Recommended listening: Syrian Orthodox Chant
Story
A gentle breeze drifted across the vineyards. It carried the coolness of the river, the scent of fresh vines, and the sounds of laughter and conversation as it meandered across the grounds of the monastery. Outside the monastery's walls, merchants from all over northern Iraq had set up their tents and stalls, selling their wares to all of the festival-goers. Inside the monastery, nuns dressed in black habits served wine to esteemed guests, Muslim men of the literary elite who came for an evening of music and wine. In the Christian calendar, today was the First Sunday of Lent, known as Kothine Sunday. It commemorated the Wedding of Cana when Jesus performed his first miracle by turning water into wine. The monastery of Dayr al-Khuwāt, or the Monastery of the Sisters, held a festival every year to celebrate this feast, and it drew attendees from all over the local area. Surrounded by gardens and vineyards on the banks of the Tigris, Dayr al-Khuwāt was an idyllic rural retreat for the people of Ukbara, a small city north of Baghdad. Christians and Muslims alike came to enjoy the monastery's peaceful ambience and attractive setting. During its patronal festival, a market swelled outside its gates, and Muslims sampled the monastery's famous wine while watching processions of the Christian faithful sing hymns and prayers.
Dayr al-Khuwāt was one of two nunneries north of Ukbara. While the countryside of Iraq, Syria and Palestine was full of hundreds of monasteries, very few of these were communities of women. Christianity was ancient here, and the Church's liturgy was conducted in Syriac, a language close to the Aramaic that Jesus spoke. The Syriac Church was split into different denominations stemming from theological controversies in the early centuries of Christianity. The Muslim conquest brought with it further conflict as many local leaders converted to the new religion of the Arabs. Throughout all of these disruptions and changes, however, the role of monasteries in the countryside remained relatively stable, as repositories of ancient books, guardians of sacred pilgrimage sites, agricultural powerhouses, and the main producers of wine.
In the early days of Islam, monks were respected as wise ascetics, even if they were thought to be misguided by failing to take up Islam over Christianity. While many elites converted with the advent of Islamic rule, the rural population remained predominantly Christian for centuries. By the year 1000, about half of the people in the Abbasid Empire's vast territories were still Christian. These included wealthy rural elites as well as Christian scribes working in the urban courts, who continued to patronize monasteries with donations of land even as the pressure to convert to Islam grew slowly greater. And when people did convert, many of them continued to participate in the rituals of the Christian calendar, including the annual festivals that monasteries hosted on their patronal feast days. It was what their families had always done, and what many of their relatives still did - the theological complications were probably of little consequence to them.
Among elite Muslims, particularly educated men of leisure, a tradition developed of depicting monasteries as places of relaxation and frivolity. Following in the tradition of ancient Persian rulers who held court at major monasteries, caliphs and other Muslim leaders would visit monasteries while travelling. Monastic tradition in turn emphasized the importance of hospitality for travellers regardless of their religious affiliation. When these powerful Muslim men came to a monastery, whether on an official visit or as a rest stop on their travels, they often brought with them a full court of poets, attendants, and musicians, particularly enslaved singing girls known as qiyān. Flouting Quranic prescriptions against wine, they would indulge in the monastery's finest food and drink, making merry until they were ready to move on to the next stage of their journey. Because the monastery was removed from the world of urban politics and court intrigues, men of the court considered it a refuge where the normal rules of society could be abandoned. And it wasn't just the drink that they indulged in - the poetry about monasteries is full of sexual desire for the beautiful young Christians pouring the wine. References abound to love affairs between Muslim poets and beautiful monks. In fact, monasteries became so associated with homosexuality in medieval Arabic literature that just mentioning a monk in his monastery could be an allusion to gay sex.
But what of the nuns, in those rare monastic communities made up of women instead of men? Though rarely mentioned, they too were seen as sexually available to the Muslim libertines who waxed lyrical about the pleasures of the monastery. The 10th century poet Al-Nājim Abū 'Uthmān wrote this about Dayr al-Khuwāt:
Ah, my heart, for love!
Ah, for bejeweled beauties!
Girls like slender boughs,
faces like the light of the morn.
People of the Sisters' Convent,
by the Lord God!
A lover's met his death-
what wrong has he done?
While it's possible this poem was written more about the Christian women who attended the festival than the nuns themselves, poems about other nunneries make it clear how they were viewed in the same sexual light as the male monasteries:
She went out on the day of her feast,
dressed as a nun,
and captivated with her haughty walk
everyone coming and going.
For my misery I saw her
on the feast of the Tha'ālib monastery in Baghdad,
swaying among women,
a buxom among buxom girls,
in whose midst she was like the full moon
surrounded by stars.
Dayr al-Khuwāt was also associated with a salacious rumour, popular in Muslim literature about Christians. The 10th century writer al-Shābushtī, whose Book of Monasteries catalogued the monastic sights of the Abbasid and Fatimid empires, wrote that the nuns at Dayr al-Khuwāt hosted an orgiastic Christian festival known as the Night of Māshūsh. It was said to be a night when men and women mixed freely, grabbing each other in the dark and fornicating with whoever was at hand until daybreak. Modern scholars have determined that there was no such thing as the Night of Māshūsh. Rather than a real Christian celebration, it was a Muslim myth that circulated for centuries. It fit well with rumours that nuns offered themselves up to monks and priests, undermining their claims to virginity. As one poet exclaimed about the other nunnery north of Ukbara, "It's the Virgins' Monastery - but they're nothing but hussies."
While tantalizing for the information it offers about nuns hosting interfaith festivals and rich with evocative details, The Book of Monasteries is therefore not always a reliable source. We can believe al-Shābushtī when he says that Dayr al-Khuwāt was known for its wine, and that Christians and Muslims gathered together there on Kothine Sunday. We can even be fairly sure that at least some of the male homosexual romances described in the text happened, though others were probably literary inventions. But the sexualization of Christian men and women that we find in wine-poetry about the monasteries, gathered together in collections like al-Shābushtī's, is as much a reflection of the colonial Muslim imagination as it is of Christian realities. During the 10th century, the image of monasteries as houses of ancient wisdom was fading, and Muslim leaders were increasingly building mosques to compete with the monasteries at many pilgrimage sites across the Middle East. Secularizing and sexualizing the monastics there served to undermine Christian claims to sanctity, especially since celibacy had long been valued by the Syriacs as a crucial part of their own asceticism. An illustrative example of how colonial the gaze in these poems was is that the zunnar, a colourful belt which Muslim law required Christians to wear to mark them visibly as non-Muslim, was heavily sexualized by the authors of monastic poetry when writing about monks, nuns, and Christian women attending the festivals. Nothing of the nuns' own perspectives survives in these accounts, leaving us in the dark about how they felt about Muslim visitors to the monasteries looking upon them with desire.
Unfortunately, Christian sources from the Syriac perspective offer very little information about nuns either. Only one monastic rule for women survives, in the damaged pages of a single manuscript. Dating to the late 7th or early 8th century, The Rule for the Nuns sets out the expectations about how nuns should behave. Many of these rules reveal concerns about their interactions with men. They are forbidden to leave the monastery without permission from their superior unless they go with another sister, or if the distance is less than a mile. They are not to attend funerals, banquets, restaurants or taverns, all events that would put them in the public eye. They cannot eat alone with men who aren't related to them without the permission of the abbess, and they cannot allow a man into the inner monastery unless he is an elderly priest who has come to offer the Eucharist. When they go into town, they must go with another sister - if they end up in town without a female companion, perhaps on essential monastery business, they cannot speak with monks or laymen on the street beyond saying hello. They cannot visit male hermits to offer them alms, but must operate through a designated elderly nun who has been specially approved to do so on their behalf. And finally, under no circumstances are they allowed into a male monastery.
These are the ideals set out for a single, unknown community. In reality, these ideals cannot always have been met. Syriac monastics were integrated with the rural communities, employing people from villages and towns in their hinterland to assist in the harvest of grapes, olives, and dates. The women came from local elite Christian families, as it took money to buy a cell in a monastery. Syriac monastics took no vows of poverty, so nuns who retained money and possessions after joining were allowed to make loans as long as they had the permission of the abbess. They were not normally supposed to accept gifts from strangers, but an exception was made for books. Copying and illuminating manuscripts must have been one of the main occupations of nuns in Syriac monasteries, as we don't know whether they did any agricultural labour or if they delegated all of that to hired hands, perhaps even slaves. They continued to maintain relationships with their families after they entered the monasteries, exchanging letters with relatives and even accepting some as children to be educated in the monastery under their tutelage. One Syriac hagiography, The Life of Febronia, tells movingly of how the abbess Byrene cared for her niece Febronia when she joined the monastery as a child. When Febronia was martyred for her faith, Byrene lamented, "Who will read the Scriptures to the sisters? What fingers will handle your books?" Febronia had led Scripture readings for lay Christian women as well as nuns, demonstrating to us that even in the idealized convent of a hagiography, nuns interacted with laypeople regularly.
Interestingly, The Life of Febronia also depicts Febronia's intense relationship with a laywoman called Hieria. As the story is set in Roman times, Hieria was the widow of a pagan senator. When she heard talk of Febronia's learning, beauty, humility and gentleness, she was fired by divine love and became so eager to see Febronia that she prostrated herself at the gate of the monastery and begged to be allowed inside. Febronia was so famed for her beauty that "the eye could never be sated by looking upon her." To a modern reader, Hieria's feverish devotion to Febronia throughout the story - nursing her at her sickbed, experiencing ecstatic bliss when allowed to stay up all night with her discussing the Bible, and offering herself up in martyrdom alongside Febronia - is hard not to read as romantic. The strong association between monks and homosexuality in the Abbasid period also begs the question of whether nuns and women who visited monasteries might have engaged in similar relationships. And yet, the male perspective of the poets in works like al-Shābushtī's have an enormous blind spot when it comes to interactions between women that didn't involve men, so they make no mention of it.
What do we know about female visitors to the monasteries during al-Shābushtī's time? Christian women often attended the festivals, with entire families going together to pray and to enjoy the celebrations. Free Muslim women, however, were discouraged from coming to the monasteries because of their reputation for debauchery. It's likely that some of them ignored this and attended monastic festivals anyway, especially if they lived in the countryside and came from previously Christian families. But while Muslim men were not supposed to bring their wives, this didn't stop them from bringing women. Singing girls or qiyān (singular qayna) were enslaved by well-to-do men across the Islamic world. Muslims were not allowed to enslave other Muslims, so these women were trafficked from all over Africa, Europe and Asia. Purchased as children, those destined to become qiyān were trained for years in expensive academies financed by their owners, where they studied Arabic, classical poetry, Islam, and music. By the time they were old enough to work as qiyān, they were meant to be thoroughly Arabized so that they could preside over salons in the courts and in wealthy homes. They travelled with their owners, which meant that they were often part of the retinues stopping to enjoy a break at a monastery. While Christians had their own songs they sang at monastic festivals, both sacred and secular, qiyān joined their owners in the monastery's finest guest rooms and played the oud while singing Arabic songs, often improvised and flirtatious.
Might some of these singing girls been attracted to the nuns in the same way the visiting men were? Some of them were Christians themselves, comforted, perhaps, by the familiarity of a Christian institution and the company of other Christian women. For others, whether Zoroastrians or some other faraway faith, the Christian nuns were as exotic to them as they both were to Muslim men. Singing girls were occasionally known to have relationships with each other, though this was sometimes met with disapproval from men. The 10th century Arabic erotic text The Encyclopedia of Pleasure asserted that the first relationship between lesbians - known as sahiqat, from the verb "to rub" - was an interfaith one, between the Christian princess Hind bint al-Nu'man and the pagan Arab woman Hind bint al-Khuss al-Iyadiyyah. When the pagan Hind died, the Christian Hind was so full of grief that she cut her hair and became a nun, founding a monastery where she could live an ascetic life of mourning until her death. Did stories like this animate the imaginations of educated singing girls who came to monasteries? Were there other such love stories between nuns and non-Christian women, lost forever to historians?
Our illustration today finds us in the scene of one such possible meeting. It is the afternoon of Kothine Sunday. As Christ provided the wedding guests of Cana with wine, so too does the sister of Dayr al-Khuwāt pour wine for her guests. The balcony they are seated in overlooks the monastery's vineyards, running down to the river's edge. Faced with the responsibilities of hosting an important man from Ukbara, the nun must carefully balance a set of competing directives within her. She is a hostess, welcoming all to the monastery in a sacred act of hospitality. She is a cloistered woman, limited in how often she should interact with laymen, and mindful of the words of the Syriac holy man Philoxenus that "what oil is to fire, wine is to lust." She is a Syriac ascetic, exhorted by spiritual writers to become drunk with love for God, not with wine for love of the flesh. She is a wealthy woman of the Ukbara rural elite, serving a man who may be an employer of her brother or father in the city, their lives interconnected in a deeply integrated interfaith world. She is a Christian woman under Muslim imperial rule, mindful that she cannot insult her overlords and that the monastery's survival depends on maintaining good relations, during a time of increasing suspicion of Christians from the Muslim authorities. (The zunnar she wears around her waist makes sure she won't forget that.)
She makes pleasant conversation with her guests and offers them the monastery's wine, serenaded by the sweet singing of a qayna. The singing girl's face is flushed with more than the wine as she sneaks a glance at the sister across the strings of her oud. As the pleasantness of evening settles around them after a day of prayer and celebrations, perhaps the sister fills her mind with the words of John the Solitary, a Syriac spiritual writer whose teachings she may have copied earlier that week into a precious manuscript:
When evening comes, collect your thoughts and ponder over the entire course of the day. Observe God's providential care for you, consider the grace which he has wrought in you throughout the whole span of the day. Consider the rising of the moon, the joy of daylight, all the hours and moments, the divisions of time, the sight of different colours, the beautiful adornment of creation, the course of the sun, the growth of your own stature, how your own person has been protected. Consider the blowing of the winds, the ripe and varied fruits, how the elements minister to your comfort, how you have been preserved from accidents, and all the other activities of grace. When you have pondered on all this, wonder at God's love towards you will spring up within you, and gratitude for his acts of grace will bubble up inside you.
Dayr al-Khuwāt was one of two nunneries north of Ukbara. While the countryside of Iraq, Syria and Palestine was full of hundreds of monasteries, very few of these were communities of women. Christianity was ancient here, and the Church's liturgy was conducted in Syriac, a language close to the Aramaic that Jesus spoke. The Syriac Church was split into different denominations stemming from theological controversies in the early centuries of Christianity. The Muslim conquest brought with it further conflict as many local leaders converted to the new religion of the Arabs. Throughout all of these disruptions and changes, however, the role of monasteries in the countryside remained relatively stable, as repositories of ancient books, guardians of sacred pilgrimage sites, agricultural powerhouses, and the main producers of wine.
In the early days of Islam, monks were respected as wise ascetics, even if they were thought to be misguided by failing to take up Islam over Christianity. While many elites converted with the advent of Islamic rule, the rural population remained predominantly Christian for centuries. By the year 1000, about half of the people in the Abbasid Empire's vast territories were still Christian. These included wealthy rural elites as well as Christian scribes working in the urban courts, who continued to patronize monasteries with donations of land even as the pressure to convert to Islam grew slowly greater. And when people did convert, many of them continued to participate in the rituals of the Christian calendar, including the annual festivals that monasteries hosted on their patronal feast days. It was what their families had always done, and what many of their relatives still did - the theological complications were probably of little consequence to them.
Among elite Muslims, particularly educated men of leisure, a tradition developed of depicting monasteries as places of relaxation and frivolity. Following in the tradition of ancient Persian rulers who held court at major monasteries, caliphs and other Muslim leaders would visit monasteries while travelling. Monastic tradition in turn emphasized the importance of hospitality for travellers regardless of their religious affiliation. When these powerful Muslim men came to a monastery, whether on an official visit or as a rest stop on their travels, they often brought with them a full court of poets, attendants, and musicians, particularly enslaved singing girls known as qiyān. Flouting Quranic prescriptions against wine, they would indulge in the monastery's finest food and drink, making merry until they were ready to move on to the next stage of their journey. Because the monastery was removed from the world of urban politics and court intrigues, men of the court considered it a refuge where the normal rules of society could be abandoned. And it wasn't just the drink that they indulged in - the poetry about monasteries is full of sexual desire for the beautiful young Christians pouring the wine. References abound to love affairs between Muslim poets and beautiful monks. In fact, monasteries became so associated with homosexuality in medieval Arabic literature that just mentioning a monk in his monastery could be an allusion to gay sex.
But what of the nuns, in those rare monastic communities made up of women instead of men? Though rarely mentioned, they too were seen as sexually available to the Muslim libertines who waxed lyrical about the pleasures of the monastery. The 10th century poet Al-Nājim Abū 'Uthmān wrote this about Dayr al-Khuwāt:
Ah, my heart, for love!
Ah, for bejeweled beauties!
Girls like slender boughs,
faces like the light of the morn.
People of the Sisters' Convent,
by the Lord God!
A lover's met his death-
what wrong has he done?
While it's possible this poem was written more about the Christian women who attended the festival than the nuns themselves, poems about other nunneries make it clear how they were viewed in the same sexual light as the male monasteries:
She went out on the day of her feast,
dressed as a nun,
and captivated with her haughty walk
everyone coming and going.
For my misery I saw her
on the feast of the Tha'ālib monastery in Baghdad,
swaying among women,
a buxom among buxom girls,
in whose midst she was like the full moon
surrounded by stars.
Dayr al-Khuwāt was also associated with a salacious rumour, popular in Muslim literature about Christians. The 10th century writer al-Shābushtī, whose Book of Monasteries catalogued the monastic sights of the Abbasid and Fatimid empires, wrote that the nuns at Dayr al-Khuwāt hosted an orgiastic Christian festival known as the Night of Māshūsh. It was said to be a night when men and women mixed freely, grabbing each other in the dark and fornicating with whoever was at hand until daybreak. Modern scholars have determined that there was no such thing as the Night of Māshūsh. Rather than a real Christian celebration, it was a Muslim myth that circulated for centuries. It fit well with rumours that nuns offered themselves up to monks and priests, undermining their claims to virginity. As one poet exclaimed about the other nunnery north of Ukbara, "It's the Virgins' Monastery - but they're nothing but hussies."
While tantalizing for the information it offers about nuns hosting interfaith festivals and rich with evocative details, The Book of Monasteries is therefore not always a reliable source. We can believe al-Shābushtī when he says that Dayr al-Khuwāt was known for its wine, and that Christians and Muslims gathered together there on Kothine Sunday. We can even be fairly sure that at least some of the male homosexual romances described in the text happened, though others were probably literary inventions. But the sexualization of Christian men and women that we find in wine-poetry about the monasteries, gathered together in collections like al-Shābushtī's, is as much a reflection of the colonial Muslim imagination as it is of Christian realities. During the 10th century, the image of monasteries as houses of ancient wisdom was fading, and Muslim leaders were increasingly building mosques to compete with the monasteries at many pilgrimage sites across the Middle East. Secularizing and sexualizing the monastics there served to undermine Christian claims to sanctity, especially since celibacy had long been valued by the Syriacs as a crucial part of their own asceticism. An illustrative example of how colonial the gaze in these poems was is that the zunnar, a colourful belt which Muslim law required Christians to wear to mark them visibly as non-Muslim, was heavily sexualized by the authors of monastic poetry when writing about monks, nuns, and Christian women attending the festivals. Nothing of the nuns' own perspectives survives in these accounts, leaving us in the dark about how they felt about Muslim visitors to the monasteries looking upon them with desire.
Unfortunately, Christian sources from the Syriac perspective offer very little information about nuns either. Only one monastic rule for women survives, in the damaged pages of a single manuscript. Dating to the late 7th or early 8th century, The Rule for the Nuns sets out the expectations about how nuns should behave. Many of these rules reveal concerns about their interactions with men. They are forbidden to leave the monastery without permission from their superior unless they go with another sister, or if the distance is less than a mile. They are not to attend funerals, banquets, restaurants or taverns, all events that would put them in the public eye. They cannot eat alone with men who aren't related to them without the permission of the abbess, and they cannot allow a man into the inner monastery unless he is an elderly priest who has come to offer the Eucharist. When they go into town, they must go with another sister - if they end up in town without a female companion, perhaps on essential monastery business, they cannot speak with monks or laymen on the street beyond saying hello. They cannot visit male hermits to offer them alms, but must operate through a designated elderly nun who has been specially approved to do so on their behalf. And finally, under no circumstances are they allowed into a male monastery.
These are the ideals set out for a single, unknown community. In reality, these ideals cannot always have been met. Syriac monastics were integrated with the rural communities, employing people from villages and towns in their hinterland to assist in the harvest of grapes, olives, and dates. The women came from local elite Christian families, as it took money to buy a cell in a monastery. Syriac monastics took no vows of poverty, so nuns who retained money and possessions after joining were allowed to make loans as long as they had the permission of the abbess. They were not normally supposed to accept gifts from strangers, but an exception was made for books. Copying and illuminating manuscripts must have been one of the main occupations of nuns in Syriac monasteries, as we don't know whether they did any agricultural labour or if they delegated all of that to hired hands, perhaps even slaves. They continued to maintain relationships with their families after they entered the monasteries, exchanging letters with relatives and even accepting some as children to be educated in the monastery under their tutelage. One Syriac hagiography, The Life of Febronia, tells movingly of how the abbess Byrene cared for her niece Febronia when she joined the monastery as a child. When Febronia was martyred for her faith, Byrene lamented, "Who will read the Scriptures to the sisters? What fingers will handle your books?" Febronia had led Scripture readings for lay Christian women as well as nuns, demonstrating to us that even in the idealized convent of a hagiography, nuns interacted with laypeople regularly.
Interestingly, The Life of Febronia also depicts Febronia's intense relationship with a laywoman called Hieria. As the story is set in Roman times, Hieria was the widow of a pagan senator. When she heard talk of Febronia's learning, beauty, humility and gentleness, she was fired by divine love and became so eager to see Febronia that she prostrated herself at the gate of the monastery and begged to be allowed inside. Febronia was so famed for her beauty that "the eye could never be sated by looking upon her." To a modern reader, Hieria's feverish devotion to Febronia throughout the story - nursing her at her sickbed, experiencing ecstatic bliss when allowed to stay up all night with her discussing the Bible, and offering herself up in martyrdom alongside Febronia - is hard not to read as romantic. The strong association between monks and homosexuality in the Abbasid period also begs the question of whether nuns and women who visited monasteries might have engaged in similar relationships. And yet, the male perspective of the poets in works like al-Shābushtī's have an enormous blind spot when it comes to interactions between women that didn't involve men, so they make no mention of it.
What do we know about female visitors to the monasteries during al-Shābushtī's time? Christian women often attended the festivals, with entire families going together to pray and to enjoy the celebrations. Free Muslim women, however, were discouraged from coming to the monasteries because of their reputation for debauchery. It's likely that some of them ignored this and attended monastic festivals anyway, especially if they lived in the countryside and came from previously Christian families. But while Muslim men were not supposed to bring their wives, this didn't stop them from bringing women. Singing girls or qiyān (singular qayna) were enslaved by well-to-do men across the Islamic world. Muslims were not allowed to enslave other Muslims, so these women were trafficked from all over Africa, Europe and Asia. Purchased as children, those destined to become qiyān were trained for years in expensive academies financed by their owners, where they studied Arabic, classical poetry, Islam, and music. By the time they were old enough to work as qiyān, they were meant to be thoroughly Arabized so that they could preside over salons in the courts and in wealthy homes. They travelled with their owners, which meant that they were often part of the retinues stopping to enjoy a break at a monastery. While Christians had their own songs they sang at monastic festivals, both sacred and secular, qiyān joined their owners in the monastery's finest guest rooms and played the oud while singing Arabic songs, often improvised and flirtatious.
Might some of these singing girls been attracted to the nuns in the same way the visiting men were? Some of them were Christians themselves, comforted, perhaps, by the familiarity of a Christian institution and the company of other Christian women. For others, whether Zoroastrians or some other faraway faith, the Christian nuns were as exotic to them as they both were to Muslim men. Singing girls were occasionally known to have relationships with each other, though this was sometimes met with disapproval from men. The 10th century Arabic erotic text The Encyclopedia of Pleasure asserted that the first relationship between lesbians - known as sahiqat, from the verb "to rub" - was an interfaith one, between the Christian princess Hind bint al-Nu'man and the pagan Arab woman Hind bint al-Khuss al-Iyadiyyah. When the pagan Hind died, the Christian Hind was so full of grief that she cut her hair and became a nun, founding a monastery where she could live an ascetic life of mourning until her death. Did stories like this animate the imaginations of educated singing girls who came to monasteries? Were there other such love stories between nuns and non-Christian women, lost forever to historians?
Our illustration today finds us in the scene of one such possible meeting. It is the afternoon of Kothine Sunday. As Christ provided the wedding guests of Cana with wine, so too does the sister of Dayr al-Khuwāt pour wine for her guests. The balcony they are seated in overlooks the monastery's vineyards, running down to the river's edge. Faced with the responsibilities of hosting an important man from Ukbara, the nun must carefully balance a set of competing directives within her. She is a hostess, welcoming all to the monastery in a sacred act of hospitality. She is a cloistered woman, limited in how often she should interact with laymen, and mindful of the words of the Syriac holy man Philoxenus that "what oil is to fire, wine is to lust." She is a Syriac ascetic, exhorted by spiritual writers to become drunk with love for God, not with wine for love of the flesh. She is a wealthy woman of the Ukbara rural elite, serving a man who may be an employer of her brother or father in the city, their lives interconnected in a deeply integrated interfaith world. She is a Christian woman under Muslim imperial rule, mindful that she cannot insult her overlords and that the monastery's survival depends on maintaining good relations, during a time of increasing suspicion of Christians from the Muslim authorities. (The zunnar she wears around her waist makes sure she won't forget that.)
She makes pleasant conversation with her guests and offers them the monastery's wine, serenaded by the sweet singing of a qayna. The singing girl's face is flushed with more than the wine as she sneaks a glance at the sister across the strings of her oud. As the pleasantness of evening settles around them after a day of prayer and celebrations, perhaps the sister fills her mind with the words of John the Solitary, a Syriac spiritual writer whose teachings she may have copied earlier that week into a precious manuscript:
When evening comes, collect your thoughts and ponder over the entire course of the day. Observe God's providential care for you, consider the grace which he has wrought in you throughout the whole span of the day. Consider the rising of the moon, the joy of daylight, all the hours and moments, the divisions of time, the sight of different colours, the beautiful adornment of creation, the course of the sun, the growth of your own stature, how your own person has been protected. Consider the blowing of the winds, the ripe and varied fruits, how the elements minister to your comfort, how you have been preserved from accidents, and all the other activities of grace. When you have pondered on all this, wonder at God's love towards you will spring up within you, and gratitude for his acts of grace will bubble up inside you.
Artist's Comments
I loved doing the research for this picture. I got the inspiration at the end of last year when I read the newly released English translation of The Book of Monasteries. I couldn't believe how many poems there were from Muslim men writing about the Christian monks they were in love with! My imagination was fired up for a potential parallel story of love between a nun and a non-monastic woman. I was also very inspired by the image of nuns as presiding over peaceful interfaith celebrations in the medieval Middle East. Once I decided to work on that idea in earnest, I knew so little about Syriac Christianity that I had to do a ton of reading to catch myself up. It's really fascinating coming at this from the perspective of someone who studied Western Christian monasticism, where Christianity is usually in control of the government and leaves behind such a wide variety of records. The information about Syriac monastic women is so much more fragmentary. I had a lot of digging to do to piece together what life might have been like for one of the nuns at Dayr al-Khuwāt! There is such a gulf between the Muslim wine-poetry and the Syriac ascetic and hagiographical literature that it's hard to know how reality played out in between.
The tiraz embroidery on the man and singing girl's gowns and the man's turban is based on this one, dated to circa 1008 and naming the man who was caliph of the Abbasid Empire in 1000. The cup the man is holding is based on this one, engraved with a poem in celebration of wine. The nun's goblet is based on this one, while her wine bottle is based on this bottle. The singing girl is wearing these earrings. You can hear Syriac hymns for the First Sunday of Lent here.
Thank you to Ellie for helpful advice on the art, and to Dad for bringing home his copy of Holy Women of the Syrian Orient for me to peruse. Fun side note - reading The Priory of the Orange Tree is what got me wanting to work on this picture idea again. I had so much to say about this topic, and I hope I could do justice to all of the fascinating scholarship out there about Syriac Christian women and about the complex relationship between Muslims and monasteries in the medieval Middle East. I've always wanted to have a nun from the Middle East in the Women of 1000 project, so here she is at long last! ~ April 20, 2024
The tiraz embroidery on the man and singing girl's gowns and the man's turban is based on this one, dated to circa 1008 and naming the man who was caliph of the Abbasid Empire in 1000. The cup the man is holding is based on this one, engraved with a poem in celebration of wine. The nun's goblet is based on this one, while her wine bottle is based on this bottle. The singing girl is wearing these earrings. You can hear Syriac hymns for the First Sunday of Lent here.
Thank you to Ellie for helpful advice on the art, and to Dad for bringing home his copy of Holy Women of the Syrian Orient for me to peruse. Fun side note - reading The Priory of the Orange Tree is what got me wanting to work on this picture idea again. I had so much to say about this topic, and I hope I could do justice to all of the fascinating scholarship out there about Syriac Christian women and about the complex relationship between Muslims and monasteries in the medieval Middle East. I've always wanted to have a nun from the Middle East in the Women of 1000 project, so here she is at long last! ~ April 20, 2024
Resources
Want to learn more about medieval Syriac nuns? Here are some recommended resources.
The Book of Monasteries by al-Shābushtī, edited and translated by Hilary Kilpatrick
The only surviving example of the diyārāt genre (10th century Arabic works about monasteries) is now available for the first time in complete English translation! Reading this is what inspired me to depict one of the monasteries described inside. There are so many interesting stories there of homosexual relationships between monks and Muslim men - I highly recommend it to anyone interested in queer medieval history. It's certainly a very different perspective to reading medieval Christian spiritual texts! Hilary Kilpatrick, the translator, has published other work that was very helpful for my illustration - see her chapters "Representations of Social Intercourse Between Muslims and Non-Muslims in Some Medieval Adab Works" and "Monasteries Through Muslim Eyes: The Diyārāt Books." These explore the nuances of how Muslims portray interfaith relations with Christians in their medieval literature. There are lots of interesting anecdotes here about friendships and tensions between Muslims and Christians. Unfortunately, neither these nor any of the works listed in this section dealt with relationships between Jews and Christians under Abbasid rule, so I wasn't able to say anything about whether the sizable Jewish population of Ukbara also joined in the festivities at Christian monasteries.
"The Rules for the Nuns" in Syriac and Arabic Documents Regarding Legislation Relative to Syrian Asceticism by Arthur Vöobus
This is the only surviving monastic rule for women from the early Syriac Church. There are fourteen canons in the rule, available here in English translation. We almost didn't have this precious text - it survives in a single 8th century manuscript.
"Laylat al-Māšūš: Marginalia to al-Bayrūnī, Abū Nuwās and Other Authors" by François de Blois
In this article, de Blois thoroughly debunks the myth of the Night of Māshūsh. He demonstrates persuasively how it started as a misinterpretation of one author's vague description of baptism, then got passed along the grapevine until an elaborate myth about Christian debauchery had spread. It became so insitutionalized that Christians even started using it as an accusation against other Christian sects!
"Women in Syriac Christian Tradition" by Susan Ashbrook Harvey
This is a great introduction to the roles women played in early Syriac Christianity. There isn't too much about nuns here, but lots of information about the Daughters of the Covenant, who were a proto-monastic or laywomen's movement of spirituality in the early Syriac Church. They led active lives of service in their communities and sang hymns for mixed congregations of men and women. Harvey's discussion of the importance of women's assertive voices in the hymns' reimaginings of Biblical stories was particularly interesting. See also her chapter "Sacred Bonding: Mothers and Daughters in Early Syriac Hagiography" for information about how early Syriac women found ways to honour and strengthen the mother-daughter bond by adopting lives of celibacy and religious service together.
"A Heaven of Wine: Muslim-Christian Encounters at Monasteries in the Early Islamic Middle East" by Elizabeth Campbell
One of the appendices of this PhD thesis offers a gazetteer of all the Christian monasteries mentioned in the works of al-Shābushtī and two later Muslim authors. There are a few more female monasteries mentioned in the later works than in The Book of Monasteries, but still not very many. The thesis itself has a lot of great material about the background of non-Christian potentates visiting monasteries and how that changed throughout the Abbasid period. It is so sad how these centuries of coexistence between Christians and Muslims in the Middle East ended in the crusades and jihad of the High Middle Ages. Campbell also has one of the only discussion of nuns in Muslim literature that I was able to find. Her commentary on the way nuns were sexualized was very helpful for my research.
Holy Women of the Syrian Orient by Sebastian P. Brock and Susan Ashbrook Harvey
This collection offers several hagiographies of early Syriac women in English translation. Two that were particularly helpful for my research were The Life of Febronia and Susan's story from The Lives of Eastern Saints, which provide an idealized Christian perspective on the lives of Syriac nuns. As a side note, there are some great stories here of transmasculine saints such as Anastasios/Anastasia. Just be aware that the editorializing around those stories is quite transphobic.
"The Economy of Syrian Monasteries (Fifth-Eighth Century)" by Ewa Wipszycka
Compared to Western Christianity in the medieval period, it is a lot harder to find economic evidence of how Syriac monasteries ran, since they operated largely separate from the state except in payment of taxes. Wipszycka's article was so helpful in bringing together the fragmentary evidence from hagiography, archaeology, and Muslim literary sources in an effort to understand how monasteries functioned on a practical basis.
"Monks and Their Daughters: Monasteries as Muslim-Christian Boundaries" by Thomas Sizgorich
In spite of the "daughters" in the title, there isn't much about women in this paper. However, it provides a crucial perspective on how Muslim imperialism shaped the relationships between Muslims and Christians as portrayed in literature like the diyārāt. The post-colonial approach here made me revise how I wanted to draw this picture and tell the story behind it, since I didn't want to uncritically step into the eroticizing colonial gaze that Muslim authors deployed when writing about the sexuality of Christian monks and nuns. For this reason, while I kept my queer idea of a singing girl being attracted to a nun, I left the nun's own feelings about this more ambiguous - though it's worth noting that as non-Muslim slaves, qiyān didn't have the same power imbalance with nuns that the male Muslim writers analyzed in this paper did.
"The Monastery as Tavern and Temple in Medieval Islam: The Case for Confessional Flexibility in the Locus of Christian Monasteries" by Brad B. Bowman
Bowman's chapter looks at the religious and devotional aspects of Muslims' interest in Christian monasteries. Aside from the licentious and wine-filled reputation monasteries had in the works of literary men, there is a lot of evidence for a more spiritual interest in these holy Christian sites. A good text for a more in-depth understanding of the blurring of confessional lines between Christianity and early Islam is the book The Making of the Medieval Middle East: Religion, Society, and Simple Believers by Jack Tannous. This book looks at the ways ordinary people who converted to Islam may have understood the change in faith very differently than theologians and imams did.
Spirituality in the Syriac Tradition by Sebastian P. Brock
There isn't much about women in this book, but it's a great overview of Syriac spiritual literature in the early period. I particularly enjoyed reading excerpts from the works of John the Solitary, who had some beautiful passages about dealing with intrusive thoughts and about expressing gratitude to God for the beauty of natural surroundings. Philoxenus, Babai of Nisibis, and Martyrius had interesting passages about food and alcohol that informed my understanding of the Syriac Christian ideal of how to deal with these worldly temptations, an interesting contrast to the Muslim portrayal of monastic feasting.
The Book of Monasteries by al-Shābushtī, edited and translated by Hilary Kilpatrick
The only surviving example of the diyārāt genre (10th century Arabic works about monasteries) is now available for the first time in complete English translation! Reading this is what inspired me to depict one of the monasteries described inside. There are so many interesting stories there of homosexual relationships between monks and Muslim men - I highly recommend it to anyone interested in queer medieval history. It's certainly a very different perspective to reading medieval Christian spiritual texts! Hilary Kilpatrick, the translator, has published other work that was very helpful for my illustration - see her chapters "Representations of Social Intercourse Between Muslims and Non-Muslims in Some Medieval Adab Works" and "Monasteries Through Muslim Eyes: The Diyārāt Books." These explore the nuances of how Muslims portray interfaith relations with Christians in their medieval literature. There are lots of interesting anecdotes here about friendships and tensions between Muslims and Christians. Unfortunately, neither these nor any of the works listed in this section dealt with relationships between Jews and Christians under Abbasid rule, so I wasn't able to say anything about whether the sizable Jewish population of Ukbara also joined in the festivities at Christian monasteries.
"The Rules for the Nuns" in Syriac and Arabic Documents Regarding Legislation Relative to Syrian Asceticism by Arthur Vöobus
This is the only surviving monastic rule for women from the early Syriac Church. There are fourteen canons in the rule, available here in English translation. We almost didn't have this precious text - it survives in a single 8th century manuscript.
"Laylat al-Māšūš: Marginalia to al-Bayrūnī, Abū Nuwās and Other Authors" by François de Blois
In this article, de Blois thoroughly debunks the myth of the Night of Māshūsh. He demonstrates persuasively how it started as a misinterpretation of one author's vague description of baptism, then got passed along the grapevine until an elaborate myth about Christian debauchery had spread. It became so insitutionalized that Christians even started using it as an accusation against other Christian sects!
"Women in Syriac Christian Tradition" by Susan Ashbrook Harvey
This is a great introduction to the roles women played in early Syriac Christianity. There isn't too much about nuns here, but lots of information about the Daughters of the Covenant, who were a proto-monastic or laywomen's movement of spirituality in the early Syriac Church. They led active lives of service in their communities and sang hymns for mixed congregations of men and women. Harvey's discussion of the importance of women's assertive voices in the hymns' reimaginings of Biblical stories was particularly interesting. See also her chapter "Sacred Bonding: Mothers and Daughters in Early Syriac Hagiography" for information about how early Syriac women found ways to honour and strengthen the mother-daughter bond by adopting lives of celibacy and religious service together.
"A Heaven of Wine: Muslim-Christian Encounters at Monasteries in the Early Islamic Middle East" by Elizabeth Campbell
One of the appendices of this PhD thesis offers a gazetteer of all the Christian monasteries mentioned in the works of al-Shābushtī and two later Muslim authors. There are a few more female monasteries mentioned in the later works than in The Book of Monasteries, but still not very many. The thesis itself has a lot of great material about the background of non-Christian potentates visiting monasteries and how that changed throughout the Abbasid period. It is so sad how these centuries of coexistence between Christians and Muslims in the Middle East ended in the crusades and jihad of the High Middle Ages. Campbell also has one of the only discussion of nuns in Muslim literature that I was able to find. Her commentary on the way nuns were sexualized was very helpful for my research.
Holy Women of the Syrian Orient by Sebastian P. Brock and Susan Ashbrook Harvey
This collection offers several hagiographies of early Syriac women in English translation. Two that were particularly helpful for my research were The Life of Febronia and Susan's story from The Lives of Eastern Saints, which provide an idealized Christian perspective on the lives of Syriac nuns. As a side note, there are some great stories here of transmasculine saints such as Anastasios/Anastasia. Just be aware that the editorializing around those stories is quite transphobic.
"The Economy of Syrian Monasteries (Fifth-Eighth Century)" by Ewa Wipszycka
Compared to Western Christianity in the medieval period, it is a lot harder to find economic evidence of how Syriac monasteries ran, since they operated largely separate from the state except in payment of taxes. Wipszycka's article was so helpful in bringing together the fragmentary evidence from hagiography, archaeology, and Muslim literary sources in an effort to understand how monasteries functioned on a practical basis.
"Monks and Their Daughters: Monasteries as Muslim-Christian Boundaries" by Thomas Sizgorich
In spite of the "daughters" in the title, there isn't much about women in this paper. However, it provides a crucial perspective on how Muslim imperialism shaped the relationships between Muslims and Christians as portrayed in literature like the diyārāt. The post-colonial approach here made me revise how I wanted to draw this picture and tell the story behind it, since I didn't want to uncritically step into the eroticizing colonial gaze that Muslim authors deployed when writing about the sexuality of Christian monks and nuns. For this reason, while I kept my queer idea of a singing girl being attracted to a nun, I left the nun's own feelings about this more ambiguous - though it's worth noting that as non-Muslim slaves, qiyān didn't have the same power imbalance with nuns that the male Muslim writers analyzed in this paper did.
"The Monastery as Tavern and Temple in Medieval Islam: The Case for Confessional Flexibility in the Locus of Christian Monasteries" by Brad B. Bowman
Bowman's chapter looks at the religious and devotional aspects of Muslims' interest in Christian monasteries. Aside from the licentious and wine-filled reputation monasteries had in the works of literary men, there is a lot of evidence for a more spiritual interest in these holy Christian sites. A good text for a more in-depth understanding of the blurring of confessional lines between Christianity and early Islam is the book The Making of the Medieval Middle East: Religion, Society, and Simple Believers by Jack Tannous. This book looks at the ways ordinary people who converted to Islam may have understood the change in faith very differently than theologians and imams did.
Spirituality in the Syriac Tradition by Sebastian P. Brock
There isn't much about women in this book, but it's a great overview of Syriac spiritual literature in the early period. I particularly enjoyed reading excerpts from the works of John the Solitary, who had some beautiful passages about dealing with intrusive thoughts and about expressing gratitude to God for the beauty of natural surroundings. Philoxenus, Babai of Nisibis, and Martyrius had interesting passages about food and alcohol that informed my understanding of the Syriac Christian ideal of how to deal with these worldly temptations, an interesting contrast to the Muslim portrayal of monastic feasting.