The Most Important Cultural Centers

a - Al-Hira

Al-Hira (Herta in Syriac, meaning "encampment" or "camp"), located about 5 kilometers south of Kufa, was a center of civilization in the era of the Lakhmids (the Mundhirids), when it was their capital. In addition to the Arabs, Al-Hira was home to the Nabataeans (the Syriacs, the ancient inhabitants of Iraq), the Iranians, and the Romans, who belonged to various religions — Zoroastrian, Christian, Jewish, and Sabian. It was a meeting place of the ancient civilizations. Its people mostly spoke Arabic but wrote in Syriac, owing to the predominance of Christianity there, and they used the Nabataean script (which would come to be known as Kufic after the Islamic conquest) and knew Persian and Aramaic (the forerunner of Syriac). (Al-Hira lost its importance after the Islamic conquest, especially after the founding of Kufa nearby; yet its churches and the monasteries near it could well have become a wellspring for those Arab historians who pioneered knowledge, since they could draw manuscripts from its churches, study them, and transmit their contents. In Iraq — occupied by the Sasanian Iranians shortly before the arrival of the Muslim Arab conquerors — objective and subjective conditions had come together to allow Christians to practice their activities with greater freedom, as a result of the development of social relations and the tolerance of the Zoroastrian Iranian authority — which was non-proselytizing. This created the most favorable conditions for the Nestorian Syriacs — the sect most accepted by, and most responsive to, the Sasanian authority — to carry out the whole [?] of their religious, cultural, and civilizational activities, even if these were on the whole neither deep nor of broad dimensions. Al-Hira — because of its subordination to the Sasanian state — was influenced by Iranian civilization in its Sasanian era. In it and near it were built the most famous palaces of the Lakhmids (Al-Khawarnaq, Al-Sadir, Sinnimmar, Al-Abyad, Al-Faris [?], Al-Zawra) and their monasteries, such as the Monastery of Hind the Elder, using the most skilled engineers, architects, and builders — Iranians, Byzantines, and others. In Al-Hira, studies arose (that the Jews wrote their Babylonian Talmud there — its writing apparently begun by Rabbi Ashi, who died in the year 430 AD, and given its final form in the early sixth century AD — where they had a community). Numerous references to this have come down; Al-Tabari reports: "I was told that Hisham ibn Muhammad al-Kalbi said: 'I used to extract the accounts of the Arabs and the genealogies of the house of Nasr ibn Rabi'a, the extent of the reigns of those of them who served the house of Chosroes, and the chronology of their years, from the churches of Al-Hira, in which was their kingship and all their affairs.'" But in what language and in what script were this knowledge, these events, and this poetry recorded? And where did those rich, important sources go? And why did none of the akhbar-collectors, critics, and historians consult them except Ibn al-Kalbi? Some hold that Ibn al-Kalbi was ignorant of Syriac (Nabataean), the language in which the accounts were written. The Indian scholar "Khuda Bakhsh" points out that the Arabs owe to Al-Hira their knowledge of the art of writing — the art that passed from Al-Hira and Al-Anbar to the Hijaz a century later, after the Caliph Umar founded the city of Kufa and gave the name Kufic to this art. Philip Hitti holds that from Al-Hira, whose affairs the Iranians governed, the influences of Nestorian Aramaic culture passed to the Arabian Peninsula in the ages preceding the Prophet (peace be upon him), and the Nestorians thereafter became the link connecting Hellenic culture with the young Islamic culture. R. Blachère confirms this role with a dense clarification: "...The elements generating acculturation were, at the outset, the city dwellers of Syria, Iraq, and Egypt, together with the masses of rural townsfolk who revolved in their orbit. These elements — with their clergy, their traditional readiness for theological debate, their scribal traditions, and their practice of commerce and administration — appeared as the civilized ones. Through them the Roman and Hellenic traditions and the Iranian heritage remained alive."

b - Bosra

Before Islam, Bosra (Bostra) rivaled Al-Hira as the capital of the Ghassanids, enemies of the Lakhmids, the rulers of Al-Hira. Although Bosra was not the sole capital of the Ghassanids, it had a fame, standing, and urbanity that surpassed those of its rival, for the Ghassanids were more closely attached to the Byzantines — especially after they abandoned their gods and became Christians — given their neighboring and subordinate relationship to the Byzantines, compared with the Lakhmids, who differed in creed from their Zoroastrian masters. Bosra was also a hub of the road network the Romans had established, because in antiquity it had been a Nabataean trading market from which caravans set out in every direction. The Ghassanids took to urbanization and drew close to the Byzantines to the point of becoming Christians (the West Syriac Church — the Syriac Orthodox) and adopting Aramaic as a second language alongside Arabic. Hamza al-Isfahani mentions that the Ghassanids had cities, villages, and palaces that they built in various regions, taking several capitals in Palestine, Jordan, and the outlying parts of Syria; they also dug canals and cisterns and built monasteries with the help of Byzantine engineers and architects, some of which the Romans had already dug and founded.

The Ghassanids' influence from the Byzantines was not very broad, deep, or highly developed. Nevertheless, the Ghassanid centers used to attract the Arab poets of the Jahiliyya, just as their rival Al-Hira did, on account of the gifts lavishly bestowed. And so, by way of these poets and by way of the merchants and missionaries, there filtered into the Arabic language — as Hitti notes — a body of Aramaic words (in the Christian ages Aramaic is called Syriac), from Bosra and Al-Hira alike, among them: (church [kanisa], place of worship [bi'a], effigy [dumya], image [sura], priest [qissis], and alms [sadaqa]). These words were not confined to the domain of thought and religion but went beyond them into the domains of economy, society, and other aspects of material civilization, such as the words watchman [natur], yoke [nir], and feddan. The word candle [qindil] is originally Latin (candela), which passed into Greek, then into Aramaic, then into Arabic.

The Latin word castrum became in Syriac (qastra) and in Aramaic qasra, and from it comes qasr (palace) in the Arabic language — the very word that our language returned to Europe in the form of the Italian castello and the Spanish alcázar.

The Christians of the Ghassanid cities, in the Islamic era, inherited the expertise and knowledge of their forebears, and made use of their mastery of Aramaic, Arabic, Syriac, and Greek in translation, and were relied upon for this reason. The Muslim rulers likewise employed them in building the Islamic congregational mosques, mosques, and palaces, which preserved the Byzantine style thanks to the skilled workers and engineers among the people of the Syrian cities, among them the people of Bosra. Moreover the Christians — as Barthold notes — on the whole preserved their houses of worship and built new churches and monasteries without encountering resistance. In this way they were the intermediaries for transmitting the architectural heritage and developing it in the Islamic era.

c - Harran

It lies on one of the eastern tributaries of the Euphrates in Syria. Al-Istakhri mentioned it as (the city of the Sabians, in which are their seventeen shrines). Its inhabitants were pagan Syriacs who assumed the guise of Sabianism as a cover so that the Muslims would count them among the People of the Book. To it and to Antioch passed the Hellenic learning of Alexandria — especially the medical — owing to the severing of its ties with the Romans; and for this reason the Syrians in Antioch and Harran continued — as Brockelmann notes — to protect the heritage of Byzantium, to develop it, and to transmit it to Baghdad. Harran, together with the other important Syrian cities, was a scholarly center and a beacon of culture in which scientific, philosophical, and religious-ecclesiastical studies were pursued. When the Muslims came, those centers preserved their standing and their scholarly importance, because the conquerors were ignorant of the Greek and Latin languages that many of the Syriacs — both Christians and pagans — had mastered. Hitti pointed to this: "But the Arabs did not know Greek, so at first they relied on translations produced for them by Jews, pagans, and Christians — especially the Nestorians among the Christians. The method of these last, who were Syriacs, was to render the Greek book into their Syriac language and then afterward translate it from Syriac into Arabic, and thus they became the greatest link connecting Hellenic culture with Islam. For Hellenic culture reached the Arab mind only by way of the Syriac language." There is no doubt that the interest of the Harranian Sabians and pagans in astronomy and mathematics, and their distinction in the two fields, is due for the most part to their worship of the stars and the wandering planets, and to their attention to their times, the observation of their positions and the orbits of their spheres, the precise calculation of their periods, and the fixing of their appointed times in conjunction with the zodiacal signs and the seasons.

d - Al-Ruha (present-day Edessa, Urfa)

Al-Istakhri pointed to the great number of its monasteries and hermitages, owing to the predominance of Christians there. It is the oldest seat of the Syriac Christians, for in it the Nestorians who affirmed the two natures gathered. From it they emigrated to Iran (489 AD) after the Emperor Zeno issued a decree expelling them — which no doubt provided a more favorable circumstance for the adherents of the one nature there. The metropolitan of Al-Ruha, Jacob Baradaeus (d. 578 AD), was one of the ardent supporters of the Monophysite doctrine (the adherents of the one nature), so much so that this doctrine came to be known, after him, as the doctrine of the Jacobite Church (the Syriac Orthodox). Barthold notes: "The city of Al-Ruha holds a distinguished place in the history of Christianity and the civilization of Syria. It is a momentous homeland of ancient Syrian civilization and the birthplace of Syriac writing." It is worth noting that Saint Ephrem the Syriac, born in Nisibis, was a teacher in Al-Ruha (363-379 AD). (In Al-Ruha there arose religious and doctrinal studies and disputations between the Jacobites (the Syriac Orthodox), who acknowledge nothing in Jesus but divinity (that is, that in Christ there is one nature and that Christ is God), and the Nestorians (named after the bishop Nestorius), metropolitan of Constantinople (428-431 AD), who held that in Christ there are two independent, wholly distinct natures joined by bonds of close intimacy: one divine, by which he performs divine matters, and the other human, by which he conducts himself in the world as the rest of mankind do. On this view Mary is not the mother of the Christ who is of the divine nature (God), but the mother of the Christ who is of the human nature (Jesus, the man). The motives for the Nestorian Syriacs' learning of the Greek language, and likewise the continuation of the study of the Greek sciences in the Syrian cities, were explained by Brockelmann: "In fact the study of these sciences never for a single day ceased in the Syrian monasteries, for the theology of the Greek Church — including Theodore of Mopsuestia, of great influence on the Nestorian interpretation of Scripture — could not be understood without reference to the terminology that this theology drew from Aristotelian philosophy. But mathematics and the natural sciences were always able to receive some attention as well, even though concern with intellectual matters was confined, among the Syrians, to the hands of the clergy." Among those famed from Al-Ruha was Jacob of Edessa (640-708 AD), who became its bishop for the Syriac Orthodox doctrine (684-688 AD) and who devoted himself to authorship, revised the translation of the Bible known as the (Peshitta), and continued the chronicles of (Eusebius of Caesarea) (265-339). Among them was Nyufilus (Theophilus bar Thoma of Edessa, the Maronite, d. 785 AD), the astronomer who resided in the palace of Al-Mahdi (the third of the Abbasid caliphs) and translated the Iliad and the Odyssey into the Syriac language; he translated part of Homer's Iliad into Arabic, though it had — as Hitti noted — not the slightest effect on the intellectual life of the Arabs and did not last long. Among them was Theodore Abu Qurra (d. around 820 AD), who was born in Al-Ruha, was a monk at the Monastery of Mar Saba (in Palestine) and a disciple of Saint John of Damascus, and became bishop of Harran; he has polemical works against the heretics, the Jews, and the Muslims — some in Greek and some in Arabic — in which he defended the most important doctrines of Christianity.

To be continued in the next issue