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CHAPTER 1

Converting to Islam and Returning to Christianity

Let us begin this chapter with a story that illustrates how conversion is usually thought to have worked in the early Islamic period. The anecdote comes from the Chronicle of Zuqnin, a historical work completed around 775 in a monastery near Amid in northern Mesopotamia. The author of the chronicle, a Syriac-speaking monk known as Joshua the Stylite, lamented the perceived uptick in conversions in his day. Burdened by heavy taxes and the harassment of the 'Abbasid authorities, Christians were "turn[ing] to Islam [Syr. hanputa] faster than sheep rushing to water." In packs of "twenty, thirty, one hundred, two hundred, and three hundred" at a time, they descended on the Muslim prefects in Harran, where they "renounced Christ, baptism, the Eucharist, and the Cross." The desire to convert transcended social and economic classes. "This was done not only by the young," the chronicler bemoaned, "but also by adults, the elderly ... even by senior priests and so many deacons they cannot be counted." Although the Chronicle of Zuqnin is a Christian eyewitness to the events of the early 'Abbasid period, it reinforces an impression left by medieval Muslim sources, too. That is, the eighth century was a time of rapid religious change, but this change usually went in one direction: from the church to the mosque.

From a historical perspective, this impression is not entirely inaccurate. Sometime during or shortly after the Crusades, scholars surmise, the Middle East went from being a predominantly Christian world (with large numbers of Jews, Zoroastrians, Manichaeans, and pagans) to one whose majority population practiced Islam. This was an uneven process, probably invisible to most who lived through it, and shaped by the vicissitudes of conquest and the varying fortunes of missionaries. It was also a process of remarkable regional diversity, for just as some areas crossed the threshold of a Muslim numerical majority early on, others held out for centuries, including parts of Upper Egypt, the mountains of Lebanon, and much of northern Mesopotamia, which remained predominantly Christian into the twentieth century. Despite this, conversion to Islam should not be regarded as the only religious option in the early period. While it is undeniable that most of the region's Christians (and non-Muslims) converted to Islam gradually, there were many who chose to convert in less "popular" directions. These included Christians who embraced Islam but regretted their decision and returned to their original faith, the children of religiously mixed marriages who spurned their fathers' Islam and adopted their mothers' Christianity, and a small but significant group of Muslims from Muslim backgrounds who converted to Christianity. They constitute the focus of this and the next chapter.

Normally, such unconventional forms of conversion are invisible in Muslim sources. By and large, these texts paint a triumphalist portrait of Islamization as an irreversible process, one that was well on its way by the early 'Abbasid period. Basing their research on these sources, too, some modern scholars have implicitly accepted the master narrative. Even among those who have not, many have concentrated their research on the question of when the Middle East first became predominantly Muslim, as if this benchmark were intrinsically important for understanding the shape of a society or were a foregone conclusion in the early period itself. The truth is that the demographic tipping point between Muslims and non-Muslims is almost impossible to know. Scholars of the medieval period lack the kind of reliable demographic data that could shed definitive light on the question, comparable to what we can glean from tax registers or censuses of later periods. Attempts to deduce such data from premodern sources have been met with mixed success — most notably, Richard Bulliet's groundbreaking 1979 study Conversion to Islam in the Medieval Period: An Essay in Quantitative History, which proposed conversion curves for different regions of the medieval Middle East on the basis of onomastic information in biographical literature (tabaqat).

Bulliet's approach was creative and remains broadly influential nearly forty years after its publication. Despite this, it has had the practical effect of narrowing research on conversion to a cluster of broadly empirical questions, such as when conversion to Islam took place and how many individuals converted. Along the way, other basic questions related to the process of conversion have received less attention: How did converts relate to their old and new communities? How did relatives, friends, and neighbors perceive the conversion of their loved ones? How did conversion affect an individual's political, social, and cultural identities? How did different kinds of literary sources represent the experience of religious change? Was conversion a discrete moment in time or a drawn-out process that lasted for many years, if not for generations?

One way we can begin to answer these questions is by consulting the Christian martyrologies of the early Islamic period (a type of evidence whose usefulness Bulliet has doubted, unjustifiably so in my opinion). Many of these texts recount the stories of apostates who were executed for leaving Islam. Their motivations were varied, but in each case, we can see how the process of Islamization was neither absolute nor inevitable in the early years. Rather, the Middle East during the seventh, eighth, and ninth centuries was an intensely competitive world in which confessional costume changes were common. In this chapter, I wish to explore the nature of conversion in the early medieval Middle East by focusing on the first half of these convert martyrs, who began their lives as Christians, embraced Islam, and then returned to Christianity. I will also focus on martyrs from religiously mixed families, leaving the matter of "true apostates" — that is, Muslim converts to Christianity — to chapter 2.

The central argument of these two chapters may be summarized as follows: there were many forms of conversion in the early medieval Middle East other than the monolithic form of conversion that most scholars investigate today. Even if the number of apostates paled in comparison with the number of those who converted and remained Muslims, their paths in and out of Islam can tell us a great deal about how conversion worked more generally, especially the myriad social, spiritual, economic, and political pressures that powered religious change in the period. In a sense, we can understand the long-term, large-scale conversion of the Middle East better by investigating those exceptional moments when this process was undermined or reversed. For this reason, these two chapters present several case studies designed to highlight alternative models of conversion in the early medieval Middle East. These include apostasy from Islam in the context of slavery; conversion to Islam in contested circumstances, such as intoxication or financial disputes; apostasy within religiously mixed families; conversion due to alleged supernatural experiences; and apostasy caused by Muslims losing contact with Muslim communities and institutions.

These models accord well with much recent theoretical literature that has stressed the complexity and diversity of motivations behind conversion, as well as the variety of ways in which conversion can be represented and instantiated. Thus, this chapter and the next investigate conversion in the context of spiritual excursions (Anthony al-Qurashi, Ibn Raja'), social encounters with the religious other ('Abd al-Masih, Elias), and cultural dislocation (Vahan, Abo). They also show how converts signaled their shift in allegiances by changes in appearance (Dioscorus), administrative status (Cyrus), social groups (George the Black), and naming (Bacchus) and by redefining their ties with broader family networks (Aurea). Above all, they reveal the importance of narrative in portraying the experience of conversion, particularly how authors represented conversion using literary devices that were intelligible and persuasive in the eyes of their readers.

I. RELIGIOUS CHANGE IN THE POSTCONQUEST MIDDLE EAST: AN OVERVIEW

To understand what compelled martyrs to convert and revert, we must step around one popular image of conversion that is based on the experiences of famous figures such as Paul of Tarsus, Augustine of Hippo, the Protestant Christians of the Second Great Awakening, and Malcolm X. This model understands conversion as an outward manifestation of a changing emotional, spiritual, or intellectual reality. Though this may describe some conversions in premodern times, it is inadequate for understanding what I would regard as the majority of conversions in the early Islamic period. In this world, conversion hinged not only on spiritual convictions but also on an array of social and political factors detached from questions of high theology. In fact, the line between religious conversion and cultural assimilation was often very blurry. For this reason, Arthur Darby Nock famously distinguished between the process of "conversion" and that of "adhesion," in other words, a wholesale change of heart and practice and a kind of fence-sitting in which religious change was more cultural than creedal. Nock's model has been hotly debated ever since. Recently, for instance, Linford Fisher has argued that it is better to speak about religious "engagement" or "affiliation" among Native American Christians in the colonial period rather than outright "conversion" — a distinction that holds for the early Islamic period, too.

The issue of religious change in the early medieval Middle East raises a more fundamental question that scholars tend to overlook when discussing conversion: What kind of Islam were these converts embracing, and what kind of Christianity were they leaving behind? When we think back to the seventh, eighth, and ninth centuries, it is important to recall that "Islam" and "Christianity" meant something very different than they do today. Levels of lay catechesis were very inconsistent, and in the cities and villages of Egypt, Palestine, Syria, and Iraq where Muslims and Christians first rubbed shoulders, it was not always clear in practice where one community ended and the other one began. The problem of overlapping beliefs was compounded by deep social and cultural similarities between the two populations, especially as the ranks of the Muslim community swelled with converts from non-Arab backgrounds.

As Jack Tannous has shown, early medieval sources are filled with vivid reports about the state of mixture on the ground: recent converts who demanded baptism for their Muslim children, individuals who recited pagan poetry from the pulpits of the mosques because they confused it with the sound of the Qur'an, caliphal missions to catechize converts who had no idea how to pray, and Muslims who sought spiritual counsel at the feet of Christian holy men. Political leaders and religious scholars were often the first to take issue with the resemblance between groups and their practices. Muhammad b. 'Ali (d. 125/743), for instance, the father of the first ?Abbasid caliph, denounced his Kharijite opponents in the Jazira as "Muslims who behave like Christians" (wa-muslimun fi akhlaq al-nasara). The Chronicle of Zuqnin describes the efforts of an 'Abbasid governor in Mosul to ferret out suspicious Muslims "who took [Syrian] wives, sired Syrian [suryaye] children, mingled with Syrians, and were even indistinguishable from Aramaeans [aramaye]." The annalist al-Tabari hints at the existence of similar problems in Ctesiphon (al-Mada'in), the old Sasanian capital on the banks of the Tigris, where a "Muslim" was regarded as anyone who "prays as we do, who prays [while] facing the [proper] direction as we do, and eats meat ritually butchered as we do" — a minimalist definition that falls well short of an orthodox Muslim by the standard of later periods.

There were many reasons to stay put within the Muslim fold, but conversion did not always instill a deep sense of attachment to other Muslims or necessarily impart a rigorous understanding of Islamic belief and practice (if such things even existed at the start). In fact, as Nehemia Levtzion put it, a good many converts entered the Muslim community through a process of "passive adhesion to Islam" — brought about by the mass conversion of an Arab tribe, for instance, not after a process of spiritual deliberation. This is not to say that converts were insincere about their beliefs or motivated purely by material concerns — far from it. As Patricia Crone argued, there was no greater proof of the truth of the Muslim God than the riches and power He bestowed on the umma throughout the conquests, a truth that would have been easy for prospective converts to grasp. Rather, it is to say that the early Islamic period was a time of experimentation about what it meant to be a Muslim, and it is against this backdrop that we must study the surprising phenomenon of apostasy.

One major reason for the porosity of the early Muslim community was its low barrier for entry. Conversion to Islam was a straightforward procedure, especially in contrast to the complicated rites of initiation in late antique Christianity. Then, as today, converting to Islam involved the recitation of the double shahada, "There is no god but God, Muhammad is the messenger of God," usually but not necessarily in the company of a witness. In the early generations, non-Arab converts became Muslims by also becoming clients of an Arab tribe, and therefore, they had to secure an Arab Muslim patron to sponsor them, a practice known as wala' al-islam. Converts, in turn, served this patron as clients (Ar. mawali). Gradually, this requirement was waived as the number of non-Arabs in the Muslim community increased. Indeed, already by the early 'Abbasid period, Muslims of non-Arab or mixed ancestry probably outnumbered purebred Arab Muslims.

Although it may have been easy to join the Muslim community, over time, it became exceptionally hard to leave it. The Qur'an does not approve of apostasy, but at the same time, it makes no provision for the execution of apostates. In fact, it could be surprisingly lenient toward those who reneged on Islam, as in Q. al-Baqara 2:109, which urges forgiveness of individuals who depart the Muslim community without any clear expectation of their returning. There are even notable examples of early Muslims who apostatized and were not killed, including the Prophet's Companion 'Ubaydallah b. Jahsh, who took part in the first hijra to Ethiopia in 7 BH/614–15 and then converted to Christianity and never returned. This more lenient attitude is also attested in precanonical hadith collections, including the Musannaf of 'Abd al-Razzaq al-San'ani (d. 211/827), which portrays apostates as going free despite not having returned to Islam. It did not take long for this liberal attitude to give way to fierce opposition. The change was owed to several factors, among them the experience of the Ridda Wars (ca. 11–12/632–33), when numerous Arab tribes "apostatized" following Muhammad's death, refusing to pay taxes to his successor, Abu Bakr. In the wake of this tumult, a strong consensus emerged that apostasy was inadmissible and should be punished by death. In later periods, the only serious debate surrounded the levels of punishment for women and minors who had apostatized (Hanafis and Shafi'is believed that they should be imprisoned, not killed), as well as for apostates who were Muslim by birth versus those who had converted from non-Muslim backgrounds. Taken as a whole, the medieval tradition spoke with a unified, unambiguous voice on the matter. As a hadith narrated by the Companion Ibn 'Abbas (d. 68/688) put it: "Kill anyone who changes his religion!" (man baddala dinahu fa-'qtuluhu).

One of the most troubling forms of apostasy for early Muslims was conversion to and away from Islam, what we might call "flip-flopping" today. The Qur'an refers to flip-floppers as munafiqun, a term of Ethiopic origin, usually translated as "hypocrites" or "dissenters." In the words of Q. al-Nisa? 4:137, "Lo, those who believe then unbelieve [amanu thumma kafaru], believe then unbelieve, only to increase in their unbelief: God has never forgotten them and will not guide them on the path [of righteousness]!" Flip-floppers were also referred to using the term mudhabdhabun (Q. al-Nisa' 4:143), from the Arabic root for "wavering" or "vacillating." Muslim jurists of the period puzzled over how to deal with converts who returned to their former religions. Likewise, contemporary Christian clergy offered succor to returnees, even developing rituals to reintegrate ex-Muslims into the Christian fold.

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Excerpted from "Christian Martyrs under Islam"
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