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medieval worlds • no. 17 • 2022
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Verlag der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften Austrian Academy of Sciences Press
A-1011 Wien, Dr. Ignaz Seipel-Platz 2
Tel. +43-1-515 81/DW 3420, Fax +43-1-515 81/DW 3400 https://verlag.oeaw.ac.at, e-mail: verlag@oeaw.ac.at |
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DATUM, UNTERSCHRIFT / DATE, SIGNATURE
BANK AUSTRIA CREDITANSTALT, WIEN (IBAN AT04 1100 0006 2280 0100, BIC BKAUATWW), DEUTSCHE BANK MÜNCHEN (IBAN DE16 7007 0024 0238 8270 00, BIC DEUTDEDBMUC)
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medieval worlds • no. 17 • 2022, pp. 120-144, 2022/11/30
As Christians and Muslims encountered each other in the Middle East from the beginning of Islam in the 7th century CE onward, theology was not only a field of setting boundaries to distinguish one’s own community from the other but also an area of mutual influence between the communities. This article analyzes two letters of the East Syriac patriarch Timothy I (d. 823), both of which have an apologetic agenda but at the same time demonstrate Timothy’s familiarity with the Muslim intellectual milieu of his day. To defend the Christian doctrine of the Trinity against Muslim objections, Timothy made reference to the Islamic doctrine of divine attributes. He used relational attributes which consist of a subject, an act, and an object to show that there must be a certain plurality as well as relationships between the subjects, acts, and objects of the divine attributes. These relationships serve Timothy as a proof for the Christian doctrine of the Trinity. In this article, Timothy’s arguments and the teachings he ascribed to his Muslim counterparts are compared with what modern scholars have reconstructed about the teachings of Muslim thinkers from Timothy’s period; so far, such comparisons have been done for Christian Arabic writings more commonly than for Syriac ones. The result of this comparison shows that the positions of Timothy’s Muslim counterparts approximate very closely the ideas of the Muʿtazilite Abū l-Hudhayl al-ʿAllāf. Thus, based on their content, it is possible to connect Timothy’s letters to the teachings of a concrete person among Muslim intellectuals of the period or to circles where Abū l-Hudhayl al-ʿAllāf seems to have been somehow involved.
Keywords: eighth century; ninth century; theology; Christianity; Islam; Christian-Muslim relations; Middle East; Church of the East; Patriarch Timothy I; Muʿtazila; Abū l-Hudhayl al-ʿAllāf