Syriac Orthodox Christianity under Islam

For the West Syriac church the Arab conquest lifted a weight. They had been the losing side under Byzantine emperors who wanted Chalcedon enforced, and under the caliphs they became simply one protected community among others — taxed, but not pressed to change their confession. The centuries that followed were unusually productive. Jacob of Edessa revised the Syriac Bible and wrote the first grammar of his own language. Dionysius of Tel Mahre, patriarch and historian, travelled to Egypt in the caliph al-Ma'mun's own company and wrote a chronicle that later writers mined for centuries; Moses bar Kepha explained the liturgy and the Scriptures for his clergy. The carriers of all this were the monasteries — Mor Gabriel and the other houses of the Tur Abdin plateau, and the Syrian monastery in the Egyptian desert, where monks assembled a library that is now one of the world's great collections of early Syriac manuscripts.