“What has Athens to do with Jerusalem?” The famous rhetorical question of Tertullian serves as a leitmotif throughout Theresa Shawcross’ book, but it could as well have been posed in a different way: “What has Cairo to do with Constantinople?” For her book not only sets out in search of hidden, forgotten, or invisible links between the symbolic capitals of monotheism and Hellenism: it also shows how skillfully the Fatimid and Macedonian dynasties drew upon them both as they tried to reinvent and legitimize their rule.
Modern western Europeans, believing their history to be detached from the rest of the world by an imagined chasm known as the Middle Ages, long approached Athens and Jerusalem by means of two narrow corridors: the Crusades and the Greek War of Independence. They were neither keen to acknowledge the two cities as natural and indispensable parts of the Islamic world for several centuries, nor – which is even more interesting – of the Eastern Roman Empire. Athens was cast in the light of a Hellenism that was understood to be primarily pagan, unreachable for Christians and Muslims alike; Jerusalem belonged to the world of the Bible, its history fading into obscurity after the Roman destruction in AD 70. The fact that the Parthenon served as a Christian cathedral for longer than it was a temple to Athena made no difference to the nineteenth-century city planners who erased all traces of its postclassical history, whereas the Islamic monuments of Jerusalem became objects of reverence by the Crusaders, who knew little about their origins and assumed them to represent the Biblical Temple of Solomon.
Shawcross does not exonerate medieval Christians or Muslims from similar distortions of history. On the contrary, she highlights how Athens and Jerusalem served as canvases for premodern imaginations that could be as destructive as they were creative. The Parthenon was indeed turned into a Christian cathedral by a violent overthrow of what until then had been considered its holiest images and statuary. The Church of the Holy Sepulchre, one of the marvels of the late antique world, was razed to the ground by the Fatimid Imam-Caliph al-Hakim in 1009. But in both cases, Shawcross demonstrates how the symbolism tied to the two sites mitigated as much as it inspired violence. Instead of the eternal flame that had been lit for the Virgin-goddess on the Acropolis, the new church inside the Parthenon featured a lamp that was burning, never to be extinguished, in front of the perpetual Virgin and Mother of God. The annual miracle of the Easter Fire, which al-Hakim tried to end when he ordered the destruction of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, had in fact been regularly attended and revered by Jerusalem’s Muslim governors.
Wisdom’s House, Heaven’s Gate follows a somewhat winding path, and the best way of doing the book justice is by treating each of its chapters as a study of its own. There are five chapters, apart from the introduction and the conclusion. “The Parthenon from Temple to Church” and “A Miracle of Heavenly Fire” set the stage for the discussion on continuity and discontinuity in Athens and Jerusalem, respectively, and introduce a theme that will reappear in different forms throughout the book: symbolism and the mysticism of fire and illumination. The miracle of the Easter Fire in Jerusalem, still revered to this day throughout the Orthodox Christian world, became a major point of traction for Christian pilgrimage in the early Muslim period and eventually clashed with the illumination theology of the Fatimids, especially that of al-Hakim. Even if he did not outright claim the divinity that the Druze would attribute to him, he nevertheless considered himself a “lamp by which people might be guided and by whose light the path might be illuminated” (pp. 138-139). Once al-Hakim had curtailed Christian pilgrimage to Jerusalem, Byzantine Athens found itself well equipped to fill the void, the Parthenon now serving as one of the foremost cathedrals to the “Parthenos” (Virgin) and “Theotokos” (God-bearer) Mary, with an “eternal fire” burning in front of her image. A crucial role here was played by a long tradition of erudite clergy, representing the educated elite of Byzantium, the most famous example probably being Michael Choniates (twelfth century).
The same topic is expounded further in “The Relocation of Jerusalem,” which deals with mobility between the two cities, and especially the migration of Christians from Fatimid to Byzantine lands. These population shifts further contributed to the growing importance of Athens as a site of Christian pilgrimage, but simultaneously brought about an Arabization of the city and its hinterland, testified in Arabic or pseudo-kufic brickwork decorations on churches and monasteries. Hellenism, meanwhile, went in the other direction: “The Light of Hellenism in Empire and Caliphate” shows how the legacy of ancient Greek philosophy – which had been a matter of contestation ever since the heydays of the Abbasids – was reinvigorated by Fatimid dependence on Platonic ideas in their own interpretations of Islam, but also retained its position in the Byzantine world, reaching a new flourishing point in the works of Michael Psellos (eleventh century).
Finally, “Wisdom: Lady of the Temple, Lady of the Red Thread,” returns to Athens and highlights the strong feminine dimension of the religious beliefs that persevered in the city from the pagan era into the Christian one, both with regards to the divine agency that they confessed and the high-born women known to have undertaken a pilgrimage to the city. Here, too, the theme ties into the larger topic of wisdom (sophia) and illumination, Marian imagery emphasizing the role of the Virgin who bore the “Light of the World.”
But what does the one story told in this book really have to do with the other? Several times I found myself pausing and posing to myself the question of Tertullian in one form or another. That pseudo-kufic ornaments in Byzantine churches can carry a deeper significance rather than merely serving as decorative elements, that the teachings of Suhrawardi might be said to revitalize an Illuminationist heritage from the Fatimids, that Christian craftsmen produced ceramics for the Fatimid court that may contain hidden political messages, and that there is a continuity from the suppressed cult of the female deity Asherah in early Judaism to devotion to the Prophet’s daughter Fatima in Shi’i Islam are all highly interesting observations and propositions in and of themselves, but it is sometimes difficult to see how they fit in the same framework. The conclusions do their best to show how the masterful web is interconnected, but I am not entirely sure if it succeeds.
At the same time, I think this is precisely the point. We need more books like Wisdom’s House, Heaven’s Gate to undertake this kind of daring parallel readings of Greek and Arabic medieval materials – even if they are of a scattered and somewhat incoherent kind – to remind us, over and over again, that our nineteenth-century frameworks of approaching and understanding the so-called Middle Ages are skewed, not only by the self-constituting paradigms that medieval Muslims and Christians created for and of themselves, but also by modern attempts to narrate a European history that bypasses them in search for a purified past.