The sectarian Armenians

A review of a book titled "The Fatimid Armenians" 

This is an interesting but bewildering overview of “sectarian Armenians”, written by a Lebanese professor. Judging by her name, she is Armenian herself. Judging by her other published works, Dadoyan is an expert on medieval Armenian philosophy. In this book, she concentrates on various ethnically Armenian “heretical” movements within Christianity and Islam during Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages. In passing, she also mentions Frederick Cornwallis Conybeare's sensational manuscript find of a 18th century heretical scripture, “The Keys of Truth”, which Conybeare believed reflected age-old Christian heresies somehow surviving in Armenia until the modern day, a claim to which Dadoyan is skeptical. Unfortunately, she doesn't elaborate on this point (I recently reviewed Conybeare's book on Armenia).

The most well known heretical or sectarian movement to emerge in Armenia were the Paulicians, who waged frequent wars against the Byzantine Empire. The near-genocidal repression with which the Paulicians were met by the Byzantine state made them pro-Muslim. The Paulicians may have inspired both Bosnian Bogomilism and Provencal Catharism, partly because of the fact that the Byzantine emperors forcibly exiled entire Paulician communities to the Balkans or Sicily (from which their ideas spread to Italy and presumably southern France). There were sectarians in Armenia already before the Paulicians. The status of Armenia as a borderland between the Roman and Persian empires probably made it a tempting place of refuge for Christian groups deemed heretical by the mainstream Church in the Roman Empire. Both Valentinus and Tatian had adherents in Armenia and adjacent regions. Later, Nestorians and the inevitable Messalians established themselves there. In contrast to these foreign imports, the Paulicians seem to have been an indigenous Armenian movement. Other examples of specifically Armenian sectarians include the Mezghneans, the “Borborits” and the Tonrakians.

The Armenian sectarians did have some features in common (which prompted Conybeare to see them all as essentially the same movement). There was an emphasis on ascetic living, an adoptionist Christology, and a radical rejection of the sacraments, holy images and the church hierarchy. Crosses were seen as “pagan”. There was also a connection to social protest, sometimes expressed in the form of communal living or armed attacks on the local aristocracy. Interestingly, there were also aristocrats who supported the sectarians. Dadoyan believes that the dream of many sectarians was to establish an independent state in Armenia or Syria. Despite their attacks on “paganism” within the official Christian churches, the sectarians were themselves inspired by “pagans”, or so their detractors claim. Accusations of sun worship were common, a charge also leveled against the Persian Zoroastrians. Naturally, the sectarians were also accused of sexual transgressions, perhaps because their women enjoyed more freedom than accepted by the Byzantines.

Another salient feature of Armenian sectarians were their pro-Muslim sympathies (and before Islam, pro-Persian ditto). On one level, the pro-Muslim sympathies were due to the religiously intolerant policy of the Byzantine Empire, with its one and only Orthodox Church. On another level, there are obvious similarities between Armenian sectarianism and Islam: Jesus is seen as a human chosen by God rather than as God himself, all image-worship is rejected, and the cross is attacked (Muslims deny the crucifixion and therefore consider crosses blasphemous). The author believes that the Paulicians influenced Islam and gave rise to various Shia sub-sects such as the Ahl-e Haqq, the Yazidis and the Qizilbash. (The origins of the “devil-worshipping” Yazidis is a hotly debated question. Here, they are said to have originally been an Armenian Shia sect. Today, Yazidis are Kurds and not regarded as Muslims at all.)

The second half of the book, which is even more bewildering than the first, deals with the Fatimid dynasty in 11th and 12th century Egypt, its “Byzantine” (pun intended!) internal power struggles, and the Armenian component of the same. The Fatimids were Ismailites, a sectarian Shiite movement. There were both Orthodox and sectarian Armenians in Fatimid Egypt, due in part to the tolerant attitude of the Ismailites towards Christians, Jews and other Shiites (since the Ismailites, as a minority group, needed all support they could muster against the Sunni Muslim majority of Egypt). It seems that some of the Fatimid viziers were sectarian Armenians from Syria who had embraced various forms of Islam, including the Alawite sub-sect. The author has a positive view of several Armenian viziers, arguing that they saved Egypt and the Fatimid dynasty from destruction, and carried out a policy of easing the tax burdens on the farmers, thereby increasing production. However, she admits that the most efficient viziers were also highly authoritarian and repressive, and anything but ascetic! Badr al-Jamali, Al-Afdal Shahanshah, Kutayfat, Yanis al-Rumi al-Armani and Talai are the viziers discussed in the book. Despite all the problems and internecine bloodletting besetting the Fatimid dynasty at the end of its reign, the author clearly prefers them to Saladin, who overthrew the Fatimids, purged Egypt of Shia influence and incorporated Egypt into his Sunni sultanate. (In the West, Saladin is the Muslim good guy, while few people even heard of the Fatimids.)

While it's difficult to see any similarity between the persecuted Paulicians and the Armenian viziers of the Fatimid mini-empire, the author believes that somehow there nevertheless is a kind of continuity. As already mentioned, Paulicianism may have influenced dissident Muslims and hence give rise to “heresies” on both sides of the Christian-Muslim divide. The Armenian viziers who identified with Shia Islam in Fatimid Egypt could therefore be seen as another example of the old dream of a sectarian-Armenian homeland. I'm not sure if this thesis makes any sense, or whether the author is herself looking for an alternative homeland for non-Orthodox Armenians, perhaps projecting this onto medieval movements which were really rather different from each other and from modern secular nationalism?

My main problem with “The Fatimid Armenians” is that the book contains too little synthesis of the material, and too much name-dropping. I'm pretty patient, since I happen to be interested in both Paulicians and Ismailites, but this is probably not for the general reader. The Fatimid power struggles in particular are so complex, they would probably make George R R Martin blush! But then, this is the real world, not some fantasy novel…