ABSTRACT

The fate and fortune of the so-called Nestorian church, the Church of the East according to its own official designation, was tied up for better or worse with the Sasanian state since at least the early fifth century. The East Syrian Christian community as such did accept the imposition of Arab rule relatively passively, though there were numerous Christians in both the Arab and the Persian armies. Arab conquest of the Byzantine dominions is also registered; but, in contrast to West Syrian, Monophysite writers who link the Byzantine defeat to the persecution of their party, Yohannan makes no such theological nexus. It should be noted that the Christian community did flourish, despite internal divisions as well as repeated persecution and repression; Christians may well have come to form the single largest religious community in Mesopotamia at the time of the Muslim conquest.