Historical sources of Syriac Christians from the beginning of Islam to the end of the Umayyad period

Document Type : Original Article

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Abstract

With the beginning of the Islamic conquests, Syriac-speaking people of Iraq, Shamat and western Iran began to reflect these conflicts and then describe Islam and Muslims in their writings, which are more and more used by early Islamic history researchers. Considering the importance of explaining the historical context of the emergence of these texts, their strengths and weaknesses, and the evolution of these texts in using them, the following article has addressed this issue in a descriptive-analytical way. The results of the research show that these writings compared to Islamic historical sources as well as other non-Islamic sources have advantages such as the time proximity of the authors to the reported events, an external view of Islam and Muslims, living in an Islamic society and having first-hand information. First, they have more information compared to other non-Islamic sources. But he searched for their weak points in the unavailability of all these texts, religious and polemical nature, sectarian biases and false and exaggerated image of Islam and Muslims. The origin and development of these texts until the end of the Umayyad period can be analyzed in the following four stages: 1st: scattered references to the conquests; Second: the first references to Islam and the first attempts to explain the philosophy of conquests; Third: reaction to the localization policies of Abd al-Malik Ibn Marwan (trying to show Islamic and Arabic elements in Diwans, coins, etc.); Fourth: The reaction to the consolidation of government and religion during the period of Abdul Malik and after that. From the fourth stage, wider social, political and theological relations between.

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