In 2014 when I was in Albania, I noticed something interesting. While 60% of the Albanian people are Muslim, 10-15% of the people are Catholic and 10-15% belong to the Orthodox Church. The Muslims are not religious in the slightest. It seemed that the Christians were more devout. Either way, I could tell the difference between the Orthodox and Catholic churches with ease. They simply had different architecture. The Catholic churches looked more like a Church one would find in Italy or France and the Orthodox Churches looked more like the churches that I had just seen in Serbia a few days prior.
They didn’t look exactly the same since Albania’s Orthodox churches are more influenced by Greek architecture while Slavic Orthodox churches were slightly different. Still, one could tell.
When Saladin took back Jerusalem he dismantled the churches that the crusaders had built. He didn’t touch the Greek churches since they weren’t built by the crusaders. It would not have been hard to tell the difference between the two.
Let’s go back to the 7th century. How did the early Islamic empire look? Look at the Dome of the Rock. If that building had a Byzantine Cross on top of it, it would look like a Greek Church. The early mosques in North Africa would be similar as well.
What about the coinage? Believe it or not, early Islamic coinage looked identical to Byzantine coinage. They had a picture of the leader on it, even with a cross! The Arab Caliph looked like the Byzantine Emperor. The pictures were eventually taken off and replaced with calligraphy. Did this maybe happen inside the mosques as well? Did they have iconography early on? There is a good possibility that they did since they didn’t have a problem with it on early coins. Remember, in the 8th century, the Byzantine government went through an iconoclast period. Perhaps this happened in early Islam but unlike the Byzantine Empire, it was never reversed? It’s a definite possibility.
Style of worship? In the Eastern Church prostration is far more common than in the Catholic Church. It’s even more common in the Coptic Church. We know that Muslims prostrate for their prayer so it probably didn’t look that different. If you watch the video above it seems to suggest that this tradition has been maintained in the modern Greek churches in the Middle East.
What about theology? Muslims and Christians definitely believe different things but if you study the Muslim sources, the Quran is closer to Christianity than the Hadith. The Hadith definitely looks more like the Islam that we see today. The Quran comes in the 7th century while the Hadith comes in the 9th. If one adopts the revisionist position that Caliph Abdul Malik compiled the Quran instead of Uthman, then there is a chance that it was replacing an even earlier belief that was probably even closer to Eastern Christianity. The coinage definitely suggest that this was the case.
If you were living in a city like Damascus in the 630’s when they underwent regime change, I don’t think that things would have looked that different. The rulers would be Arab instead of Greek, and they’d be the ones collecting your tax money. The truth is, that it probably looked almost identical to the Byzantine Empire. Slowly over time things would change, especially with Caliph Abdul Malik.
Why did the early Arab empire copy almost everything from the Byzantines? The most natural explanation is that they had just acquired an empire and didn’t know how to rule. They had to learn on the fly. They couldn’t just take a few years off to think of customs and practices. Why not look to the north to their Byzantine neighbors? Eventually much of this changed. A lot of it changed with Caliph Abdul Malik but even he didn’t change everything. After all, he was the one who built the Dome of the Rock.
It’s not surprising that the Arabs adopted these customs but why did they change? Probably because of Greek-Arab tension within the Arab Empire and outside of it. They were at war with the Byzantines after all. This is just my theory. I would never use any of this in a debate with a Muslim but it’s something that I like thinking about since I like history.
Feel free to share your thoughts below.
Shabir Ally has tried to explain away the coinage by appealing to a German orientalist, who suggests that the early Muslims were simply using imagery that is familiar to their non-Muslim subjects in order to make the shift of the ruling authority from Christian to Islamic one easier. But this explanation is problematic- if the early Muslims really hated depictions of human beings and Christian imagery (as Muslim apologists try to convince us), they wouldn’t care so much about the feelings of newly conquered infidels. A few decades later they started removing the crosses on top of the churches and replacing them with crescents. Was there a sudden shift in the umma’s collective mood? I think that the caliphs were beginning to realize that their Christian-like ideology simply doesn’t work. They needed something new and more competitive with the religion of their enemies- the Byzantines, and voilà- we got Islam with all its joys. Anyway, I think it is important to remind Muslims that their sacred history is not as secure as they would like to have it. We have no idea what hadiths (if any) were circulating in the caliphate in the year 650 A.D. We don’t know why the early biographies of Muhammad were not preserved by Muslims (as even Ehteshaam Ghulam admits). The best summary is that of the noted Muslim scholar Jonathan Brown- the first Islamic century is ”out of historical reach”.
Hi Orangehunter,
Out of historical reach? I think that this is an uncomfortable subject for Muslims since much of what they find doesn’t fit into the neat and clean mold that the 9th century gives us. I don’t know if I subscribe to the Mecca-Petra theory but many promoters of it have produced evidence that contradicts the later orthodox narrative.
There is no excuse as to why an empire doesn’t have documents. It’s because of their late sources that we’ve resorted to archaeology and tracts written by monks and priests from the 7th century. Maybe if the Saudi authorities would let Western archaeologists into the Hijaz, it may help things out but we can’t expect it anytime soon.
The coins do pose a huge problem. It’s convenient that these coins are from the period that’s “out of historical reach”. Perhaps they may shed light on some areas of history that Muslims wish was out of reach.
God Bless,
Allan
1.”…much of what they find doesn’t fit into the neat and clean mold that the 9th century gives us”- well, I counted three Muhammads thus far- the obscure war chief with prophetic claims, mentioned in Doctrina Jacobi, the one that got severely retconned; the rather disturbing and unlikeable prophetic figure, depicted by Ibn Ishaq; the much more polished version of the said prophet that emerged in the 9th century and whom the Muslim scholars continued to polish in the succeeding three centuries.
2. “There is no excuse as to why an empire doesn’t have documents.”- it gets even weirder once we take into account the dry climate in the desert lands, inhabited by the earliest “Muslims”. Even this was not good enough to conserve Islamic manuscripts. I guess they just evaporated, just like “the original” Torah and Injeel.
3. “Maybe if the Saudi authorities would let Western archaeologists into the Hijaz, it may help things out but we can’t expect it anytime soon”- the late Orientalist Patricia Crone claimed in one of her articles that archaeological excavations in the Arabian desert provided evidence that the towns there were not measly Bedouin keeps, they were actually flourishing trade centers. The Arabs were not some bunch of savages, dwelling in history’s periphery.