How Did Christianity Survive Under Islamic Rule?

Within a single generation after the death of Muhammad in 632, Arab armies took Syria, Palestine, Egypt, Iraq and most of Persia. These were among the oldest Christian lands on earth, the homes of the patriarchates of Antioch, Alexandria and Jerusalem. Yet today there are still Orthodox Christians in Damascus, Copts across Egypt, Syriac Christians in Iraq and Syria, and an Armenian Church with an unbroken history. How did these churches survive thirteen centuries of Muslim rule, and why did they nonetheless shrink from majorities to minorities?

Popular Christian writing often tells a story of unbroken persecution; popular Muslim writing often tells a story of unbroken tolerance. Both are easier to tell than the history. This article looks at the evidence church by church, because a Melkite in Jerusalem, a Copt in the Nile Delta and a Greek villager under the Ottomans lived very different lives. It also says plainly where the evidence weakens claims that Christians, including Orthodox Christians, like to make.

In brief

Christians under Muslim rule lived as dhimmis, protected but subordinate communities who paid a poll tax (jizya) grounded in Qur’an 9:29 and accepted a set of restrictions later gathered under the name "Pact of Umar". That document is attributed to the second caliph (634-644), but historians date its surviving form to the ninth century or later, and rulers reissued its rules so often that enforcement was plainly uneven. Conversion to Islam took centuries, though scholars disagree sharply about when Muslims became the majority in Egypt and elsewhere. Periods of ordinary coexistence alternated with real persecution: the decrees of al-Mutawakkil in the 850s, the destruction of churches under the Fatimid caliph al-Hakim, the anti-Christian riots of fourteenth-century Egypt, and the massacres of Armenian and Syriac Christians in 1915. The churches survived mainly through their own institutions: bishops, monasteries, liturgy, language and the memory of martyrs.

Thesis: Eastern Christianity survived under Islam neither because Muslim rule was uniformly tolerant nor in spite of uniform persecution, but because legally subordinate churches kept their worship and community life through long periods of uneasy coexistence, punctuated by real and sometimes catastrophic violence.

Five churches, five histories

By the seventh century the Christians of the East were already divided by the Christological controversies of the fifth century (see what the Council of Chalcedon defined).

Community	Main lands	Relation to Chalcedon (451)
Melkites (Byzantine or "Rum" Orthodox)	Palestine, Syria, Egypt (cities)	Accepted Chalcedon; in communion with Constantinople
Syriac Orthodox	Northern Syria, upper Mesopotamia	Rejected Chalcedon (Miaphysite)
Copts	Egypt	Rejected Chalcedon (Miaphysite)
Armenians	Armenia and the Caucasus	Rejected Chalcedon
Church of the East	Iraq, Persia, routes into Central Asia	Outside the Roman conciliar process; strict two-nature Christology

The Gorgias Encyclopedic Dictionary of the Syriac Heritage describes the Church of the East as "a third position in the three-way split" alongside the Syriac Orthodox and the Chalcedonian Orthodox, and notes that it was "misleadingly labelled as 'Nestorian' by its theological opponents."¹ (See our articles on the Church of the East and on Eastern and Oriental Orthodoxy.)

The legal framework: jizya and the "Pact of Umar"

Qur’an 9:29

The Qur’anic basis for the tax is a single verse. In the Sahih International translation, Qur’an 9:29 commands: "Fight against those who do not believe in Allah or in the Last Day ... from those who were given the Scripture - [fight] until they give the jizyah willingly while they are humbled."² How Muslims should read this verse today is disputed, and we discuss it fully in Is Qur’an 9:29 Extortion?

As Vera Moreen explains in the Encyclopaedia Iranica, in theory the tax fell on "adult, free, capable males," while children, the old, women, slaves, beggars and the infirm were exempt; yet "judging by the documents of the Cairo Genizah, the exemptions mentioned above were far from being always implemented." Rates "varied on the basis of local economic conditions," and the Qur’anic phrase about payers being humbled "was often interpreted literally," with taxpayers sometimes struck.³

The Pact of Umar

The most famous text of the dhimmi system is a letter in which "the Christians of such-and-such a city" supposedly petition the caliph Umar for safe conduct and list the conditions they accept. In the version preserved by the Andalusian jurist al-Turtushi, they promise not to build "new monasteries, Churches, convents, or monks' cells," not to display "our crosses or our books in the roads or markets of the Muslims," and to use "only clappers in our churches very softly." They promise not to imitate Muslim dress, not to ride on saddles, and not to prevent relatives from becoming Muslims.⁴

Was this really Umar's treaty? The evidence says probably not in this form. The Encyclopaedia Judaica article (revised by Mark R. Cohen) records the older objections: Umar was remembered as tolerant, and for the first fifty years of Umayyad rule "the protected subjects did not complain of any restrictions." It quotes A. S. Tritton's point that "[i]t is not usual for a conquered people to decide the terms on which they shall be admitted to alliance with the victors."⁵ More recent scholars, such as Albrecht Noth and Cohen, think many stipulations go back to the conquest treaties. Milka Levy-Rubin's Cambridge study traces the rules from the first surrender agreements to "the canonic document called the Pact of 'Umar," which, in the publisher's summary of her argument, "was formalized under the early 'Abbasids, in the first half of the ninth century," and in which "the conquered peoples themselves played a major role."⁶ {{strong: The Pact of Umar as we have it is a ninth-century or later codification, not a verbatim seventh-century treaty, though some of its terms may be older.}}

The Judaica article also notes that "several of the stipulations themselves are identical with the anti-Jewish laws of the Byzantine emperors." And it draws an important inference from the documents: "The fact that instructions for upholding the covenant were repeatedly issued during various periods, and sometimes at short intervals, shows that most of the conditions were not respected." It names the caliphs who reissued restrictions, including al-Mutawakkil (847-861), "the most extreme," who "published a series of restrictions in 850 and 854."⁷ The rules were real, and could be harsh, but their enforcement rose and fell with rulers and circumstances.

Region by region

The Syriac Orthodox: a deliverance remembered, and reshaped

The most quoted Christian verdict on the conquest comes from Michael the Great, the Syriac Orthodox patriarch who died in 1199. Angry at the Byzantine emperor Heraclius, whose officials had handed Miaphysite churches to the Chalcedonians, Michael wrote that God "brought from the land of the South the children of Ishmael that by their hands we would acquire salvation from the hands of the Romans," and that "it was no light benefit for us to be freed from the cruelty of the Romans."⁸

Orthodox readers should feel the weight of that sentence: the "Romans" Michael blamed were Chalcedonian Christians, the ancestors of today's Eastern Orthodox. But Michael wrote more than five centuries after the conquest, and Jan van Ginkel's study of Syriac historiography shows that the passage is not a seventh-century view. Van Ginkel concludes that the earliest Syriac accounts describe plunder and anarchy, that the conquest was first presented as a positive event by the ninth-century writer Dionysius of Tel Mahre, and that later historians "projected the clear separation of Chalcedonians and anti-Chalcedonians in their own days back upon the early seventh century."⁹ He also cites J. Moorhead's 1981 argument that many Miaphysites fought the invaders. {{debated: Whether non-Chalcedonian Christians broadly welcomed the Arab conquest.}}

The Syriac Orthodox patriarchs settled near Mardin in the thirteenth century and moved to Homs only in 1933, after the massacres of the First World War.¹⁰

The Church of the East: the caliph's capital and the road to China

For the Church of the East, Muslim rule did not replace a Christian emperor; it replaced the Sasanian Persian kings, under whom this church had already lived outside the Christian empire. Under the early Abbasids it flourished. The Catholicos Timothy I, elevated in 780, held office "through the rule of five caliphs." His dialogue with the caliph al-Mahdi (775-785) survives in Syriac and Arabic, he encouraged translations from Greek "into Syriac and Arabic," and he organized or revived churches in "China, Tibet, Yemen, India, and Central Asia."¹¹ {{strong: Under the early Abbasids the Church of the East was intellectually vigorous and missionary, with its patriarch working close to the caliphal court.}}

The later story is darker. "From the 14th cent. onwards," the same dictionary says, the Church of the East "became greatly diminished on account of plague, oppression, and periodic massacres," and by the nineteenth century it was confined mainly to the Hakkari mountains and the plain of Urmia.¹²

The Melkites: losing an empire

The Chalcedonian Christians of Palestine and Syria felt the loss of the Christian empire most sharply. Christian Sahner's study of the martyrs of the early Islamic period found that most surviving neomartyr texts come from this Melkite community. As one reviewer summarizes him, most non-Chalcedonians "were already well accustomed to living out of power."¹³ In this world St John of Damascus, whose family served the Umayyad administration before he became a monk, wrote theology in Greek under a Muslim caliph (see our article on St John of Damascus).

A severe blow to this community, and to Egypt's Copts and Jews, came from the Fatimid caliph al-Hakim, who came to power in 996. According to the Encyclopaedia Judaica, in 1012 he moved "to humiliate non-Muslims and segregate them," and "Christian sources indicate that many churches were destroyed, including the Church of the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem"; many Christians "embraced Islam or left the country." Yet his successor al-Zahir and the later Fatimids "returned to the traditional policy of tolerance."¹⁴ The same dynasty had earlier made the Christian brothers-in-law of the caliph al-Aziz patriarchs of Jerusalem and Alexandria.

The Copts: when did Egypt become Muslim?

Copts rose in a series of revolts, including those of 725 and 739, until 831, when the Abbasid caliph al-Ma'mun crushed the last of them himself. Shaun O'Sullivan surveys three scholarly positions on when Copts became a minority. Gaston Wiet and his followers proposed two waves of conversion, in the ninth and the fourteenth centuries. In O'Sullivan's summary, Tamer el-Leithy held that the fourteenth century "alone marks the decisive sociological transformation of Egypt." O'Sullivan himself, reading al-Maqrizi, concludes that Muslims outnumbered Copts in most villages by the mid-ninth century, and that this happened less through conversion than through Arab settlement, intermarriage and the demographic collapse of the Copts after failed revolts.¹⁵

Whatever the timing, the fourteenth century was terrible for the Copts. O'Sullivan describes Mamluk measures that forced a convert's wife to convert, banned Coptic festivals and confiscated church endowments, and he recounts the riots of 1321 that "destroyed sixty churches and monasteries across the whole country."¹⁶ The Coptic Church survived as a minority, with its patriarchate, monasteries and liturgy intact.

The Armenians: a church that became a nation's government

Under the Umayyads and Abbasids, Hakob Papazian writes in the Encyclopaedia Iranica, Armenians were treated as ahl al-dhimma and "had to pay a head tax or ǰezya," and the eighth and ninth centuries saw repeated revolts. Armenian princes regained a measure of independence; in 919 the caliph al-Muqtadir sent a crown to the Bagratid king Ashot II.¹⁷ Under later Muslim dynasties, including the Mongol Il-khans after Ghazan Khan's conversion in 1295, Armenians faced renewed persecution. When the Armenian Catholicate returned to Echmiadzin in 1441, Papazian notes, "the Armenian church emerged as the only national authority whose rights were recognized by the ruling Muslim powers."¹⁸

The Ottomans: patriarchs, tax farms and new martyrs

After 1453 most Orthodox Christians lived under the Ottoman sultans. Older histories, such as Steven Runciman's, treated Mehmed II's installation of Gennadios Scholarios as patriarch in 1454 as the founding of a "millet system" in which the patriarch governed the Orthodox as civil and religious head. Recent work has complicated this. Reviewing Tom Papademetriou's Render unto the Sultan, Jonathan Harris notes that the "bare bones" of Gennadios's elevation come from the historian Kritovoulos and were later elaborated, and summarizes the book's argument that the Ottomans valued the Church "as a source of revenue, whether through tax farming or through the payment of bribes and ransoms."¹⁹ {{moderate: The idea of a single, empire-wide "millet system" from 1454 onward is a later simplification.}}

The Ottoman centuries also produced the "new martyrs" whom Orthodox churches still commemorate. One is St Nikodemos of Elbasan in Albania, who according to the Orthodox Church in America "became a Moslem," repented, became a monk on Mount Athos, returned home, and was beheaded on July 11, 1722.²⁰ As in the early Islamic period, many new martyrs were people who had left Islam for Christianity, which classical Islamic law treated as a capital offense (see our article on apostasy in Islam).

The final Ottoman decades were catastrophic. The Gorgias dictionary records serious massacres in 1843, 1860 and 1895-96, and calls those of 1915 "evidently orchestrated by high Ottoman officials." For the Syriac churches of eastern Turkey, "the losses ... were well over 50%, and in some cases as much as 90%," and an estimated third of the Church of the East's people were victims of the massacres around the First World War.²¹ Ronald Grigor Suny's history of the Armenian genocide describes the destruction of the Ottoman Armenians in the same years; the Republic of Turkey rejects the term genocide, and when President Biden used it in 2021, Turkey's foreign ministry said the statement had no "scholarly and legal basis."²² Even in 1860, though, a Muslim protector stood out: the Algerian exile 'Abd al-Qadir won international fame for "his rescue of thousands of Christians" during the Damascus massacre.²³

How fast did Christians become Muslims?

The modern debate begins with Richard Bulliet's Conversion to Islam in the Medieval Period (1979). Bulliet counted the appearance of Muslim names in family trees recorded in medieval biographical dictionaries and plotted a curve of conversion. For Iran, Elton Daniel summarizes, Bulliet suggested slow conversion until about 750, a rapid rise after the Abbasid revolution, and "80 percent or more" Muslim by about 950. Daniel adds that the data limit the model "to generalizations about full, formal conversions in an urban environment."²⁴

Critics have challenged the method. David Wasserstein notes that Bulliet's Iranian sample was 469 genealogies and his Andalusian sample only 154, and that many readers misread his percentages, which refer "to percentages of the islamised/islamising section of the population, not to percentages of the population as a whole." Wasserstein nonetheless says that "much in its basic thesis nonetheless remains central to our understanding."²⁵ {{debated: Bulliet's precise conversion curves, especially outside Iran.}}

Iran was mostly Zoroastrian, not Christian. For the Christian lands, Jack Tannous argues that Muslims remained a numerical minority in the Middle East "at least until the Mamluk period," and that conversion was driven more by everyday concerns than by doctrine. His reviewer Conor Dube points out that Egyptian evidence "complicates" this, and O'Sullivan's reading of Egypt puts the Muslim majority far earlier.²⁶ Scholars agree that conversion took centuries; they do not agree on how many.

What kept the churches alive?

Several things worked together. Rulers dealt with Christians through their bishops and patriarchs, which gave the hierarchy civil weight. Language marked identity: van Ginkel shows how, after the conquest, Syriac became a defining feature of the Syriac Orthodox community.²⁷ Martyr stories strengthened resolve; Sahner argues that church leaders wrote them to dissuade Christians from converting at a time when many considered it, for social advancement or because Islam attracted them.²⁸ The pressures ran the other way. New churches were barred, converts could not return, the tax fell on non-Muslims, and marriages between Muslim men and Christian women, which O'Sullivan stresses for Egypt, produced Muslim children.

The Orthodox position

The Orthodox Church has no dogma about this history, but three layers can be distinguished.

• Dogma: Christ said of His Church, "the gates of Hades shall not prevail against it" (Matthew 16:18, NKJV). The promise concerns the Church, not any country or empire, so the loss of Christian majorities does not contradict it.
• Common tradition: The Church honors the martyrs and new martyrs who died rather than deny Christ, including those killed under Muslim rulers, and the historic Orthodox patriarchates of Alexandria, Antioch and Jerusalem continue today after centuries of minority life. How the Church recognizes such saints is explained in how someone becomes a saint in the Orthodox Church.
• Theological opinion: Some Orthodox writers stress persecution and the faithfulness of martyrs; others stress coexistence and dialogue. Both can be held in good faith if they respect the evidence.

Honesty also requires an admission. The Byzantine Empire that the Orthodox remember with affection pressured Christian dissenters and restricted Jews, and Michael the Syrian's complaint, however shaped by later memory, was about Chalcedonian Christians.

The strongest objections

"Islam protected Christians; the dhimma system was tolerant for its time."

In its strongest form this view says: Christian communities survived for thirteen centuries; patriarchates and monasteries remained; Christians served rulers as physicians, clerks and officials; medieval Europe treated religious minorities worse; and the harshest episodes were exceptions that later rulers reversed. Much of this is true: the Fatimids appointed Christians to high office, Timothy I worked with the Abbasid caliphs, and al-Hakim's successors restored tolerance. The reply is that "tolerant for its time" is a comparison, not a description. The dhimma was a system of protection that was also a system of subordination, with a distinctive tax, restrictions on worship and a ban on leaving Islam. Christians shrank from majority to minority under it.

"Islam has always persecuted Christians."

Many Christian writers say this, pointing to real events such as al-Hakim's destruction of the Holy Sepulchre and the massacres of 1915. The evidence does not support "always." Sahner, whose book is a study of Christian martyrs, concludes that early Islamic treatment of Christians did not amount to a general persecution, in the sense of "systematic efforts to extirpate Christians across the caliphate," and that martyrdoms were recorded because they were noteworthy rather than routine.²⁹ Repeated reissuing of the Pact's rules shows that they often lapsed. Constant persecution also cannot explain why Christians remained numerous for so long. Honest Christian apologetics describes persecution where it happened and coexistence where it existed.

"The Oriental Orthodox welcomed the Arabs because the Orthodox persecuted them."

A Syriac Orthodox or Coptic Christian may say this, and later sources from their tradition support it: imperial Chalcedonian policy alienated much of Syria and Egypt, and Arab rule ended it. The reply, following van Ginkel and Moorhead, is that the welcome is mainly a later memory, not a seventh-century report. The grievance itself, though, was real, and Eastern Orthodox Christians should acknowledge it rather than explain it away.

What we can say confidently

• Christians under Muslim rule were protected but subordinate dhimmis who paid the jizya, a tax grounded in Qur’an 9:29 and applied very differently by place and period.
• The Pact of Umar in its known form is a codification of the ninth century or later, and its repeated reissuing shows uneven enforcement.
• Real persecutions occurred: al-Mutawakkil's decrees (850 and 854), al-Hakim's church destructions, the Mamluk-era riots in Egypt, and the massacres of Syriac and Armenian Christians in 1915.
• Long periods of coexistence also occurred, with Christians in high office and church leaders at court.
• Conversion to Islam took centuries, and the experience of each church differed.

What remains disputed

• When Muslims became a majority in Egypt, Syria and Iraq: the ninth century, the fourteenth, or somewhere between.
• How far conversion, rather than immigration, intermarriage and demographic decline, explains the change.
• How reliable Bulliet's name-based conversion curves are outside Iran.
• Whether non-Chalcedonian Christians broadly welcomed the Arab conquest, or whether this is mainly later memory.
• Whether the Ottoman "millet system" existed as a coherent institution before the nineteenth century.

Conclusion

The churches of the East did not survive because history was kind to them. Through centuries in which they could not build new churches or carry crosses in the street, they kept the Liturgy, the episcopate, the monasteries and the memory of the saints. Sometimes Muslim rulers protected them and sometimes killed them; sometimes fellow Christians failed them. They endured, diminished but alive.

For an Orthodox Christian this history is humbling, because it forbids triumphal stories about Christian empires and Muslim tolerance alike. It also gives hope. Christ never promised His Church majorities or political safety; He promised that it would not be overcome. The Christians of Damascus, Cairo, Mardin and Echmiadzin who still sing the ancient services in the lands where those services were first sung are living evidence that the promise has been kept.

Notes

1. Sebastian P. Brock and James F. Coakley, "Church of the East," in Gorgias Encyclopedic Dictionary of the Syriac Heritage, ed. Sebastian P. Brock et al. (Piscataway, NJ: Gorgias Press, 2011), electronic edition (e-GEDSH), https://gedsh.bethmardutho.org/Church-of-the-East. ↩
2. Qur’an 9:29, Sahih International translation, quran.com (bracketed gloss "[i.e., Islam]" omitted at the ellipsis). ↩
3. Vera Basch Moreen, "Jezya," Encyclopaedia Iranica, vol. XIV, fasc. 6 (2008), 643-45, https://www.iranicaonline.org/articles/jezya. ↩
4. "Pact of Umar," from al-Turtushi, Siraj al-Muluk, 229-30, in Paul Halsall, ed., Internet Medieval Sourcebook (Fordham University), https://sourcebooks.fordham.edu/source/pact-umar.asp. The Sourcebook notes that the source of the English translation is not given. ↩
5. Eliezer Bashan and Mark R. Cohen, "Omar, Covenant of," Encyclopaedia Judaica, 2nd ed. (Detroit: Macmillan Reference/Gale, 2007), via Jewish Virtual Library, quoting A. S. Tritton, The Caliphs and their Non-Muslim Subjects: A Critical Study of the Covenant of 'Umar (London: Oxford University Press, 1930), 8. ↩
6. Bashan and Cohen, "Omar, Covenant of" (on Noth and Cohen); Milka Levy-Rubin, Non-Muslims in the Early Islamic Empire: From Surrender to Coexistence (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), publisher's description. See also Mark R. Cohen, "What was the Pact of 'Umar? A Literary-Historical Study," Jerusalem Studies in Arabic and Islam 23 (1999): 100-57. ↩
7. Bashan and Cohen, "Omar, Covenant of." ↩
8. Michael the Syrian, Chronicle XI.3, in J.-B. Chabot, ed. and trans., Chronique de Michel le Syrien, vol. 2 (Paris, 1901), 412-13; English translation by Jan J. van Ginkel, "The Perception and Presentation of the Arab Conquest in Syriac Historiography," in Redefining Christian Identity: Cultural Interaction in the Middle East since the Rise of Islam, ed. J. J. van Ginkel, H. L. Murre-van den Berg and T. M. van Lint, Orientalia Lovaniensia Analecta 134 (Leuven: Peeters, 2005), 171-84, at 171. ↩
9. Van Ginkel, "Perception and Presentation," 172, 182-84; J. Moorhead, "The Monophysite Response to the Arab Invasion," Byzantion 51 (1981): 579-91, as summarized by van Ginkel. ↩
10. George A. Kiraz, "Syriac Orthodox Church," in Gorgias Encyclopedic Dictionary of the Syriac Heritage, e-GEDSH. ↩
11. David D. Bundy, "Timotheos I," in Gorgias Encyclopedic Dictionary of the Syriac Heritage, e-GEDSH. ↩
12. Brock and Coakley, "Church of the East." ↩
13. Christian C. Sahner, Christian Martyrs under Islam: Religious Violence and the Making of the Muslim World (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2018), as summarized in Josh Mugler, "Book Note: Christian Martyrs under Islam," Ancient Jew Review (2019). ↩
14. "Fatimids," Encyclopaedia Judaica, 2nd ed. (2007), via Jewish Virtual Library, https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/fatimids. ↩
15. Shaun O'Sullivan, "Coptic Conversion and the Islamization of Egypt," Mamluk Studies Review 10, no. 2 (2006): 65-79, discussing Tamer el-Leithy, "Coptic Culture and Conversion in Medieval Cairo, 1293-1524 A.D." (PhD diss., Princeton University, 2005). ↩
16. O'Sullivan, "Coptic Conversion," citing al-Maqrizi. ↩
17. Hakob Papazian, "Armenia and Iran vi. Armeno-Iranian Relations in the Islamic Period," Encyclopaedia Iranica, vol. II, fasc. 5 (1986), 467-78. ↩
18. Papazian, "Armenia and Iran vi." ↩
19. Jonathan Harris, review of Tom Papademetriou, Render unto the Sultan: Power, Authority, and the Greek Orthodox Church in the Early Ottoman Centuries (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), Reviews in History, no. 1851 (October 2015). ↩
20. "New Monastic Martyr Nikodemos of Albania" (July 11), Orthodox Church in America, Lives of the Saints, oca.org. ↩
21. Sebastian P. Brock, "Sayfo," in Gorgias Encyclopedic Dictionary of the Syriac Heritage, e-GEDSH; Brock and Coakley, "Church of the East." ↩
22. Ronald Grigor Suny, "They Can Live in the Desert but Nowhere Else": A History of the Armenian Genocide (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015); "Biden recognises Armenian genocide, defying Turkey in watershed," Dawn (from Reuters and AFP), April 24, 2021. ↩
23. University of Zurich, research project "Fragmented Sovereignties in the Colonial Age: 'Abd al-Qadir al-Jaza'iri (1808-1883) and the Making of an 'Arab Hero'," https://jazairi.uzh.ch/en/research.html. ↩
24. Elton L. Daniel, "Conversion ii. Of Iranians to Islam," Encyclopaedia Iranica, vol. VI, fasc. 3 (1993), 229-32; Richard W. Bulliet, Conversion to Islam in the Medieval Period: An Essay in Quantitative History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979). ↩
25. David J. Wasserstein, "Where Have All the Converts Gone? Difficulties in the Study of Conversion to Islam in al-Andalus," Al-Qantara 33, no. 2 (2012): 325-42, at 326-27 and n. 1. ↩
26. Jack Tannous, The Making of the Medieval Middle East: Religion, Society, and Simple Believers (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2018), 340, as quoted in Conor Dube's review, Hugoye: Journal of Syriac Studies 24, no. 1 (2021); O'Sullivan, "Coptic Conversion." ↩
27. Van Ginkel, "Perception and Presentation," 183-84. ↩
28. Sahner, Christian Martyrs under Islam, as summarized by Mugler, "Book Note." ↩
29. Sahner, Christian Martyrs under Islam, 162, as quoted by Mugler, "Book Note." ↩

Bibliography

Primary sources

• The Qur’an. Sahih International translation. quran.com.
• "Pact of Umar," from al-Turtushi, Siraj al-Muluk, 229-30. In Internet Medieval Sourcebook, ed. Paul Halsall. Fordham University. https://sourcebooks.fordham.edu/source/pact-umar.asp.
• Michael the Syrian. Chronique de Michel le Syrien, Patriarche Jacobite d'Antioche (1166-1199). Edited and translated by J.-B. Chabot. 4 vols. Paris, 1899-1924. (Quoted in van Ginkel's English translation.)

Orthodox and patristic sources

• Orthodox Church in America. "New Monastic Martyr Nikodemos of Albania." Lives of the Saints, July 11. oca.org.

Other scholarship

• Brock, Sebastian P., Aaron M. Butts, George A. Kiraz and Lucas Van Rompay, eds. Gorgias Encyclopedic Dictionary of the Syriac Heritage. Piscataway, NJ: Gorgias Press, 2011. Electronic edition (e-GEDSH), Beth Mardutho: entries "Church of the East" (Brock and Coakley), "Sayfo" (Brock), "Syriac Orthodox Church" (Kiraz), "Timotheos I" (Bundy).
• Bulliet, Richard W. Conversion to Islam in the Medieval Period: An Essay in Quantitative History. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979.
• Daniel, Elton L. "Conversion ii. Of Iranians to Islam." Encyclopaedia Iranica VI/3 (1993): 229-32.
• Encyclopaedia Judaica, 2nd ed. Detroit: Macmillan Reference/Gale, 2007. Entries "Omar, Covenant of" (Eliezer Bashan and Mark R. Cohen) and "Fatimids," via Jewish Virtual Library. (The Covenant entry summarizes Mark R. Cohen, "What was the Pact of 'Umar? A Literary-Historical Study," Jerusalem Studies in Arabic and Islam 23 [1999]: 100-57, and the work of Albrecht Noth and A. S. Tritton.)
• Levy-Rubin, Milka. Non-Muslims in the Early Islamic Empire: From Surrender to Coexistence. Cambridge Studies in Islamic Civilization. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011.
• Moreen, Vera Basch. "Jezya." Encyclopaedia Iranica XIV/6 (2008): 643-45.
• O'Sullivan, Shaun. "Coptic Conversion and the Islamization of Egypt." Mamluk Studies Review 10, no. 2 (2006): 65-79.
• Papademetriou, Tom. Render unto the Sultan: Power, Authority, and the Greek Orthodox Church in the Early Ottoman Centuries. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015. Reviewed by Jonathan Harris, Reviews in History, no. 1851 (2015).
• Papazian, Hakob. "Armenia and Iran vi. Armeno-Iranian Relations in the Islamic Period." Encyclopaedia Iranica II/5 (1986): 467-78.
• Sahner, Christian C. Christian Martyrs under Islam: Religious Violence and the Making of the Muslim World. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2018. Summarized in Josh Mugler, "Book Note: Christian Martyrs under Islam," Ancient Jew Review, 2019.
• Suny, Ronald Grigor. "They Can Live in the Desert but Nowhere Else": A History of the Armenian Genocide. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015.
• Tannous, Jack. The Making of the Medieval Middle East: Religion, Society, and Simple Believers. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2018. Reviewed by Conor Dube, Hugoye: Journal of Syriac Studies 24, no. 1 (2021).
• Van Ginkel, Jan J. "The Perception and Presentation of the Arab Conquest in Syriac Historiography." In Redefining Christian Identity: Cultural Interaction in the Middle East since the Rise of Islam, ed. J. J. van Ginkel, H. L. Murre-van den Berg and T. M. van Lint, 171-84. Orientalia Lovaniensia Analecta 134. Leuven: Peeters, 2005.
• Wasserstein, David J. "Where Have All the Converts Gone? Difficulties in the Study of Conversion to Islam in al-Andalus." Al-Qantara 33, no. 2 (2012): 325-42.

Sources on contested modern history

• "Biden recognises Armenian genocide, defying Turkey in watershed." Dawn (Reuters and AFP), April 24, 2021. (Includes the Turkish foreign ministry's response.)
• University of Zurich. "Fragmented Sovereignties in the Colonial Age: 'Abd al-Qadir al-Jaza'iri (1808-1883) and the Making of an 'Arab Hero'." Research project page, https://jazairi.uzh.ch/en/research.html.