The birth of Islam is perhaps the worst-documented major event of the Dark Ages. An anonymous Armenian ecclesiastic chronicle misnamed Sebeos' History is the closest we have to a primary source. Its earliest manuscripts date to the seventeenth century CE and it is first quoted (plagiarised in fact) in 905 CE by Artsruni (Thomson, pp xxxi-iii). But if it is a late forgery, it is the boldest one I have ever read, because it lacks all mention of "Islam", "Muslims", "Qur'an", or any ahadith or qur'anic quotes. In their place the chronicle describes a Jewish rebellion aided by Mohammed's "Hagarenes". It calls Mohammed's scripture not "Recitation" but mere teaching of "the way of truth"; Bedrosian's translation calls it a "sermon" but even this is beyond what Thomson sees in the text. The chronicle even dares to cite eyewitnesses as a source, for chapter 30 (42 in Thomson).
In 1851, a T. Mihrdatian collated some manuscripts into the first widely-available printed edition, splitting it into the chapter divisions we see today. In chapter 30 here the history discusses the initial Judaeo-Arab alliance and its conquests. Chapter 31 follows, describing how the alliance collapsed.
But where chapter 30 cited eyewitness sources, chapter 31 did not. Chapter 31 also contains internal tensions which point to a composite origin. Not all of it should be read as history.
So why do this? One purpose, on this night after Yom Kippur, is to raise awareness of the true origin of Islam: a task much more important now than to air out Judaeo-Christianity's laundry again (can we even call it dirty anymore?). I've known about Sebeos for some time; I studied the Justinianic dynasty in college, 1996. But I don't want just to parrot what Patricia Crone and Ibn Warraq have revealed decades ago. This project's aim is to improve our understanding of the non-Islamic sources, so real historians can use them more effectively.
The following comes from Bedrosian, with some changes to the text within the brackets and emphasis:
Now I shall speak about the plot of the Jewish rebels, who, finding support from the Hagarenes for a short time, planned to [re]build the temple of Solomon. Locating the place called the holy of holies, they constructed [the temple with a pedestal, to serve as their place of prayer. But the Ishmaelites envied [the Jews], expelled them from the place, and named the same building their own place of prayer. [The Jews] built a temple for their worship, elsewhere.
It was then that they came up with an evil plan: they wanted to fill Jerusalem with blood from end to end, and to exterminate all the Christians of Jerusalem. Now it happened that there was a certain grandee Ishmaelite who went to worship in their private place of prayer [i teghi aghawt'its' iwreants' miayn]. He encountered three of the principal Jewish men, who had just slaughtered two pigs and taken and put them [in the Ishmaelite] place of prayer. Blood was running down the walls and on the floor of the building. As soon as the man saw them, he stopped and said something or other to them. They replied and departed. The man at once went inside to pray. He saw the wicked [sight], and quickly turned to catch the men. When he was unable to find them, he was silent and went to his place Then many [Ishmaelites] entered the place and saw the evil, and they spread a lament throughout the city. The Jews told the prince that the Christians had desecrated their place of prayer. The prince issued an order and all the Christians were gathered together. Just as they wanted to put them to the sword, the man came and addressed them: "Why shed so much blood in vain? Order all the Jews to assemble and I shall point out the guilty ones". As soon as they were all assembled and [the man] walked among them, he recognized the three men whom he had previously encountered. Seizing them, [the Ishmaelites] tried them with great severity [datets'in agahin datestanawk'] until they disclosed the plot. And because their prince was among the Jews present, he ordered [Ew zi ishxan nots'a er i hreits' anti, hramaveats'... The subject probably is the Arab, not Jewish, prince] that six of the principals involved in the plot be killed. He permitted the other [Jews] to return to their places.
The chapter claims to be about the "plot of the Jewish rebels", but it really describes two plots. The first is the Jews' (abortive) plan to rebuild the Temple which the Byzantines had prevented. The second, and longer, is their "evil plan" to frame the Christians. Thomson and his commentator James Howard-Johnson both devoted about a page in analysing the first event, by comparison devoting only two sentences to the second. But Howard-Johnson followed the lead of his own sources, Mango and Flusin, in assuming that both events were historical. (Thomson II p. 249)
The chronicler certainly intended the first "plot" of the Jewish rebels to serve as a background for the second; the comparitive size of the two is evidence enough. But the first story is not really part of the second. No element of the former - Hagarene envy, the ownership of the central temple - is mentioned in the latter, except for the setting of Jerusalem, which appears solely in the preamble. No information from the former story, beyond Christian inferiority in an Ishmaelite-Jewish world, is even assumed in the latter story, and some of the former even conflicts with the latter: the Jews' revenge should be against the Ishmaelites who betrayed them, but instead it is against Christians.
Both stories have a setup, a conflict, and an end which resolves the conflict. But the first story ends in a morally neutral fashion, from an Armenian Christian perspective. The second ends in a victory for Christ.
The first story is better connected to the rest of the chronicle than it is to the second story. The promise of the Temple must have been a primary motive for the Jews' rebellion, and the Arabs' betrayal of this promise explains why there was still no Temple at the time the history was written. The chronicler also sticks with the sweep of events, with no mention of individuals; one must go to Pseudo-Methodius, Arculf (misspelt "Arnulf" in Thomson), and Islamic tradition for the names "al-Aqsa" and "Umar" (Thomson p. 102 n.637, II p. 249). This is characteristic for the chronicler, who also did not feel a need to recognise the personalities (or the names) of Ali and Uthman in his account of the great Sunni-Shia schism: the armies toppled and replaced the "kings" as if they were statues. The anecdote of the al-Aqsa foundation therefore does not exist for its own sake but for the sake of the history.
The second starts with "It was then", which could be any time, whether the Jews had a Temple or not. And when the story ends, everything is returned to the status quo ante. It leaves no trace in the rest of the chronicle. It therefore exists for its own sake.
Between one story and the next, even the casts of characters differ. Where the first story turned around peoples, the second turned around persons, however anonymous: one Ishmaelite prince, three Jewish plotters, one Ishmaelite yet pro-Christian grandee; note especially the folkloric number of plotters. The plotters carry on a conversation with the grandee, which the author does not see fit to relate - redundant in a history, but understandable in a summary of a folk tale.
The second tale was not the only "tall tale" told by the good Christian citizens of Jerusalem. Arculf related another story to Adamnan of Iona involving a magic napkin, in which the Arab overlord serves as mediator between Christian and Jew, and protects the former against the latter.
These tales' closest analogy in the Old Testament is the tale of Esther, in which Haman plotted to wipe out the Jews but Esther saved them. We consider Esther a diaspora legend, and Thomson would probably say the same of Arculf's tradition. What applies to those tales ought to apply also for the "Jerusalem Conspiracy" tale.
The above does not prove that the former event of Sebeos's chapter took place and the latter did not. But the latter left no other trace in this chronicle nor any other, and exists in an edifying rather than expository structure. Like the book of Esther, it is superfluous to contemporary events and suspicious in origin.
The Jerusalem Conspiracy may not be useful as history, but as folk-memory it provides a rare glimpse at Christian popular culture in the first decades under Judaeo-Arab rule.
The narrative has the plotters use pig blood as their instrument, precisely chosen to frame Christians; pig blood is doubly unclean to Jews. This shows either that the narrator had become intimately familiar with Jewish law, or that the Arabs had adopted that part of it, or both.
The narrator depicted a city of Arabs, Jews, and Christians under an Arab prince. The populations were distinct, and Christians in particular did not worship with Arabs and Jews. (Other legends which Sebeos preserves, such as the Egyptian army baptismal story, true or not, show that the surviving pockets of Christianity did not view the religion of the Arabic armed forces as Christian, either.) The narrator saw Christians as third-class citizens, behind the Jews in social status. He cast the Arab rulers as protectors, as the author of Esther cast Ahasueros.
As they say, people get what they ask for. A story that had originated outside the Hagerene empire would not have viewed Arabs so positively. Certainly the chronicler did not.
He cited the scripture "his hands will be at everyone, and everyone will have their hands at him
", and described Arab soldiers as a "corruptive army" who "pillaged the entire country", "burned every country", taking "loot and captives" everywhere. An external source most likely would have
implicated Arabs and not saved Christians from atrocity. This legend by contrast certainly originated in and spread across Christian communities in a Hagarene city or cities before it reached Armenia.
This proves the existence of at least one "Christian mole" funneling information from within the Hagarene empire (if precedent holds, from Jerusalem) into Armenia, as Howard-Johnson had postulated in his commentary. I do not know how directly, and the chronicler made minimal attempt at distinguishing fact from urban legend (as it were). It is in this light that we must evaluate other internal events in the chronicle, of which the loss of the rebuilt Temple is one.
Islamic history need not be clouded in ignorance. The sources exist, if we muster the will to use them.
Any thoughts? e-mail me :^)
zimriel@sbcglobal.net2 Feb 2003: discovered Arculf. lanat on Thomson's spelling! 10 Feb, the Egypt story may not be false; plus there is a new project to link to.
The first version of this project was written 29-30 Sept 2001. 9 Oct, cleared up the wording. 8 Nov, acquired a more recent and less biased source in Thomson. 10 Nov, cleared up structure.