Christian Armed Violence under the Early Abbasids: Syriac Perspectives

Abstract This article argues that Syriac sources were mostly written from the perspective of the higher clergy who often owed their appointment to senior Muslim governors or caliphs. Their accounts were therefore framed to discourage and downplay violence by Christians. But occasionally we find signs of Christian populations living in difficult terrain such as highlands or marshland who did deploy armed rebellion as a negotiating tool against the Abbasid state. In some cases, the response of the caliph and his governors was not to crush these rebels, but to co-opt them as poachers turned gamekeepers.