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…
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