The Making of the Medieval Middle East by Tannous Jack

Author:Tannous, Jack
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2018-09-16T16:00:00+00:00

DEMOGRAPHICS AND THE QUESTION OF POWER

Such considerations aside, however, it must be acknowledged that focusing on numbers and on when exactly it was that Muslims achieved a demographic majority in the Middle East can itself be a misleading endeavor, tainted by concerns that are more at home in the political dynamics of democratic states in our contemporary world than in the period in question.158 In the Middle Ages, demography was not as significant as political power. What was important was that from the mid-seventh century onward, the followers of the Prophet belonged to a religion of winners: ‘And this is the sign that God loves us, and is pleased with our religion,’ the Muslim interlocutor in an early eighth-century Syriac dispute text is made to say, ‘that he has given us authority over all faiths and all peoples. And behold, they are our slaves and subjects!’159 ‘Do not think, my beloved children,’ Ps.-Samuel of Qalamūn admonished his tenth-century readers in Egypt, ‘that this nation is honored in the sight of God because he has handed over this land to their hands.’160 Christians, however, numerous they may have been, could not compete: ‘They seek help from Saint Sergius and his son, after the Cross,’ the poet Jarīr (d. ca. 728), wrote mockingly of the Christian Arab tribe of Taghlib, ‘but they have no helper.’161 Writing in the late seventh century, Ps.-Methodius would describe the Arabs, or Children of Ishmael, bragging about their military successes over a variety of different peoples. ‘They will be dressed as bridegrooms,’ he wrote, ‘and adorned as brides; they will blaspheme, saying, “The Christians have no Saviour.”’162

Al-Hāshimī, the Muslim correspondent in the early ninth-century Apology of al-Kindī, referred to the debate tactics of the ‘rabble, ignorant, riff-raff, commoners, and foolish among those of our religion’ whose manner of discussing and disputing with Christians was uncouth and did not rely on reason; their way of speaking was to be contentious, arrogant, and domineering, he noted, based on ‘the power of the empire, without knowledge or argument.’163 That al-Hāshimī’s portion of the Apology was probably written by a Christian points to how the attitudes of at least some Muslims towards religious others in the context of interreligious discussion, especially outside of learned religious circles, were perceived. In Part I, we saw that Chalcedonians might simply appeal to the fact of who it was that controlled the holy places as a way to trump other Christians in debate; now, a Muslim similarly might point to the might of the Muslim state as proof of the truth of the Prophet’s message. The political domination of Muslims over non-Muslims and the divine favor this implied was what mattered, not numerical hegemony. Indeed, when the Andalusian jurist Ibn Ḥazm (d. AH 456/AD 1064) discussed notions of dār al-islām and dār al-shirk, the ‘abode of Islam’ and the ‘abode of polytheism,’ he noted that a region or area or place (dār) ‘is only named for the one who is dominant over it and who governs it and possesses it.

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