Mosul's Hinterland: Village and Monastery in Early Islamic Iraq

Abstract

This dissertation offers a social history of monasteries and villages in the hinterland of Mosul during the early Islamic period. Modern historians of the medieval Islamic world often mention the large Christian populations that flourished in the rural areas of the caliphate, but rarely include close analysis of these communities. Syriac monastic sources, however, take readers deep into rural landscapes of the ʿAbbāsid Empire, which remained little known to Muslim geographers. Using John Bar Kaldoun’s Life of Rabban Joseph Busnaya, a tenth-century narrative about the rise and fall of the East Syrian monastery of Beit Ṣayyare in the highlands of northern Iraq, this work traces the interactions between urban center and hinterlands and the tangled connections between monasteries, local villages, and Kurdish tribes. Its anecdotes about the war between the Ḥamdanid and Buyid dynasties also give a glimpse of Islamic history from below and the consequences that followed the seismic political shifts that wracked the middle ʿAbbāsid era.