Leo’s “reply,” however, has been known since the beginning of the sixteenth century, when a brief Latin translation made from “Chaldean” (presumably Arabic) was first published.137 The full extent of Leo’s letter subsequently came to light only in Łewond’s History, where it follows his summary of ʿUmar’s letter. This Armenian translation of Leo’s letter is rather lengthy, and alone it amounts to more than one-fourth of Łewond’s chronicle.138 Its size not only revealed the Latin translation to be a mere summary of Leo’s letter but also invited suspicions that the original version of ʿUmar’s letter was likely of similar extent.
Fortunately, the complete text of ʿUmar’s letter has recently come to light, having been pieced together from two partial manuscripts in different languages by Jean-Marie Gaudeul.139 The second half of ʿUmar’s letter was the first to be discovered, but since this fragment lacks the opening epistolary framework, the nature of this early Islamic text was not immediately recognized. In the mid-1960s, Dominique Sourdel found among a collection of materials from Damascus at the Turkish and Islamic Arts Museum in Istanbul ten stray parchment folios containing an Arabic text that appeared to be quite old. Sourdel published the text as an “Anonymous Muslim Pamphlet” against the Christians, and on the basis of the manuscript itself and the contents of the text, he convincingly argued for its composition sometime before the end of the ninth century.140 Not long thereafter, Denise Cardaillac published a manuscript of Muslim anti-Christian polemics from the National Library of Madrid that includes the beginnings of a letter ascribed to ʿUmar, written to “Lyon, king of the Christian infidels.”141 Like the other polemics of this collection, the letter survives in Aljamiado, that is, a Romance dialect written using the Arabic script. Cardaillac compared this letter with Arthur Jeffrey’s translation of ʿUmar’s letter in Łewond’s History, and, believing that Łewond’s version was in fact the original, she concluded that the Aljaimado text had been more recently composed by Moriscos, using ʿUmar’s letter as a basis and expanding it considerably.142 Clearly, however, Łewond gives merely a “summary” (
Gaudeul first came to suspect that Sourdel’s “Anonymous Pamphlet” should be identified with ʿUmar’s letter after comparing Leo’s letter in Łewond very broadly with early Islamic polemical writings against the Christians from the ninth and tenth centuries. Gaudeul noted that many of the same themes and even similar expressions were found in both Leo’s letter and the Anonymous Pamphlet, leading him to conclude that these two texts were in dialogue with one another and, by consequence, that the Anonymous Pamphlet was indeed the second half of ʿUmar’s lost letter.144 This hunch was confirmed unmistakably when Gaudeul began to compare ʿUmar’s Aljaimado letter with Leo’s letter in Łewond. At first Gaudeul began to notice connections between the Aljaimado text and Leo’s letter that were similar in nature to the former’s parallels with the Anonymous Pamphlet. Then, in the final pages of the Aljaimado letter, Gaudeul found that its contents suddenly began to overlap with the first few pages of the Anonymous Pamphlet and that their contents were nearly identical.145 This discovery revealed that the Aljaimado text was in fact no Morisco forgery but instead a very faithful translation of this early Arabic text, validating Gaudeul’s identification of the Anonymous Pamphlet with ʿUmar’s lost letter. Thanks to Gaudeul’s meticulous research, ʿUmar’s letter has now been recovered from these two manuscripts, thus restoring the other side of this interreligious debate from the early medieval Near East.
On the basis of this newly recovered text, Hoyland has introduced some important refinements to the dating of this early Islam polemic. Although Gaudeul largely follows Sourdel’s initial dating of the Anonymous Pamphlet in assigning ʿUmar’s letter to the late ninth century,146 Hoyland’s more thorough analysis of the Leo-ʿUmar tradition complex convincingly identifies the eighth century as the likely milieu for this epistolary contest.147 First, Hoyland answers Stephen Gerö’s proposal that Łewond’s letter of Leo is a medieval Armenian forgery added to the text by a later reviser. According to Gerö, Łewond’s History as we now have it is the work of an eleventh- or twelfth-century redactor, who heavily revised a now lost chronicle that was actually written by Łewond in the late eighth century. Among his amendments was the introduction of this epistolary exchange, inspired by brief mention of such correspondence in Thomas Artsruni’s early tenth-century Armenian chronicle.148 Łewond’s editor, however, wanted to incorporate a more detailed account of the Leo-ʿUmar correspondence than he found in his source.149 Consequently, Gerö postulates that the redactor took an existing Armenian anti-Islamic polemical tract and reshaped it to create the illusion of an exchange of letters. The scheme involved forging a letter from ʿUmar that corresponded with the main points of the anti-Islamic treatise and then “lard[ing] the Christian tract with allusions to the ʿUmar letter.”150
Gerö’s theories regarding Łewond’s History and the Leo-ʿUmar correspondence in particular have not found much acceptance. Experts on the Armenian historical tradition continue to regard Łewond’s chronicle as an authentic work of the late eighth century, and its genuine witness to an early tradition of a polemical exchange between Christians and Muslims in the guise of letters authored by Leo and ʿUmar seems widely conceded.151 Nevertheless, Hoyland responds to each of Gerö’s arguments point by point and convincingly demonstrates both that Łewond’s History as we now have it is a work of the late eighth century and that his version of Leo’s letter is not an adaptation of an Armenian work, but in fact translates an older Greek text that was part of an early tradition of epistolary polemic between Muslims and Christians.152 Gaudeul’s study, published subsequent to Gerö’s work, is particularly decisive in this regard. Gaudeul’s recovery of ʿUmar’s letter leaves Gerö’s scenario rather improbable, and the close rhetorical connections between this Muslim text and Łewond’s account of the correspondence suggests that they reflect an actual polemical exchange between Christians and Muslims in the early medieval Near East.153
Although Gaudeul (and Sourdel) would locate this exchange as late as the end of the ninth century, the date of Łewond’s chronicle, the late eighth century, would seem to indicate that it had reached a fairly mature state more than a century earlier. Many of the main themes from this confrontation are in fact, as Hoyland notes, paralleled in other sources of the late eighth century and the early ninth.154 Moreover, both letters have the appearance of responding to an earlier tradition of correspondence, which leads Hoyland to propose that over the course of the eighth century a series of Leo-ʿUmar / ʿUmar-Leo letters were composed, and “what has come down to us is a compilation from or rehashing of such works.”155 Perhaps most importantly, however, the Aljaimado text of ʿUmar’s letter begins with an isnād, that is, a chain of the text’s early transmitters. Although such efforts to authenticate Islamic traditions by providing an intellectual pedigree were frequently forged and are thus generally viewed with a high measure of suspicion, Gaudeul and Hoyland are both correct to note that in this instance the letter’s isnād seems worthy of some historical consideration.156 The isnād identifies a series of three scholars who are known to have been active in Ḥimṣ (Homs in western Syria), and the fact that the isnād does not attempt to link the letter with ʿUmar himself seems to speak for its authenticity. The earliest of these transmitters died in 798, a date that would be consistent with the origins of these epistolary polemics in the eighth century. On the whole then, as Hoyland rightly concludes, the evidence strongly favors the emergence of a literary tradition of polemical correspondence between Leo and ʿUmar, and more specifically the composition of ʿUmar’s letter, sometime before the end of the eighth century. This would make ʿUmar’s letter one of the oldest Islamic documents to have survived, making it a precious witness to the beginnings of Islam.
The relevant passage of ʿUmar’s letter for the present question comes at the very end of the text, in the early Arabic fragment published by Sourdel. As the letter draws to a close, it undertakes an
