AND MEDIEVAL ISLAMIC NEAR EAST • NUMBER 1 THE ORIENTAL INSTITUTE OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO CHICAGO, ILLINOIS oi.uchicago.edu iv Library of Congress Control Number: 2015956904 ISBN: 978-1-614910-31-2 © 2016 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. Published 2016. Printed in the United States of America. The Oriental Institute, Chicago THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO LATE ANTIQUE AND MEDIEVAL ISLAMIC NEAR EAST • NUMBER 1 Series Editors Leslie Schramer and Thomas G. Urban with the assistance of Rebecca Cain With special thanks to Tasha Vorderstrasse. Cover Illustration St. John of Damascus, icon from Damascus, Syria (d. ca. 131/749). 19th century, attributed to Iconographer Ne’meh Naser Homsi https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_of_Damascus#/media/File: John_Damascus_%28arabic_icon%29.gif (accessed 1/21/2016) Printed by Thomson-Shore, Dexter, Michigan, U.S.A. The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Services — Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1984. ∞ oi.uchicago.edu v Table of Contents Acknowledgments ................................................................. vii Abbreviations ..................................................................... ix Introduction Christians and Others in the Umayyad State ................................... 1 Antoine Borrut and Fred M. Donner Contributions 1. Notes for an Archaeology of Muʿāwiya: Material Culture in the Transitional Period of Believers......................................................... 11 Donald Whitcomb, The Oriental Institute 2. The Manṣūr Family and Saint John of Damascus: Christians and Muslims in Umayyad Times ........................................................... 29 Sidney H. Griffith, The Catholic University of America 3. Christians in the Service of the Caliph: Through the Looking Glass of Communal Identities....................................................... 53 Muriel Debié, École Pratique des Hautes Études 4. Persian Lords and the Umayyads: Cooperation and Coexistence in a Turbulent Time ........................................................... 73 Touraj Daryaee, University of California, Irvine 5. Non-Muslims in the Muslim Conquest Army in Early Islam . 83 Wadād al-Qāḍī, The Oriental Institute 6. Al-Akhṭal at the Court of ʿAbd al-Malik: The Qaṣīda and the Construction of Umayyad Authority........................................................ 129 Suzanne Pinckney Stetkevych, Georgetown University 7. ʿUmar II’s ghiyār Edict: Between Ideology and Practice .......................... 157 Milka Levy-Rubin, The National Library of Israel 8. Did ʿUmar b. ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz Issue an Edict Concerning Non-Muslim Officials?........ 173 Luke Yarbrough, Saint Louis University Index ............................................................................ 207 v oi.uchicago.edu oi.uchicago.edu vii Acknowledgments This volume inaugurates a new book series entitled Late Antique and Medieval Islamic Near East (LAMINE), published by the Oriental Institute at the University of Chicago. The editors express their gratitude to Director Gil Stein and the Oriental Institute publications committee for their support in launching this new publishing venture. LAMINE aims to publish a variety of works of scholarship, including mono- graphs, edited volumes, critical text editions, translations, studies of corpora of documents — in short, anything that makes a significant contribution to our understanding of the Near East between roughly 200 and 1000 C.E. The primary language of the series will be English, but contributions in French and German will be considered as well. LAMINE volumes will be released simultaneously in print (softcover) and electronically (the latter available at no charge via the Oriental Institute’s website1), to encourage dissemination of this scholarship as quickly and widely as possible. The papers assembled below were presented at a workshop held in Chicago on June 17–18, 2011, entitled “Christians, Jews, and Zoroastrians in the Umayyad State.” Two speakers were already commit- ted to submit their work elsewhere, but the other eight papers are published here in full. The workshop was meant to foster dialogue and so papers were not read during the event, but rather pre-circulated in order to have ample time for discussion. Each paper was assigned a formal respondent, after which the floor was open to free discussion among the roughly 40 scholars who attended the workshop. Even though it was not possible to reproduce here the responses to the papers and the ensuing discussions, all participants benefited tremendously from them and they often had a significant impact as the vari- ous contributions were revised by their authors for publication. It is hoped that this gathering will be followed by others in a series of workshops dedicated to the first dynasty of Islam that will follow the same format and be subsequently published in LAMINE. The editors are grateful to the following institutions for their generous financial support of the conference: the Franke Institute for Humanities at the University of Chicago, the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Chicago,2 the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago, the Department of History at the University of Maryland, the Divinity School at the University of Chicago, and the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations at the University of Chicago. Without their generosity and encouragement provided at the earliest stages of planning, it is uncertain that the conference could have materialized in such a successful manner. We also offer sincere thanks to Dr. Thomas Maguire, Associate Director of CMES, who handled most of the practical arrangements for the conference. The editors also wish to express their profound thanks to the staff of the Publications Office of the Oriental Institute, in particular Thomas Urban and Leslie Schramer, for their efficient and highly professional handling of the many technical and other challenges posed by this manuscript once it was submitted to them. It was a pleasure to work with them and we know that this bodes well for future volumes in the LAMINE series. 1 For more on the electronic publications initiative of the Oriental Institute, please refer to: http://oi.uchicago.edu/ research/electronic-publications-initiative-oriental-institute-university-chicago 2 CMES funding came in part from a Title VI National Resource Center grant from the U.S. Department of Education. vii oi.uchicago.edu oi.uchicago.edu ix Abbreviations A.D. anno Domini (in the year of [our] Lord) A.H. anno Hegirae (in the year of the Hegira) A.S. anno salutis (in the year of salvation) attrib. attributed to C.E. Common Era ca. circa, about, approximately ch(s). chapter(s) col(s). column(s) d. died ed. edition, editor e.g. exempli gratia, for example esp. especially f(f). and following fl. floruit, flourished gov. governed ibid. ibidem, in the same place i.e. id est, that is n(n). note(s) no(s). number(s) O. ostracon P. papyrus pl. plural r. ruled ref. reference sing. singular s.v. sub verbo, under the word trans. translation, translator v(v). verse(s) CSCO Corpus Scriptorum Christianorum Orientalium EI1 Encyclopaedia of Islam. 1st edition. Edited by M. Th. Houtsma, T. W. Arnold, R. Basset, and R. Hartmann. Leiden: Brill, 1913–1936. EI2 Encyclopaedia of Islam. 2nd edition. Edited by P. Bearman, Th. Bianquis, C. E. Bosworth, E. van Donzel, and W. P. Heinrichs. Leiden: Brill, 2012. EIr Encyclopædia Iranica. Edited by E. Yarshater. 15 vols. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1982–2011. ix oi.uchicago.edu oi.uchicago.edu 1 Introduction: Christians and Others in the Umayyad State Antoine Borrut and Fred M. Donner The papers in this volume were prepared for a conference entitled Christians, Jews, and Zoroastrians in the Umayyad State, held in June 2011 at the University of Chicago. The goal of the conference was to address a simple question: just what role did non-Muslims play in the operations of the Umayyad state? It has always been clear that the Umayyad family (r. 41–132/661–750) governed populations in the rapidly expanding empire that were over- whelmingly composed of non-Muslims — mainly Christians, Jews, and Zoroastrians — and the status of those non-Muslim communities under Umayyad rule and more broadly in early Islam has been discussed continuously for more than a century. It is impossible to do justice here to decades of scholarship devoted to non-Muslims in early Islam since it has become a field of its own and generated its own industry.1 Topics such as non-Muslims’ perceptions of emergent Islam, the legal status of non-Muslims under Islamic rule, theological