Christians in the Eighteenth-Century Ottoman Mashriq

Nabil Matar

Eighteenth-Century Studies, Volume 47, Number 2, Winter 2014, pp. 177-194

(Article)

Published by Johns Hopkins University Press

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/ecs.2014.0000

For additional information about this article

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/536208

[ Access provided at 10 Oct 2021 01:03 GMT from University of St Mary of the Lake ]
 Matar / Christians in the Eighteenth-Century Ottoman Mashriq 177

Christians in the Eighteenth-Century

Ottoman Mashriq

Nabil Matar

In the last quarter of a century, the study of Arabic-speaking Christians in

the early modern Middle East has received much-needed attention from historians
and theologians alike. Chiefly basing their analyses on European missionary sources
and travel accounts and/or on Ottoman court records, scholars have described
those Christians under Ottoman rule (the Ottomans did not use the term “empire,”
preferring “caliphate” or “devlet” [state]) either as a persecuted minority or as
active commercial agents, as people of dhimma with all the second-class implica-
tions of that Qur’ānic category, or as communities protected by foreign powers
and in service to them.1 These studies, however, have ignored the perspective of the
dhimmis themselves in their own words and voice, and from their own theological
perspective.2 While Ottoman Jews of the Arab provinces did not leave any writings
in Arabic of a historical or theological nature,3 Christians did, and from after the
Ottoman conquest of Syria, Palestine, and Egypt in 1516–17 onward, they pro-
duced a large corpus in Arabic, attesting to an active spiritual and intellectual life.
Some authors so mastered Arabic that they were able produce religious poetry, use
Qur’ānic language, cite Church Fathers, and engage with medieval thinkers such
as Avicenna and al-Ma‘arri.
Because the Arabic regions were largely Muslim and had been conquered
from Muslims (the Mamluks), the Ottomans did not send colonial settlements
among them, nor did they view the minority Christian populations there as either
a military threat or as a source for slaves, as they did in the Balkans or Ukraine.4
Daniel Goffman notes that the minority communities in the Ottoman Empire “have

Nabil Matar is professor of English, and adjunct professor of History and Religious Studies.
His forthcoming publications are Henry Stubbe and the Beginnings of Islam (Columbia UP,
2013) and British Captives in the Mediterranean and the Atlantic, 1563–1760 (Brill, 2014).

© 2014 by the ASECS Eighteenth-Century Studies, vol. 47, no. 2 (2014) Pp. 177–94.
178 Eighteenth-Century Studies Vol. 47, No. 2

been examined (and often continue to be examined) autonomously, with minimal

regard to the Muslim state and society of which they were a part and which helped
mold their unique characteristics.”5 The difference in the Ottoman administration’s
dealings between these two regions determined the subsequent and distinct history
of the dhimmis: Arabic-speaking Christians in the Asian and African regions of
Ottoman control, for instance, were taxed less than the Christian dhimmis of the
European regions and were excluded from the devsirme levy.6 As Adnan Bakhit
has shown by examining the Tapu Defters of the sixteenth-century province of
Damascus, the Christian population, except in the “sensitive city of Jerusalem,”
had “not suffer[ed] from any official policy or program of what could properly be
termed persecution.”7 Rather, they played “an active role in society . . . and their
treatment seems to have depended more on local considerations (e.g. political)
than any imperial canon.” Notwithstanding collusion with the Crusaders centuries
earlier, and Mamluk reprisals, the Christians increased in numbers in various parts
of the newly conquered Ottoman territories, especially in the Palestinian triangle
of Bayt Sahūr, Bayt Jāla and Bethlehem, as well as in Aleppo and Alexandria, and
even in Anatolia.8
With the advent of the seventeenth century, Arabic-speaking Orthodox
and Catholic Christians began to assume an active role that was reflected in their
written output.9 Centuries earlier, they had adopted Arabic as their native tongue,
leaving Greek and Aramaic (and Coptic) for church worship, and perhaps as
they came under a conqueror whose language was alien to them, they focused on
Arabic as the language they had in common with the Muslim Arab majority. By
the eighteenth century, this linguistic facility, as well as the growing commercial
prosperity of trading cities, had brought positive change to the Middle East.10 There
was a rise in literacy which allowed Christians to engage theologically with Muslim
interlocutors, the like of which did not generally occur in the Rumeli-Balkan axis
or in the Maghrib (Libya-Morocco axis), which saw conflict with Euro-Christian
conquistadores and pirates.11 Although “little is known about social relations be-
tween Muslim and non-Muslim townsmen” in the seventeenth century, as Suraiya
Faroqhi notes,12 there are many things that can be known in the eighteenth century,
and the discussion below will focus on this unique trajectory of the “speaking” of
the Christian minority in the Ottoman Mashriq,13 and the articulation of a “self-
definition in the world of Islam.”14

CHRISTIANS IN ARABIC WRITINGS

In 1796, the Moroccan historian Abu al-Qāsim al-Zayānī finished writing
the first draft of his world history, al-Turjumāna al-kubra [The Great Chronicle].
He had spent the previous few years traveling on land and (much less) by sea, flee-
ing Morocco and the tasks that the ruler Mulay Suleyman (reigned 1792–1822)
wanted him to assume.15 He went to Tunisia, Algeria and Egypt, performed the
pilgrimage (twice) in Mecca and Medina, prayed at the mosques of Hebron and
Jerusalem, and spent months in Istanbul. He wrote about jurists and governors,
wondrous episodes and mirabili, cities and buildings, at the same time that he
read a vast amount of Arabic books, ancient and modern, on topics ranging from
jurisprudence to geography and history. His Turjumāna is a mix of travel accounts
and excerpts from earlier writers, lists of ports, islands, rivers and precious stones,
 Matar / Christians in the Eighteenth-Century Ottoman Mashriq 179

and descriptions of the assistance he received as he traveled, sometimes without

money, around the vastness of the Islamic world.
And the world, for al-Zayānī, was Islamic. In over five hundred pages, there
are no references to Euro-Christians, although he included some general and impre-
cise information about countries and geographies in Europe (a name he did not use).
But much as Euro-Christians were not part of his experience, al-Zayānī expressed
interest in the Arabic-speaking Christians of the Mashriq.16 During his travels from
Istanbul to Jerusalem to Alexandria, he saw numerous Christian communities in
the multi-religious dominions of the Turks. In such mixed environments, religious
changes and challenges occurred frequently: disputation, conversion and resistance
to conversion, sometimes re-conversion, and wavering in between. Coming from
Morocco where there were no indigenous Christian populations, al-Zayānī was
perplexed at Arabic Christian expressiveness, especially in the light of a number
of episodes he witnessed or heard about while staying in Egypt.
Al-Zayānī did not discuss the status of Christians in eighteenth-century
Egypt nor did he specify denominations in his description of Christian episodes.
In that period, some Copts had become prominent in financial and administrative
institutions—which may help to explain Christian expressiveness.17 Before al-Zayānī
recounted his episodes, however, he felt the need to introduce solid and firm refuta-
tions of Christianity. During his earlier visit to Tunis, he had come across one of
the best Arabic refutations of Christianity written by a fourteenth-century monk
from Majorca who converted to Islam and wrote a systematic rebuttal of his for-
mer religion.18 ‘Abdallah al-Turjumān (Anselm Turmeda) had extensive knowledge
of Christian scriptures and ecclesiastical traditions, and he wrote so convincingly
that after his death, his tomb was enshrined in the middle of one of the souks of
Tunis.19 Al-Zayānī lavishly copied passages from al-Turjumān’s refutation,20 after
which he described the examples of defiance, argumentation, and assertiveness
that he had witnessed.21
The first episode had been recounted to him by one al-Tuzartī, about a
Muslim prince who arrived in Egypt with his Christian assistant. The latter declared
that he would challenge any jurist to a religious disputation: if the jurist won, he
would give him 300 dinars and if he won, he would expect the same. Also, if the
jurist prevailed, he would join his religion and if he prevailed, the jurist would
convert to Christianity. So a jurist came up and the Christian said:

You say that the bounty of God is infinite. Give me an

example that will make me understand such a belief in an empirical man-
ner. The jurist replied: “Even children can demonstrate this.” He then
walked to the middle of the mosque and lit a candle in front of the ruler
saying: “Call, O ruler, on all your subjects in this city and let each light
his candle from this candle.” Thus is the bounty of God enough for all
the creation. All creatures take of His bounty without diminishing it.
The Christian said: You claim that in paradise there is a
tree that casts its shadow on all and not a house in paradise but is pen-
etrated by a branch of that tree. Explain that to me. Yes, answered the
jurist. Did you not see how the sun rises and travels around the earth and
not a single house but is touched by its light?
The Christian said: You claim that the residents of
paradise eat and drink and defecate. Show me something like that in our
180 Eighteenth-Century Studies Vol. 47, No. 2

world here. The jurist said: Have you not seen the fetus in its mother’s
belly, eating and drinking but not defecating or urinating?
Then the jurist turned to the Christian and said: You
Christians claim that paradise is yours and is your house. Everyone who
owns a house knows its features. I want you to tell me: what is written
on the gate of paradise?
The Christian fell silent, finding no answer. After some
time, the jurist said: What is written is the following: “There is no god
but God and Muhammad is His prophet.”
˙
He then demanded that the Christian convert to Islam,
but the latter resisted and was ransomed by a huge sum of money.22

Al-Zayānī must have found this episode intriguing: the Christian had the effrontery
to challenge Muslims about their faith—and to do so inside a mosque; the ruler was
in attendance but did not intervene; and the defeated Christian did not convert, as
he had promised, but merely paid a high penalty. At the same time, the jurist and
other attendants took the disputation in their stride as if the questions that had
been raised by the Christian were commonplace. Al-Zayānī conveyed neither anger
nor hostility as the two communities discussed the most divisive issues between
Christianity and Islam. Still, he decided to consult a local jurist about this matter.
Earlier, he had been confused about another episode that had been relayed
to him by an Egyptian, one Ibrahīm al-Dimyāti. . The latter reported that he had
been captured by pirates and taken to Malta, but instead of being sent to the gal-
leys, he was made to help a Maltese monk in copying Arabic manuscripts. Nothing
surprised al-Dimāytī . more than to discover that the monk had once been a judge
in Jerusalem, where he mastered Arabic and Islamic jurisprudence. He had been
captured while traveling, after which he converted to Islam and rose in the ranks
to become a respected authority on law. But then, added the monk to al-Dimyā.
tī, he returned home where he continued to improve his Arabic studies. Because
al-Dimyātī . was a learned shaykh, the monk was kind to him, and al-Dimyātī . spent
an enriching month with him discussing many of the Arabic books in the monk’s
library. At the end of the month, al-Dimyātī . was sent back to Tunis, gratis.
23

Such an episode was perplexing to al-Zayānī. The monk had become such
a devout Muslim that he had risen to the position of a judge—but then he deserted
Islam and returned to his former religion. Still, he was not a “bad” Christian for
he treated al-Dimyātī . well and shared with him his collection of books. Here was
a priest, the quintessential Christian, treating with a Muslim on an intellectually
commensurate level and extending charity to him. Evidently, the monk and the
captive had much in common because of their shared interest in Islamic history
and jurisprudence. Perhaps they engaged in debates on the Christian island of
Malta similar to what took place in the Muslim land of Egypt. Al-Zayānī was so
moved by this story that when he finally went to consult the jurist in Alexandria,
he could not but repeat it to him. To his surprise, the jurist burst out laughing and
told al-Zayānī that he was going to send to him a man to whose amazing story he
should listen. The jurist explained that since al-Zayānī had been traveling in so
many regions of the world, God could not but reveal to him some of His ‘ajā’ib
[wonders]. “Do not get angry with him,” he instructed al-Zayānī about the man,
“for he is a master of all religions, and tonight he is a Muslim. But don’t ask about
tomorrow.”
 Matar / Christians in the Eighteenth-Century Ottoman Mashriq 181

That evening, Shaykh Yahya . al-Maqdisī (John of Jerusalem), wrote al-

Zayānī, came to visit him. Viewing him as a Sufi qutb [master] from the Maghrib,
the shaykh asked for al-Zayānī’s blessing after which he spent the evening telling
al-Zayānī the story of his life (though he refused to eat of the couscous which was
served for dinner). He was Cretan in origin and had studied to become an authority
on Christian scriptures. When he started showing interest in Judaism and debating
with Jewish scholars, he was shunned by his community, and after ten years of serv-
ing as a judge, he was dismissed from office. Furious, he left for Jerusalem where
he converted to Judaism, which he so mastered that he became a judge and served
for seven years. Meanwhile, he was reading Arabic-Islamic books and debating
with Muslims. The Jews grew angry and dismissed him. Furious, he left Jerusalem
to Anatolia (“the land of the Rūm”) where he converted to Islam and commuted
between Istanbul, Adana and Bursa to perfect his studies. He became a judge “in
a small town called Ankara” and then in numerous other cities; he went twice on
the pilgrimage to Mecca and Medina, after which he settled in Cairo and taught
at the Azhar for years. When he tried to become the chief judge of the Shafi‘ites
(the dominant jurisprudential school in Egypt), fellow scholars grew jealous of
him and divulged the secrets about his life to the prince who banished him (with
a modest income) to Alexandria. Furious, he renounced teaching and began de-
nouncing princes, rulers, and judges, even cursing them openly, while continuing
in prayer and fasting.
Al-Zayānī liked Shaykh Yahya . and for the two months which he spent in
Alexandria, he hosted him every Friday night. One evening he asked the shaykh
about the best of the three monotheistic religions. The answer came that Islam
was the best religion because it was the narrowest, since it relied exclusively on
the Qur’ān and the Sunna and did not integrate customs or regional practices in
its theological or legal codes. It was narrower than Judaism, and by far narrower
than Christianity, the least narrow of them all. Al-Zayānī immediately suspected
that the man was still a Christian at heart and so he asked him for proof of his
statement. The shaykh gave him a rather convoluted answer after which he left
the house and never returned. Al-Zayānī told his jurist friend about the meeting
whereupon the latter agreed that the shaykh was still a Christian at heart, and so
the two men expressed hope that God would continue to guide and instruct them
in the Right Path. Although al-Zayānī had nothing more to say about the shaykh,
he felt the need to confirm the truth of Islam and thus continued with an elabo-
rate discussion of the humanity and non-divinity of Christ. In the privacy of his
chronicle, he re-asserted his faith.24
Al-Zayānī was intrigued by the encounter, perhaps because it showed
him how the two religious communities were not living in separate intellectual
and cultural spaces. Other disputations have survived, interestingly written not by
Muslims but by Christian Arabic clerics from the Orthodox and Catholic churches
in Syria and Lebanon, showing similar proximities. A stylized exchange between
a Christian and a Muslim presents Shaykh Shams al-Dīn al-Bakrī asking some
Masihiyyūn [Christians] (significantly using the Christian not the Islamic designa-
tion, Nasārā)
. about the mystery of the incarnation of Christ. In polite verse, the
shaykh queries the “worshippers of the cross” how God could die at the hands of
mortals, and be buried, thereby leaving the universe without a God? The answer
182 Eighteenth-Century Studies Vol. 47, No. 2

is given by Yūhanna Ibn ‘Ῑsa who responds, also in verse, that we Christians (but
using here the Islamic designation, Nasārā)
. believe that God assumed a hijāb
. [veil]
in human form through the Virgin—and that God can do what He chooses. Al-
though the Christian respondent avoids discussing the incarnation, he feels that he
has provided in a few lines a good summary of his faith to the Muslim interlocu-
tor.25 As expected, the Christian reply is supposed to defeat Muslim doubt, but
strikingly, the Arabic of the Christian respondent is suffused with Qur’ānic and
Hadith echoes (17v–19r), showing how steeped the priest and his community have
been in the language of the “Hagarians:” la sharīk lahū [He has no associates]; al-
maghdūbi ‘alayhim [those with whom God is angry]; Allah yaf‘al mā yashā’ [God
does what He wills], and others. Interaction with Muslims on the level of theology
and language was clearly ongoing—to the point where Christians picked up Islamic
expressions and vocabulary.26 One cleric in Malta in the seventeenth century even
transcribed manuscripts about the Arabic language that included various praises
of Muhammad and Islam, which he faithfully reproduced.27
Some Arab Christians studied the Qur’ān and other Islamic sources, and
mastered them—as another version of the above disputation shows. This version of
the jidāl [disputation] sets al-Bakrī against the mutrān
. [bishop], Butrus
. al-Ghustāwī
(from Ghusta in Lebanon) who describes his counterpart as ibn bilādina al-qarīb
ummatina [our close compatriot from our community].28 In this longer version, the
bishop, who had been trained in Rome, opens with the questions posed to him in
verse by al-Bakrī, and, using the same rhyme scheme, presents his answer. He then
takes every verse/question from al-Bakrī and replies with references to the Old and
New Testaments. Another disputation records how a Shī‘ite from the Hamādeh .
family used to argue with the priest in a village near Jubayl/Byblos in Lebanon.29
The former then went to Sidon and told Shaykh Sāli . h. ibn Mansūr. al-Kawtharānī
about his disputations who in turn wrote to the priest a couple of pages against
dīn al-Nasārā
. [the religion of the Christians.] The priest, Antonius Shahwān,
wrote a long and detailed letter, “in answer to his objections and in refutation of
his statements and views.” The exchange, often in rhymed prose, was respectful,
firm, and not overly confrontational.30 Another version of this disputation, written
some time later, includes reference to the “Rūm, Siryān, al-Inglīz, Qupt, Arman,
Ifranj, Mawārina” [Europeans, Syriacs, English, Copts, Armenians, Franks, and
Maronites] as having “inharafū”
. [deviated,] like all the “Nasārā,”
. from “al-injīl”
[the Gospel]. Another disputation, or possibly the same but with different names,
31

pits Bishop Farhāt . against al-Kawtharī [sic]. This disputation is longer than the
above, and is important because the bishop not only uses the Old and New Testa-
ments for his answers, but also the Qur’ān, treating it as an equally reliable source
as the other scriptures. The bishop is gently blunt in telling his counterpart how
the latter had not understood Christian doctrine. “We believe, like you, in the one-
ness of God. But we do not deny His attributes, evident by reason and tradition.
We say that God is ahadun
. samad,
. lam yalid mithla al-bahsar wa lam yūlad wa
lam yakun lahū kafwan ahad . bal inna wilāadatahū kaniyya fīh mundhū al-azal
wa ilā al-abad, wa hiya wilāda ‘aqliyya rūhaniyya la hayūliyya jismāninyya [one
eternal, gives no birth like mankind, and was not born and had no equal at all,
but his birth was in him from eternity and forever, and it was a birth that was ra-
tional and spiritual, not material and bodily].32 Some of the bishop’s wordings are
 Matar / Christians in the Eighteenth-Century Ottoman Mashriq 183

directly taken from Sura 112 in the Qur’ān, showing how, with few extra words,
the Christian doctrine of the Incarnation is supposedly confirmed in the Muslim
scripture. Can you, he continues “deny the word of God and His spirit while your
book witnesses to that in stating in the third chapter of the Qur’ān (Āl ‘Imrān):
“Thus said the angels: O Mary, God brings you good tidings of His word whose
name is ‘Ῑsa son of Mary.”33 Although the writer misspells sūra with a sād. rather
than a sīn, he knows his Qur’ān well, and as he continues in his disputation, using
more and more Qur’ānic verses, he also brings in allusions to St. Isaac the Syriac
and cites numerous references from the Old and New Testaments. Disingenuously,
the bishop proves from the Qur’ān itself the doctrines which Islam vehemently
rejects: incarnation, crucifixion, and trinity. His approach is to explain Christian
belief, then bring the Qur’ān in as proof: “As we have explained, Christ is of two
natures, human and divine. They did not crucify the divine nature nor did they kill
it because God suffers no pain. They crucified the human nature . . . And if you
deny his death and resurrection, you will have deviated from your book which
says in the sūra of Mary that ‘Ῑsa said: Peace be upon my the day I was born, and
the day I die, and the day I shall be resurrected.”34
Such familiarity with Qur’ānic lore in the disputations attests to inter-
communal exchanges, both theological and social. Living in villages and cities
in proximity to one another, Muslims and Christians might well have engaged in
dialogue: men of learning and social status exchanged epistles and poems, and the
fact that the manuscripts have survived in ecclesiastical archives suggests that they
were intended for the edification of the congregations. Trade and social mobility
produced travel and new population concentrations—the Christians in Acre are a
case in point35—and relocations to previously deserted sites—such as the Christian
return to the highlands of Kisirwan.36 Such movements brought the communities
into close interaction, and Christian clerics may have felt the need to furnish their
literate and active members with instruction and responsa —to confirm doctrines
of faith for fear of the allure of conversion. That is why the debates showed the
closeness of Christianity to Islam in its monotheistic confession, and not, as in
similar debates in the West between Euro-Christians and Muslims, the falsity of
Islam. Christianity was being integrated into the Islamic, even Qur’ānic, world view.
Other descriptions of exchange appear in the chronicle of the Orthodox
Patriarch Mikhā’īl Brayk covering the years 1720 to 1782.37 As al-Zayānī was a
learned jurist with access to religious and social information, so was Brayk who
recorded from his city of Aleppo important events that he himself had witnessed
or had heard about, including episodes about religious change and subterfuge:

Let me tell you of a wondrous and strange episode that happened in AD

1757 and AH 1170. I heard a true story about a Muslim and a Christian
both of whom were respectable men. The two fell in love with an honor-
able Muslim woman. News about their love for her spread far and wide,
until one day a relative went to see that woman and chided her for loving
Muslims and Christians. After being chided, the evil woman could not
bear what she had heard, took poison and died. When the news reached
the [Muslim] honorable man who had loved her, and the Christian, both
of whom were in the public bath, they took poison and drank deeply say-
ing we do not want to live after [the death] of our beloved. The Muslim
184 Eighteenth-Century Studies Vol. 47, No. 2

died instantly, but the Christian was carried to his house and was treated
back to life.38

Brayk continued with a comment on the episode—as if he was preparing a homily.

He had nothing to say about the Christian love of a Muslim or anything else about
interreligious relations. Rather, he used the episode to warn his readers how the
satanic love of a ma‘shūqa [mistress] led the two men, Christian and Muslim, to
choose death and shame. Evidently, in a large and mixed city like Aleppo, Christian
and Muslim men became so friendly that not only did they go to the public bath
together but somehow saw the same woman enough times to fall in love with her.
For Brayk, the relevance of the episode was not social or religious but theological.
“We, the community of believers,” he continued “should choose death only for
him who redeemed us from death, saved us from eternal hell, and cleansed us of
our sins, Jesus Christ the Savior.”39
In another account about the year AD 1749/AH 1162 (Brayk often used
both calendars), Brayk told of a priest from Adana who was also a chanter in the
church choir. A widower, he lived in Damascus and visited many Christian house-
holds. One day the devil entered into him and he went to the court and converted
to Islam, thereby annulling his priestly calling. He then asked for a woman whom
he claimed had agreed to marry him. She denied that, and he remained alone and
shunned like Judas, working as gatekeeper at the court until he died. Another man,
a former priest from Aleppo who had “sold” his religion, arrived in Damascus
where he practiced medicine. “Both men brought shame to us,” commented Brayk.
Another episode involved a man from Homs who arrived in Damascus and every
morning and evening changed his clothes and went to church. When people saw
him they confronted him because he was a Muslim and told him not to come to
their church. He said: “I am a Christian and I am willing to witness for Christ.”
He had disguised himself as a Muslim but in secret he was a Christian who feared
God. Both the Christians and the Muslims of Homs knew about him. Another epi-
sode occurred a year later when a man came to Damascus claiming to be a bishop.
He was welcomed by the patriarch, but then letters reached the patriarch that the
man was a Muslim who was trying to deceive him. Immediately, the patriarch
inquired from him and the man confirmed the truth whereupon he was sent away.
Soon after, another Muslim claimed to be a Christian and asked the patriarch for
a istatikon/[license] to collect money. The patriarch gave him one, believing him
to be a Christian, but as soon as he left, the man declared his Islam and proceeded
to collect money in accordance with the sanad [license] in his possession.40

ESPACE DE JEU?
The above examples from Egypt and Syria, by Muslims and Christians,
show that religious “shifting” occurred in the Arab urban centers of the Ottoman
polity. Intermixing made possible conversion, and reconversion, sometimes more
than once. J. Dakhlia has argued that such shifting was a form of imposture that
was chiefly possible in the early modern Maghrib where there was social mobil-
ity, openness, and an “espace de jeu.”41 But there was not as much espace in the
Maghrib as there was in the Ottoman Mashriq because of the diversity of religions
and denominations among the populations in some of the major cities, unmatched
 Matar / Christians in the Eighteenth-Century Ottoman Mashriq 185

anywhere in the Maghrib or in Western Europe. Al-Zayānī included the episodes

about Christians because they were indigenous to the Mashriq, and about whom
his Magharibi readers were completely ignorant.42 No city in the Christian or
Islamic West included among its indigenous, sizeable, and long-established reli-
gious communities the three monotheistic communities, nor any of their varieties:
Druze, ‘Alawite, Shi‘ite, Nestorian, Jacobite, and others. Such mix was unique
to the Mashriq.43 Other scholars have viewed this “play” as a form of “religious
nomadism” and experimentation,44 with converts and re-converts acting as “a
moteur essentiel de multiples échanges culturels et techniques” [essential engine
of multiple cultural and technological exchanges].45 Converts were commercial,
diplomatic and intellectual brokers between Christians and Muslims, men and
women who moved easily between two religious worlds.
Such a view misses the elephant in the room. While there may have been
an element of play, more preponderant and dangerous was the condign punishment
that a Muslim convert to Christianity in the Ottoman world faced, in the same
manner that a Christian convert to Islam did in Western Europe.46 Furthermore,
only in the case of conversion-cum-emigration could converts become agents of
échanges: after all, a Euro-Christian convert to Islam could not but leave and settle
in the Islamic World, in the manner that Muslim converts to Christianity could not
but emigrate to Italy or Spain or France. In their new communities, these converts
encountered a different culture, cuisine, ideology, and language that produced in
them a new “identity.”47 The conversion of Christian Ottoman subjects in the
Mashriq, however, carried no cultural change: the convert exchanged one religious
community for another, but he did not have to change cultural “identity,” political
belonging (he remained a subject of the sultan), or, most importantly, language.
Such changes and transformations among the Mashriqi population help
to explain the surprising equanimity that informed the reporting by al-Zayānī and
Brayk and the verse disputations. Although hostile to the theology of Christianity,
al-Zayānī and his interlocutors remained faithful to the Qur’ānic injunctions and
did not extend that hostility to the personal level. Brayk expressed frustration at the
examples of Christian frailty, but never mentioned that Christians who converted to
Islam had been forced to do so, as Western observers relentlessly claimed. Rather,
he believed that it was their sinfulness that drove them to convert. The proximity
of Muslims, Christians, and Jews in the courts and the baths, the marketplaces and
the public gardens of the Ottoman cities furnished various opportunities to recog-
nize the religious other on his own terms: when al-Dhāhir ‘Omar tried to establish
some kind of autonomy from the Ottomans in Palestine, his Christian assistant
and biographer recorded how ‘Omar stopped outside the Orthodox Church of
the Annunciation in Nazareth and promised the Virgin that if he was victorious
in battle, he would dedicate annual gifts of oil to her church. After his victory, he
did.48 In that same period, a rich Christian from Lebanon built a church for his
Catholic community in Tyre, along with a mosque for the Muslim community.49

MUSLIMS IN CHRISTIAN ICONOGRAPHY

One significant manifestation of interreligious exchange in the Mashriq ap-
pears in icons of local saints or of the Virgin Mary that were venerated by Muslims
and Christians alike.50 In the icon of “The Stylites Symeon the Elder and Symeon
186 Eighteenth-Century Studies Vol. 47, No. 2

the Younger,” for instance, painted by Ni‘ma al-Musawwir

. in 1699 for the church
of Notre Dame de Balamand (in northern Lebanon), two Muslims with turbans are
shown in a rare appearance of Muslims in a Christian icon [figure 1]. As J. Leroy
noted, “to the left of the column of Symeon the Elder can be seen a worthy Arab
gentleman with his servant, who approaches the Saint while raising his hand.”51
The “worthy Arab” appears to be importuning the saints, perhaps a reflection of
current Muslim veneration for holy Christian ascetics. He is standing at a distance
from the columns, but his hand is gesturing in the direction of the older Symeon,
and his eyes are looking up.52 Significantly, turbaned figures are not at all part of
iconic representations in orthodox devotion: actually, one of the few other turbaned

Figure 1. Ni‘ma al-Musawwir,

. “The Stylites Symeon the Elder and Symeon the Younger,”
wood, 1699 (98.5 x 67 cm). Greek Orthodox Convent Notre Dame de Balamand,
Kura, Lebanon.
 Matar / Christians in the Eighteenth-Century Ottoman Mashriq 187

figures who appears in an earlier icon, of “Saint Symeon the Younger” (c. 1667),
is a “Barbarian” beheading a handicapped man (as in the story about Symeon). If
this icon was executed by Ni‘ma’s father, Yūsuf, it shows an important change in
attitude toward the Muslim—now approaching the saint, with his hand stretched
out, like the others, and seeking the blessing of the Stylites.53
The fact that the Arabic-speaking Christians wrote and painted about
Muslims attests to some sense of identity that superseded the strictures of dhimma—
which may help to explain why “the few icons that survived the iconoclasm of the
eighth to ninth centuries had been kept safely in monasteries in Islamic Palestine.”54
Such “identity” did not appear among the non-Arabic subjects of the Ottomans
in the region. The icon of St. Dimitrius in the iconostasis of the Orthodox Church
of the Annunciation in Nazareth shows a saint stabbing with his spear a prostrate
Turkish man, identified by his mustache and scimitar. Not surprisingly, the icon was
painted by a Greek sometime in the middle of the eighteenth century [figure 2].55

Figure 2. “St. Dimitrius,” wood, eighteenth-century. Orthodox Church of the Annunciation, Nazareth,
Israel.
188 Eighteenth-Century Studies Vol. 47, No. 2

CONCLUSION
The above examples of interreligious exchanges do not, and cannot,
describe the complex relations between Muslims and Christians in the eighteenth-
century Mashriq. While al-Zayānī and Brayk, along with others, recounted episodes
about Muslim-Christian interactions, the author of a large biographical diction-
ary of the eighteenth century, Muhammad
. Khalīl al-Murādī (d. 1791), completely
ignored non-Muslims. Among the hundreds of biographies of men (and only one
woman, a poetess from Istanbul) ranging from a few lines to multiple pages, there
is not a single mention of Arabic-speaking Christians—although al-Murādī included
the story about al-Dimyātī . which al-Zayānī repeated. Such total indifference to
56

the non-Muslims raises questions: how frequent were the episodes of Muslim-
Christian exchange, and how often were reporters accurate and non-committal in
their writings about dhimmis, as in the cases of al-Zayānī and Brayk? At the same
time, and during periods of regional instability, governors fought princes, princes
fought their rivals, janissaries seized power and terrorized local populations, and
tribal/religious chieftains (Druze and Shi‘ite) attacked each other. Indeed, the his-
tory of Egypt and Bilād al-Shām in this period, as studied by ‘Abd al-Karīm Rāfiq,
is a series of revolts and assassinations, military confrontations and social unrest;57
the history of Damascus by Ahmad . al-Budayrī, covering the years between 1741
and 1762, is also a series of earthquakes and freezes, robberies and murders and
mayhem;58 and the history of Lebanon and Syria between 1745 and 1800 includes
a period of terror under the Butcher Pahsa of Acre, Ahmad.
.
59
At such times, horrors
were visited on all the defenseless populations alike: Muslim, Christian, and Jew-
ish, Matāwila (Shi‘ites), Kurds, Maghariba, and Bedouin. In Jerusalem so frequent
were the depredations by Bedouins that the Ottoman authorities armed both the
Muslim and the Christian population so they could protect themselves.60
Still, in urban centers and regions of economic growth, different dynamics
prevailed, which is why no generalizations can be made about the status of the
dhimmis without taking into account different geographical and historical contexts.
That the Christian (and Jewish) minorities of the Ottoman devlet did not have the
same privileges or opportunities as the Muslim majority, as C. E. Bosworth states,
and that they were marginalized and sometimes maltreated, is not contested.61 And
while there were violations committed on them and others (in the Christian case,
sometimes instigated by the Orthodox-Catholic/Uniate rivalry), no attempt was
made by the Ottoman conquerors to destroy their cultural, linguistic, or religious
identity. That is why the status of the Christian dhimmis in the Ottoman-dominated
Mashriq should not only be studied within the context of the “Muslim state,” as
Goffman urged, but also within the context of wider global parallels. The Ottoman
conquest of Constantinople islamicized the city, but it allowed the vast majority
of its Christian population to remain—and to engage even theologically with the
new potentates (as the writings of Gennadios Scholarios and George Amiroutzes
demonstrate). By contrast, no Jew or Muslim was left in Iberia a decade after the
1492 Catholic conquest; and by the 1570s, Arabic was proscribed for the forcibly
converted Muslims, the denigrated “Moriscos.” By the second half of the six-
teenth century, when the Arabic-speaking Christians were beginning to find their
linguistic voice in the Ottoman dominions, the 1555 cujus regio eius religio model
of politico-religious uniformity was enforced in the Habsburg Empire, a model
 Matar / Christians in the Eighteenth-Century Ottoman Mashriq 189

that, had the Ottomans adopted it, would not have allowed for the continuity of
a different theological or cultural community in the Muslim polity: since before
the conquest of Bilād al-Shām, the Ottomans had already developed mechanisms
to integrate religious minorities.
Like their contemporary Spaniards and Portuguese, French and British,
the Ottomans were launched on territorial expansion that resulted in the subjuga-
tion of populations with different religions and languages. Contrast with the other
modes of global imperialisms will reveal crucial distinctions: the American Indians
encountered the Spaniards just under a quarter of a century before the Ottomans
conquered the Mashriq, but those who survived the “holocaust” from among the
native populations of America were enslaved and converted religiously, culturally,
and linguistically.62 All Indians learned to speak the language of the conqueror and
to worship the god of the conqueror; those who did not were not able to maintain
a vibrant community using its own language or appealing to its own god/s. Even in
Spain, the Castilian language was imposed in Catalan and Galician regions. That
the dhimmis were “never anything but second-class citizens” is true, but they were
never exposed to the horrors of an American-style slaughter, or to the eradication
of their religious history or culture, or to the forced labor and mass expulsions
that the Jews and the Muslims experienced in medieval and early modern England,
France, and Iberia. While there were active churches from Alexandria to Musil,
there was not a single mosque in Iberia, or anywhere else in western Christendom
(unless we think of make-shift prayer rooms for captives in Malta); and while
Antonius Shahwān could write a letter in Arabic to refute Muslim views, there
was no parallel among the Amerindians of a writer using Nahuatl or Quechua to
argue against his Catholic rulers (notwithstanding Jesuit use of native languages
for proselytization). By the time Jermānus Farhāt . died in 1732, he had written
the equivalent of two volumes of Christian meditations and poems in masterful
Arabic.63 Even Arabic-speaking Christians living in Istanbul were so proud of their
city that when a Moroccan ambassador chatted with some of their “dignitaries”
and expressed admiration for the city they answered, “Do not call it a city. This is
the world.”64 While Euro-Christian conquistadores found various justifications for
destroying the “heathen,” the Ottoman devlet included the religious other/s in the
legal fabric of the state. It is this “tolérance ottoman,” as Abdeljelil Temimi wrote,
that permitted even Christians from Western Europe “de pénétrer en très grand
nombre dans tous les teritoires islamiques alors que l’Europe a refusé d’accorder
un tel droit aux Musulmans.”65
In the Arab cities of the Ottoman devlet, new economic forces opened up
spaces in which the dhimmis flourished and “played,” linguistically, theologically
and socially. As Alastair Hamilton succinctly put it, “From the Turks, at least, the
eastern Christians had no inquisition to fear.”66

Notes
1. For general studies of Christians in the Ottoman Empire, see Robert Brenton Betts, Christians
in the Arab East (Atlanta: John Knox Press, 1978); Youssef Courbage and Philippe Fargues, Chris-
tians and Jews under Islam, trans. Judy Mabro (London: St. Martin’s, 1996); Bernard Heyberger, Les
chrétiens du Proche-Orient au temps de la réforme catholique: Syrie, Liban, Palestine, XVIIIe siècles
(Rome: École Française de Rome, 1994); Bruce Masters, Christians and Jews in the Ottoman Arab
World (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2001).
190 Eighteenth-Century Studies Vol. 47, No. 2

2. The chief exception is Asad Rustum in his magisterial history of the Antiochean Church from
a textually and intellectually Orthodox perspective: The Church of the City of God: Great Antioch, 2
vols. (Beirut: Manshūrāt al-nūr, 1958). See also Hayat Bualuan, “The Christians under Ottoman Rule
in the Writings of 18th Century Historians of Bilād al-Shām,” in Discrimination and Tolerance in the
Middle East, ed. Ray Jabre Mouawad (Beirut: Orient-Institut, 2012), 29–38.

3. I have found only three documents in Arabic by Jews in which they discuss conversion, and
resistance to conversion, to Christianity. I will include them in my future study of Western Christian
Missions in the Arabic-Speaking Mashriq: 1598–1798.

4. See for instance the study of the Balkan/Orthodox encounter with the Ottomans: Tijana Krstić,
Contested Conversions to Islam: Narratives of Religious Change in the Early Modern Ottoman Empire
(Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 2011), and my forthcoming review in Modern Greek Studies Yearbook:
A Publication of Mediterranean, Slavic, and Eastern Orthodox Studies 28/29 (2012/2013). For Ukraine,
see Galina I. Yermolenko, “Tatar-Turkish Captivity and Conversion in Early Modern Ukrainian Songs,”
in Mediterranean Identities, ed. Kay Ryerson and John Watkins (Ashgate: forthcoming 2014).

5. Daniel Goffman, “Ottoman Millets in the Early Seventeenth Century,” New Perspectives on
Turkey 11 (1994): 135–58, esp. 136.

6. Noufan Raja al-Sawariyah, “The Inhabitants of the City of Jerusalem in the 10th Century
A.H./16th Century A.D. The Early Ottoman Tahrir Defters as a Source,” Jordan Journal for History
and Archeology 5: 1 (2011): 1–35, esp. 25, where there are four categories of taxation for visitors to
the holy sites in Jerusalem: that for the ifranj (the highest rate), the “Rūm from the East,” the Nasara
.
from the region of Aleppo and Shām, and the Nasara . of Egypt—who paid the least.

7. Muhammad Adnan Bakhit, “The Christian Population of the Province of Damascus in the 16th
Century,” in Studies in the History of Bilād al-Shām in the Sixteenth Century, ed. Muhammad Adnan
Bakhit and Thaer T. al-Kadi (Amman: Univ. of Jordan, 2009), 69–111, esp. 69. For further discussion of
the integration of Christians and Jews in Aleppan/Syrian society in the early modern period, see Abdul-
Karim Rafeq, “Coexistence and Integration among the Religious Communities: In Ottoman Syria,” in
Islam in the Middle Eastern Studies: Muslims and Minorities, ed. Usuki Akira and Kato Hiroshi (Osaka,
2003), 97–133; Néophyte Edelby, “The Legislative Autonomy of Christians in the Islamic World,” in
Muslims and Others in Early Islamic Society, ed. Robert Holyand (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004), 37–82.
For the juridical maneuverability in court cases relating to Jews and Christians, see Najwa al-Qattan,
“Dhimmis in the Muslim Court: Legal Autonomy and Religious Discrimination,” Internal Journal of
Middle East Studies 31 (1999): 429–44. The statement that the Ottomans “sunnitized” the regions of
Syria and Egypt in the manner they did the Balkans is not precise: Kristć, Contested Conversions to
Islam, 14.

8. See Muhammad
. ‘Adnān al-Bakhīt, “Bayt Lahm,
. Bayt Jāla, wa Bayt Sahūr
. al-Nasara
. wa jiwariha,”
in Dirasāt fi tarīkh bilād al-Shām: Filastīn
. (Amman: Amanat ‘Amman al-Kubrā, 2007), 213–43; André
Raymond, Arab Cities in the Ottoman Period (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2012), 87–100. For growth in the
Christian population in Ankara and Kayseri in the seventeenth century, see Suraiya Faorqhi, “Part
II: Crisis and Change, 1590–1699,” in An Economic and Social History of the Ottoman Empire,
1300–1914, ed. Halil Inalcik and Donald Quataert (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1994), 581.

9. For some studies of Christian Arabic writers, see Antoine Rabbath, Documents inédits pour server
a l’Histoire du Christianisme en Orient (Paris: A. Picard et Fils, 1905–11, repr.1973) ; J. Nasrallah,
“Historiens et chroniqueurs melchites du XVIIIe siècle,” Bulletin d’Études Orientales, 13 (1949–51) :
145–60 ; Sidney Griffith, “The Monks of Palestine and the Growth of Christian Literature in Arabic,”
The Muslim World 78 (1988): 1–28; Nabil Hage, “Boutros al-Tulawi et l’école maronite d’Alep à la
fin du 17e et au début du 18e siècle,” Parole de l’Orient 16 (1990–91): 271–77; Antoine Moukarzel,
“Butrus al-Tulawi et son traité sur la logique,” Parole de l’Orient 27 (2002): 263–80; Maroun Aouad
and Hamidé Fadlallah, “Philosophes chrétiens de langue arabe au XVIIe-XVIIIe siècles en Syrie et au
Liban,” Parole de l’Orient 34 (2009): 443–68; Bernard Heyberger, “Écrire l’histoire des chrétiens dans
les villes de Syrie avant les réformes ottomanes,” Syria and Bilad al-Sham under Ottoman Rule, ed.
Peter Sluglett with Stefan Weber (Leiden: Brill, 2010), 443–54.

10. See Albert Hourani, “The Changing Face of the Fertile Crescent in the XVIIIth Century,” Studia
Islamica 8 (1957): 89–122.
 Matar / Christians in the Eighteenth-Century Ottoman Mashriq 191

11. It is unclear why H. L. Murre-Van Den Berg claimed that “for the most part the Church of the
East displayed no great interest in relations with their Muslim neighbors, at least not on the intellec-
tual level” in “Church of the East in the Sixteenth to the Eighteenth Century,” in Redefining Christian
Identity, ed. J. J. Van Gingel, H. L. Murre-Van Den Berg, and T. M. Van Lint (Leuven: Peeters, 2005),
319. Even so, it is interesting to note what Paul Rycaut, the English consul in Izmir, wrote in 1668
about the strange mix of Christianity and Islam among soldiers stationed at the Ottomans’ western
frontiers of Hungary and Bosnia: they were “reading the Gospel in the Sclavonian tongue” at the same
time that they were “curious to learn the Mysteries of the Alchoran, and the Law of Arabick tongue.”
More confusedly, he continued, the Bosnians believed “yet that Mahomet was the Holy Ghost promised
by Christ” while practicing circumcision, abhorring images, and refusing the sign of the Cross. Paul
Rycaut, The Present State of the Ottoman Empire (London, 1668), 131.

12. Suraiya Faroqhi, “Part II: Crisis and Change, 1590–1699,” in An Economic and Social History,
603.

13. As per Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Can the Subaltern speak?,” in Marxism and the Interpreta-
tion of Culture, ed. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (London: Macmillan, 1998), although my
approach does not rely on Marxist theory.

14. The phrase is Sidney H. Griffith’s: “Apologetics and Historiography in the Annals of Eutychius
of Alexandria: Christian Self-definition in the World of Islam,” in Studies on the Christian Arabic
Heritage, ed. Rifaat Ebied and Herman Teule (Leaven: Peeters, 2004), 65–91.

15. For a brief biography of al-Zayānī, see G. Salmon, “Un voyageur marocain a la fin du XVIII
siècle,” Archives Maorcaines 2 (1905): 330–49; see also Evariste Lévi-Provençal, Les historiens des
Chorfa (Paris: Larose, 1922), 142 ff.

16. For some studies of Arabic-speaking Christians, see Robert Haddad, Syrian Christians in Muslim
Society: An Interpretation (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1970); Joseph Nasrallah, Historie du move-
ment littéraire dans l’église Melchite du Ve au XXe siècle (Louvain: Peeters, 1979); Charles A Frazee,
Catholics and Sultans: The Church and the Ottoman Empire, 1453–1923 (London and New York:
Cambridge Univ. Press, 1983); Robert Schick, The Christian Communities of Palestine from Byzantine
to Islamic Rule (Princeton, New Jersey, 1995); Oded Peri, Christianity under Islam in Jerusalem (Leiden:
Brill, 2001); Souad Abou el-Rousse Slim, The Greek Orthodox Waqf in Lebanon during the Ottoman
Period (Würzburg: Ergon Vertag, 2007). See also further references below.

17. See Magdi Guirguis and Nelly Van Doorn-Harder, The Emergence of the Modern Coptic Papacy:
The Egyptian Chruch and Its Leadership from the Ottoman Period to the Present (Cairo: American
Univ. of Cairo, 2011), especially the first part, “The Coptic Papacy under Ottoman Rule (1517–1798).”
See also Daniel Crecelius, “The Attempt by the Greek Catholics to Control Egypt’s Trade with Europe
in the Second Half of the Eighteenth Century,” in La vie sociale dans les provinces arabes à l’époque
ottomane, ed. Abdeljelil Temimi , 3 vols. (Zaghouan: Publications du Centre d’Etudes et de Recherches,
1988), 3:121–32.

18. Miguel de Epalza, ed. and trans., Fray Anselm Turmeda (‘Abdallāh al-Turȳumān) y su polémica
islamo-cristiana, 2nd ed. (Madrid: Heperión, 1994).

19. Although none seemed to know who he was when I inquired in 2003.

20. Abū al-Qāsim ibn Ahmad

. Zayānī, al-Tarjumāna al-kubrá fī akhbār al-ma‘mūr barran wa-
bahran,
. ed. ‘Abd al-Karīm al-Filālī (Rabat: Wizarat al-anbā’, 1967), 365 ff, and 498 ff.

21. Ibid. , 498–523.

22. Ibid., 524–25.

23. See the translation of this account in my Europe through Arab Eyes, 1578–1727 (New York:
Columbia Univ. Press, 2011), 241–42.

24. Abū al-Qāsim ibn Ahmad

. Zayānī, al-Tarjumāna, 525–26.

25. Bibliothèque nationale de France MS Arabe 312, ff.17v–19r. For other copies of this manuscript
see entry 682 in “Catalogue raisonné des manuscrits de la Bibliothèque Orientale. VI. Controverses – P.
L. Cheikho, S. J.,” in Mélanges de l’Université Saint-Joseph, XIV (1929): 41–197. See also the reference
to the explanation of the Orthodox faith against the accusation that Christians believe in three gods,
192 Eighteenth-Century Studies Vol. 47, No. 2

. t. al-‘Arabiya fī Maktabat Dayr Sayidat al-Balamand (El-Koura, Lebanon: Balamand Univ.,

Al-Makhtūta
1994),114, from a text of 1616.

26. As John V. Tolan notes, this use of “the vocabulary of the Koran” by Christian writers goes back
as far as Theodore Abu Qurrah (d. c. 820), Saracens: Islam in the Medieval European Imagination
(New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 2002), 58–59.

27. See the copy of the Ujrūmiyya [verse account], which was to serve in tashīl ‘ilm al- nahū
. [facilitate
the study of grammar], copied by the monk Athanasius Yārid in 1791: National Library of Malta, MS
1495.

28. “Jidāl ma bayna Shams al-Dīn al-Bakrī wa-l-sayyid al-mu.trān Butrus

. al-Ghustawi,”
. Univ. of St.
Joseph, Beirut, Lebanon, MS 682, accessed at Univ. of Jordan, Center for the Study of Bilad al-Sham,
Reel 740, 2.

29. There is no specification that the interlocutor was a Shi‘ite, although the name clearly indicates
that. A small Shi‘ite community continues in that (Christian) region of Lebanon today. See Rabāh. Abi
H. aydar, “Sababiyyat al-hijra al-islamiyya min jabal Lubnān bi-ittijāh wilayat al-Shām fi al-qarn 19,” in
Al-H. ayā al-istima ‘iyya fial-wilāyāt al-‘Arabiyya, ed. Abdeljelil Temimi (Zaghouan: Markaz al-Dirāsāt
. . ., 1988), 43–57, esp. 50ff. and the reference to the H. amādeh tribes.

30. “I‘tiradāt
. ‘ala al-nusrāniya”
. Bibliothèque Orientale, St. Joseph Univ., MS 691, accessed at Univ.
of Jordan, Center for the Study of Bilad al-Sham, Reel 749, 1–11.

31. Shaykh ‘Abd al Rahīm

. Al-Shāmī, “Objections contre le Christianisme” (1822): Dayr al-Kreim,
Dar‘ūn, Harissa,
. Lebanon, 1970, accessed at Univ. of Jordan, Center for the Study of Bilad al-Sham,
Reel 781, 28–30.

32. “Risalat al-mu.trān Farhat

. raddan ‘ala al-Kawtharī,” Bibliothèque Orientale, St. Joseph Univ.,
MS 685, accessed at Univ. of Jordan, Center for the Study of Bilad al-Sham, Reel 740, 9.

33. Ibid., 12.

34. Ibid., 24–25. The verse is from Qur’ān 19:15.

35. Thomas Philipp, Acre: The Rise and Fall of a Palestinian City, 1730–1831 (New York: Columbia
Univ. Press, 2001), 23.

36. Būlus Qara’li, ‘Awdat al-Nasarā

. ila jurūd Kisirwan (Beirut: Jarrus Press, 1983?).

37. A useful source of information about Muslim-Christian relations in Aleppo appears in the mem-
oirs of the Chevalier Laurent d’Arvieux (1635–1702): see Mary Hossain, “Relations entre chretiens et
musulmans a Alep a la fin du XVIIe siècle [sic],” in Chretiens et Muslumans a l’Epoque de la Renais-
sance, ed. Abdeljelil Temimi (Zaghouan, 1997), 155–64; Jean-Claude David, “L’espace des chrétiens
à Alep: segregation et mixité, strategies communautaires (1750–1850),” Revue du Monde Musulman
et de la Méditerranée 55–56 (1990): 152–70.

38. Tarīkh al-Shām in Wathā’iq tārikhiyya lil-kursī al-malakī al-antākī, ed. Costan
. tine
. al-Bāsha
(Harīsa,
. Lebanon, 1930), 17, 18.

39. Ibid., 18.

40. Ibid., 23, 29–30.

41. Jocelyne Dakhlia, “Ligne de fuite. Impostures et reconstructions indentitaires en Méditerranée à

l’epoque moderne,” in Gens de passage en Méditerranée de l’Antiquité à lépoque modern, ed. Claudia
Moatti and Wolfgang Kaiser (Paris: Maisonneuve & Larose-MMSH (collection l’Atelier méditerranéen,
2007), 427–57, esp. 443.

42. When his contemporary Ibn ‘Uthman al-Miknāsī met a Maronite Lebanese, he was surprised to
know that the man who spoke Arabic with him was a Christian: Al-Iksīr fī iftikāk al-asīr, ed. Muhammad
.
. al-‘ilmī, (1965), 95. The meeting with the “Nusrānī
al-Fāsī (Rabat: al-Markiz al-jāmi ‘iyy li-lbahth . from
the Mashriq” [the Christian from the East] took place in 1780.

43. For the growth of Arab cities under the Ottomans, see A. Raymond, The Great Arab Cities in
the 16th–18th Centuries: An Introduction (New York: New York Univ. Press, 1984); A Abdel Nour,
Introduction a l’histoire urbaine de la Syrie ottomane, XVIe-XVIIIe (Beirut: Université libanaise, 1982).
 Matar / Christians in the Eighteenth-Century Ottoman Mashriq 193

44. Giovanni Ricci, “Crypto-identities: Disguised Turks, Christians and Jews,” in Finding Europe:
Discourses on Margins, Communities, Images, ed. Anthony Molho, Diogo Ramada Curto and Niki
Koniordos (New York: Berghahn, 2007), 40–54.

45. Abd al Hadi Ben Mansour, “Maghreb-péninsule Ibérique aux XVIe-XVIIe siècles,” Maroc-Europe
(Rabat, 1997–98), 65–95, esp. 89.

46. There are very interesting accounts of conversion and reconversion in some of the stories of
the Arabian Nights. Although the imaginaire of the Nights is medieval, some of the stories are clearly
early modern since the first printed Arabic text of the Nights appeared in the eighteenth century. See
my discussion of Christian-Muslim conversions in “Christians in the ArabianNights,” in ‘The Arabian
Nights’ in Historical Context: Between East and West, ed. SareeMakdisi and Felicity Nussbaum (Ox-
ford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2008): 131–53. For the only Arabic account of a Muslim/Druze conversion
to Christianity, see my discussion in “Muslim Conversion to Christianity in the Early Modern Period:
Arabic Texts, European Contexts,” forthcoming in Mediterranean Identities.

47. See Marie-Carmen Smyrnelis, “Identités inventé dans l’Empire ottoman au XVIIIe siècle,” in
Gens de passage en Méditerranée de l’Antiquité à l’époque modern, 459–70.

48. Mikha’īl Sabbāgh,

. Tārīkh al-Shaykh Dhāhir al-‘Omar al-Zaydānī, ed. Costan . tīn
. al-Bāshā
(Harī
. sa,
. Lebanon, 1936). See also Hayat el-Eid Bualuan, “Abbud al-Sabbag and his biography of Daher
al-Umar,” Parole de l’Orient 24 (1999): 339–56.

49. ‘Issa Iskander al-Ma‘lūf, Dawānī al-qutūf fī tarīkh banī al-Ma‘lūf (B‘abda, Lebanon, 1907–8),
˙
277.

50. See Bernard Heyberger, “Frontiérs confessionelles et conversions chez les chréiens orientaux
(XVIIe– XVIIIe siècles),” in Conversions islamiques: Identités religeuses en Islam méditerranén, ed.
Mercedes García-Arenal (Paris: Maisonneuve et Larose, 2001), 245–58, esp. 248–49. It is interesting
that the first Arabic text printed in Italy in 1585 consisted of selections from the geography of al-Sālihī
.
(fl. 1151), which included a description of an island with a church “that has a large dome across of
which there is a mosque. . . . The inhabitants of the church offer hospitality to all the Muslim visitors
of the mosque,” Kitāb al-bustān fi ‘ajā’ib al-ard. wa-l-buldān (Rome, 1585), 90b.

51. J. Leroy, Moines et monastéres du Proche-orient (Paris: Horizons de France, 1958), 159, cited
in From the hand of your servant, catalogue of an exhibition at the Ikonen Museum, Frankfurt am
Main (2004), 91.

52 Sister Agnes-Mariam de la Croix maintains that the appearance of a scimitar in the hand of St.
George in an icon of 1705 and the choice of colors, particularly the use of black near the pastel tones
in the icon of St. James, points to the Arab-Christian artistic patrimony that included Islamic motifs:
Les Exposition de l’Oeil, Icônes arabes, art chrétien du Levant , Catalogue of an Exhibition at l’Institut
du Monde Arabe (6 May to 17 August 2003), 23.

53. The reproduction is from Les Exposition de l’Oeil, Icônes arabes, art chrétien du Levant ,
Catalogue of an Exhibition at l’Institut du Monde Arabe (6 May to 17 August 2003).

54. Ruth Barnes, “Relatives in Faith,” in Pilgrimage: the Sacred Journey, ed. Ruth Barnes and Crispin
Barnfoot (Oxford: Ashmolean Museum, 2006), 14–38, esp. 31. See also Mahmoud Zibawi, Eastern
Christian Worlds, ed. Nancy McDarby, trans. Madeline Beaumont (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press,
1995), 95–97.

55. Renzo Ravagnan and Marta Boscolo, “The Greek Orthodox Church of the Annunciation in
Nazareth: New Observations iconographic,” paper presented at “The 2nd International Conference
on Nazareth: Archeology, History, and Cultural Heritage, Nazareth,” 2–5 July 2012. I am grateful to
Ms. Boscolo for her comments during the visit to the church.

56. Salk al-durar, 4 vols. (Baghdad: Maktabat al-muthannā, c.1966).

57. Bilād al-Shām wa Misr . min al-fath. al-‘Uthmani ila hamlet

. Nabulyon Bonābart (1516–1798),
2nd ed. (Damascus: n.p., 1968).

58. Hawādith
. Dimashq al-yawmiyya, AH 1154–1175, ed. Ahmad
. ‘Izzat ‘Abd al-Karīm (Cairo:
Matbū‘āt
. lajnat al-bayān al-‘arabī, 1959).
194 Eighteenth-Century Studies Vol. 47, No. 2

59. Rūfāīl Karāmah, Hawādith

. Lubnān wa Sūriyya, ed. Basīlyus Qattān (Dawrā, Lebanon: Jarrūs
Press, 1983).

60. Noufan Raja al-Sawariyah, “Jerusalem under Ottoman rule in the period 1112–1123 A.H. /
A.D. 1700–1711,” Mu’tah: Humanities and Social Sciences Series 14:8 (1999):115–143.

61. In an essay on “Dhimma in Early Islam,” C.E. Bosworth observed, “Although protected by the
contract of dhimma, the dhimmis were never anything but second-class citizens in the Islamic and social
system, tolerated in large measure because they had special skills such as those of physicians, secretar-
ies, financial experts, etc., or because they fulfilled functions which were necessary but obnoxious to
Muslims.” Christians and Jews in the Ottoman Empire, ed. Benjamin Braude and Bernard Lewis, 2
vols. (New York and London: Holmes & Meier Publishers, Inc., 1982), 1:37–51, esp. 49. The same
view was expressed by Gilles Veinstein in regard to “la tolérance ottomane:” Gilles Veinstein, “Retour
sur la question de la tolérance ottomane au XVIe siècle,” in Chrétiens et musulmans à la Renaissance,
ed. Barotlomé Bennassar and Robert Sauzet (Paris: H. Champion, 1998):415–26. A succinct exposition
of the status of the dhimmis appears in al-Mawardī, al-Ahkām. al-Sultāniyya (Cairo: Dar al-Fikr, 1983),
126.

62. David E. Stannard, American Holocaust: The Conquest of the New World (Oxford: Oxford
Univ. Press, 1992).

63. See the edition of his poems, Dīwān, ed. Sa‘īd al-Shartūnī (Beirut: al-Matba‘a
. al-Kathūlīkiyya
l-il-ābā’ al-Yasū‘iyyīn, 1894).

64. Muhammad ibn ‘Uthmān al-Miknāsī, Ihrāz . al-ma ‘ālī wa-l-raqīb fī hajj
. bayt Allah al-harām
. wa
ziyārat al-Quds al-Sharīf wa-l-Khalīl wa-l-tabarruk bi-qabr al-habīb
. (1785–1788), ed. Mu hammad
.
Bukabbūt (Beirut: al-Mu’assasa al-‘arabiyya l-il dirāsāt wa-l-nashr, 2003), 71.

65. Abdeljelil Temimi, “L’impact des raciness chretiennes de quelques savant muslumans et hauts
responsables politiques ottomans,” in Chrétiens et musulmans à la Renaissance, 511–18, esp. 517.

66. Alastair Hamilton, “The English Interest in the Arabic-Speaking Christians,” in The ‘Arabick’
Interest of the Natural Philosophers in Seventeenth-Century England, ed. G. A. Russell (Leiden: Brill,
1994), 30–53, esp. 46. For an interesting essay within the public debate on this issue, see Shams al-Dīn
al-Kīlanī, “Al-Islamiyyūn wa fikrat al-tasāmuh,”
. Al-Hayat, 25 Dec. 2009 (accessed online 17 Jan. 2010).