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Icon Veneration As a Stumbling Block

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Icon Veneration As a Stumbling Block Journal of Eastern Christian Studies 72(1-2), 71-82. doi: 10.2143/JECS.72.1.3287535 © 2020 by Journal of Eastern Christian Studies. All rights reserved. ICON VENERATION AS A STUMBLING BLOCK THEODORE ABU QURRA AND BYZANTINE ORTHODOX ICONOCLASTS IN THE EARLY ABBASID SOCIETY NESTOR KAVVADAS 1. ICONOCLASM AND FEAR: THEODORE ABU QURRA’S TESTIMONY It probably was in the first decades of the ninth century that Theodore abu Qurra, the first Orthodox Christian theologian ever to write in Arabic, com- posed a treatise in defence of the veneration of icons and addressed it to a certain Abu Yanna, possibly a clergyman of the Church of the True Icon of Christ in Edessa.1 This treatise is an appeal, as stated in its opening lines, to the ‘many Christians’ who ‘are abandoning the prostration to the icon of Christ our God … The same, too, with the icons of his saints’. These Chris- tians of Edessa who were giving up the veneration of the holy icons were doing so, Theodore says, because ‘anti-Christians, especially those claiming to have in hand a scripture sent down from God,’ – that is, the Muslims with their Qur’an – ‘are reprimanding them for their prostration to these icons, and because of it they are imputing to them the worship of idols, and the transgression of what God commanded in the Torah and the Prophets, and they sneer at them’.2 It was this Muslim pressure that had ‘frightened away from prostration to the holy icons’, as Theodore puts it, a considerable number of his Orthodox co-religionists in Edessa, Theodore’s own home- town and perhaps the major outpost of Byzantine Orthodox Christianity beyond the Euphrates in the lands of northern Mesopotamia that were then still heavily populated by Miaphysite Syrians. 1 On this treatise, see now V.-O. Mihoc, Christliche Bilderverehrung im Kontext islamischer Bilderlosigkeit: Der Traktat über die Bilderverehrung von Theodor Abū Qurrah (ca. 755 bis ca. 830) (Wiesbaden, 2017), esp. pp. 105-119. 2 Theodore Abū Qurrah, A Treatise on the Veneration of the Holy Icons, transl. S. Griffith (Leuven, 1997), pp. 28ff. 72 NESTOR KAVVADAS However, this insinuation that it was only out of fear of the Muslims that many Orthodox Christians distanced themselves from icon veneration had become a standard argument against Iconoclasts of any provenience already before Theodore abu Qurra’s times. It was first launched more than half a century earlier against Constantinopolitan Iconoclasts: these were accused by the anti-Iconoclast party of denouncing icon veneration only to flatter the much-feared Muslim Arab Empire, to escape Muslim accusations of idolatry, and to achieve a sort of overall compromise both ideologically and politically.3 Could it be then that Theodore abu Qurra is just reproducing that stand- ard argument in order to disqualify the pro-Iconoclast Edessenes as cowards? Or is he rather describing the state of affairs? Christians living in the ʽAbbāsid Empire do indeed appear to have had serious reasons to be fearful when paying honour to the holy icons in Theodore’s days. As he reports in the same treatise, ‘Christians who make icons of Christ and his saints in their churches, and who make prostrations to their icons’, that is, his fellow Icono- philes, were seen as ‘engaging in behaviour that would appear to more staid minds to be revolting, to the point that they are immersed in meanness’;4 and ‘the disdain these people endure is what is plainer than the sun for the purpose of accommodating themselves to Him [sc. to the Crucifix]’.5 3 This denigrating genealogy of Iconoclasm was recounted by John, the alleged delegate of the Patriarch of Jerusalem at the 7th Ecumenical Council of Nicea (787). John explained to the Council – with the authority of someone (allegedly) speaking on behalf of a Patri- arch from the ʽAbbāsid Empire – that the ‘first inventor’ of Iconoclasm was a Jewish sorcerer, who promised the Caliph Yazid supernatural longevity if he would forbid Chris- tian veneration of icons. Yazid did so, and the ‘Pseudo-bishop of Nakoleia’, one of the Leo III’s leading Iconoclasts, followed, and after him the Byzantine Emperor himself; see Concilium universal Nicaenum secundum – Concilii actiones IV-V, ed. E. Lamberz, Acta Conciliorum Oecumenicorum, series secunda, vol. IV.2 (Berlin – Boston, 2012), pp. 590- 596; although this speech by John is the earliest extant Greek witness of this legend, it is clearly much older than the Council; see Chr. Sahner, ‘The First Iconoclasm in Islam: A New History of the Edict of Yazid II (AH 104 AD 723)’, Der Islam, 94 (2017), pp. 5-56, esp. pp. 12-13; on this legend and its roots, see esp. St. Gerö, Byzantine Iconoclasm during the Reign of Leo III with Particular Attention to the Oriental Sources (Louvain, 1973), pp. 59-84; P. Speck, Ich bin’s nicht, Kaiser Konstantin ist es gewesen: die Legenden vom Einfluss des Teufels, des Juden und des Moslem auf den Ikonoklasmus (Bonn, 1990), pp. 25-113. 4 Theodore Abū Qurrah, A Treatise on the Veneration of the Holy Icons (see n. 2), p. 93. 5 Ibid., p. 95 ICON VENERatION AS A STUMBLING BLOCK 73 Clearly, for Theodore abu Qurra only the iconophile Christians were ‘immersed in meanness’ and had to ‘endure the disdain’ of the Muslim rul- ing class – and thus were imitating, in a sense, Christ’s passion itself. As he explains, ‘were there none of these icons in our churches, what we have mentioned [sc. the Muslim disdain for the icon of the Crucifix] would never occur to the minds of most of these people going inside our churches. As for the icons, they are what arouse them to reproach us’.6 Now, this assertion of Theodore seems not to be just an effort to style his fellow anti-Iconoclasts as the only Christians that have the courage of their convictions – and thus stress the contrast with the supposedly cowardly Icon- oclasts. For a hadith that seems only slightly earlier to Theodore’s own times, as it is handed down to us by the prominent scholar of legal tradition ‘Abd ar-Razzāq aṣ- Ṣan῾ānī in the late eighth or the early ninth century, indeed forbids Muslims to enter only those among the Christian churches where icons are venerated.7 After all, it was in that same era of the early ʽAbbāsids (and Theodore abu Qurra) that Islamic aniconism was finally established, after a series of ahādīth and perhaps even a caliphal decree had paved the way during the eighth century.8 And some scholars have suggested that this assertion of 6 Ibid. 7 A hadith that ‘Abd ar-Razzāq attributes to Sufyan ath-Thawri (716-778) has it that ῾Abdallāh ibn ῾Abbās, Muhammad’s cousin, ‘abhorred praying in a Church when there ;ابن عبس انه كنا يكره ان يصلي في الكنيسة إذا كنا فيها تماثيل) ’were likenesses [sc. icons] in it see ῾Abd-ar-Razzāq aṣ-Ṣan῾ānī, al- Muṣannaf, ed. Ayman Naṣr ad-Dīn al-Azharī (Beirut, 2000), vol. 1, hadith 1610; cf. J. Signes-Codoñer, ‘Melkites and Icon Worship during the Iconoclastic Period’, Dumbarton Oaks Papers, 67 (2013), pp. 135-187, on p. 140, n. 31); ‘Abd ar-Razzāq also relates (in two slightly different versions) an anecdote about the Caliph Umar: ‘When Umar entered Syria, one of the powerful among the Christians prepared him a dinner and invited him; but Umar said that he would not enter a Church because لما قدم عمر الشم صنع) ’[of the pictures that were in it – that is, of the likenesses [sc. icons له رجل من عزماء النصاري ظعاما ودعاه فقال عمر إنا لا يدخل كنائسكم من الصور التي فيها. يعني Abd-ar-Razzāq, al- Muṣannaf, hadith 1612; (this version is attributed by ar-Razziq῾ ;التماثيل to Caliph Umar’s eldest son, ῾Abdallāh bin ῾Umar); ‘Abd ar-Razzāq is considered a highly influential authority – he was one of ibn Hanbal’s teachers: see S. Lucas, Constructive Critics, Ḥadīth Literature, and the Articulation of Sunnī Islam: the Legacy of the Generation of Ibn Sa῾d, Ibn Ma῾īn, and Ibn Ḥanbal (Leiden, 2004), p. 208 – and a relatively reliable transmitter of earlier traditions: see H. Motzki, ‘The Muṣannaf of ʽAbd al-Razzāq al-Ṣanʽānī as a Source of Authentic Aḥādīth of the First Century A.H.’, Journal of Near Eastern Studies, 50 (1991), pp. 1-21, esp. p. 21. 8 See D. van Reenen, ‘The Bilderverbot, a New Survey’, Der Islam, 67 (1990), pp. 27-77, esp. pp. 69-70; the author dates the Bilderverbot to the second-third quarter of the eighth 74 NESTOR KAVVADAS Islamic aniconism under the early ʽAbbāsids could be seen as an act of setting a(nother) mark of differentiation vis-à-vis the Christians.9 Be this as it may, at the end of that early ʽAbbāsid era, which was the time when Christians were first reduced to minorities all over the Middle East as an ‘early Muslim majority’ emerged, Caliph al-Mutawakkil could put an icon of Mary and Christ in front of a Christian and check his reactions to decide if he should deem him an idolater or not.10 Thus, Theodore abu Qurra’s straightforward rejection, in his aforemen- tioned treatise, of the claim of certain Iconoclast Christians that, by giving up the veneration of the icons, they do not stop scandalising Muslims, for they would be appalled just as well by the aniconic cross of the Iconoclast churches, after all does not seem so dubious. Theodore states that the argu- ment is simply not true: a Muslim would not be scandalised by a Cross when entering a Church, but only by the holy icons.
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