ABU DHABI (AsiaNews): The remains of what appears to be an ancient Christian monastery, found on an island off the coast of the United Arab Emirates [UAE], may date back to the period before the spread of Islam in the Arabian Peninsula.
The discovery, reported in early November, places even more weight to the claims of historians and ecclesiastical leaders—including Louis Raphaël I Cardinal Sako, the Patriarch of Baghdad of the Chaldeans— that the Christian community is an essential and indigenous component, in the past as today, of the region.
A group of archaeologists engaged in a series of excavations in the Emirates unearthed the remains on the island of Al-Sinniyah, belonging to the emirate of Umm Al-Quwain. In the area stood a church, a refectory, some cisterns for water supply and individual cells used by the religious.
Monsignor Paolo Martinelli, apostolic vicar of southern Arabia, which includes the UAE, Oman and Yemen, called it a discovery of “objective value” from a “historical” point of view and in terms of “reconstructing the events” that characterise the area.
“For us,” Monsignor Martinelli continued, “it is important to know the history of this Christian monastic presence, even though currently the faithful of the vicariate are almost all migrants, coming from other Churches.” He said that there is an undoubted value in the discovery that will have to be “deepened” in the future.
The discovery sheds new light on the history of the origins of Christianity in the Gulf region, thanks in part to the use of radiocarbon dating and analysis of ceramics found at the site
The discovery sheds new light on the history of the origins of Christianity in the Gulf region, thanks in part to the use of radiocarbon dating and analysis of ceramics found at the site. The first results date the ancient monastic community to between the end of the 6th century and the middle of the 8th century, fuelling conjectures of the presence of a settled community well before the arrival of Islam in the Arabian Peninsula.
“It is an extremely rare discovery,” said Professor Tim Power of the UAE University, who was part of the team who discovered the monastery. “It is an important reminder of a lost chapter of Arab history.”
He said, “The fact that something similar was happening here a 1,000 years ago is really remarkable, and this is a story that deserves to be told.”
Power also rejected claims that Christianity was violently supplanted by the rise of Islam, explaining that there was also a period of at least 300 years of coexistence. “The place was slowly abandoned. There was no sign of devastation or violence or burning. There was incremental cultural and social change as Christianity faded out and Islam became dominant. It is a monument to tolerance and multi-faith society,” he explained.
The discovery of the monastery is not the first in the Gulf, as a similar structure was found in the 1990s on the island of Sir Bani Yas in Abu Dhabi, until now believed to be the oldest in the Emirates.
According to historians, the first Christian churches and monasteries in the region spread along the Persian Gulf to the coasts of present-day Oman and India; other similar places of worship can be found in Bahrain, Iraq, Iran, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia.
