Introduction

Around the year 775, a monk known as Joshua the Stylite completed a four-part history of the world in Syriac. The text, surviving in a unique manuscript, is known to scholars today as the Chronicle of Zuqnīn. The fourth and final section of the Chronicle details the social and economic hardships facing Christians in the Jazīra (northern Mesopotamia) in the aftermath of the 'Abbasid revolution (ca. 750–775). It was a time of extreme suffering, when rapacious officials of the new regime taxed, intimidated, and beat the Christian population into submission. Through Joshua's rich descriptions of everyday life, we can witness the kinds of indignities that greased the way for large-scale conversions to Islam in the years to come.

Two-thirds of the way through Part IV, Joshua describes the punishments inflicted on individuals who disobeyed the ‘Abbasids’. Officials would strike them with rods and planks, crushing their heads, hands, and flanks. At other times, they would rip away their arms and breasts, forcing them to march naked into the snow. Joshua also mentions a device called the ‘walnut’, which Muslim officials would place over the eyes of their victims, causing them to nearly pop out of their sockets.

Joshua's litany of tortures calls to mind the theatrical punishments inflicted on the martyrs of early Christian times. His allusion was far from accidental.