Note 172 — Chapter III · THE SPREAD OF ISLAM AMONG THE CHRISTIAN NATIONS OF WESTERN ASIA.

In the early part of the same century, Theodore, the Nestorian Bishop of Beth Garmai, became a Muslim, and there is no mention of any force or compulsion by the ecclesiastical historian172 who records the fact, as there undoubtedly would have been, had such existed. Some years later (between A.D. 962 and 979), Philoxenos, a Jacobite Bishop of Ād͟harbayjān, also became a Muslim,173 and in the following century, in 1016, Ignatius,174 the Jacobite Metropolitan of Takrīt, who had held this office for twenty-five years, set out for Bag͟hdād and embraced Islam in the presence of the caliph al-Qādir, taking the name of Abū Muslim.175 It would be exceedingly interesting if an Apologia pro Vita Sua had survived to reveal to us the religious development that took place in the mind of either of these converts. The Christian chronicler hints at immorality in the last three cases, but such an accusation uncorroborated by any further evidence is open to suspicion,176 much as it would be if brought forward by a Roman Catholic when recording the conversion of a priest of his own communion to the Protestant faith. It is doubtless owing to their exalted position in the Church that the conversion of these prominent ecclesiastics of two hostile Christian sects has been handed down to us, while that of more obscure individuals has not been recorded. As Barhebræus brings his ecclesiastical chronicle nearer to his own time, he gives fuller details of the career of such converts, e.g. in recording the public lapse of some of the Jacobite bishops, in the middle of the twelfth century he makes particular mention of Aaron, bishop of a town in K͟hurāsān, as having become a Muhammadan after having been convicted of some moral fault; repenting of this change, he wished to regain his episcopal status, and when this was refused him, went to Constantinople and abjured the Monophysite doctrines of the Jacobite Church; then apparently dissatisfied with the reception he received in Constantinople, he returned to the Jacobite Patriarch, but a second time went over to Islam “without any reason”; then repenting again, he finally ended his days among the Maronites of Mount Lebanon.177 A contemporary of Barhebræus, in the middle of the thirteenth century—Daniel, Bishop of Khabur—who is said to have been proficient in secular learning, sought to be appointed to the diocese of Aleppo, but disappointed in this ambition, he abandoned the Christian faith and to the grief and shame of all Christian people “became a Muslim; but God (praise be to His grace!) soon consoled his afflicted people and took away the shame from the redeemed, the redeemed of the Lord; for a few months later that unhappy wretch died miserably in a caravanserai; his name perished, he was taken away out of our midst, and no man knoweth his abiding place.”178