The inclusion of nascent Islam into a Late Antique framework has become common practice among historians of Late Antiquity, but still remains unusual among Islamicists themselves (see, however, the important discussion of C.F. Robinson, “Reconstructing early Islam: truth and consequences”, in H. Berg (ed.), Method and Theory in the Study of Islamic Origins (Leiden, 2003), 101–34). Anthony's attempt at framing Umayyad crucifixion in its Late Antique context should thus be praised as an original contribution situating this institution in the longue durée.
Anthony opens his study with a bold statement claiming that “the Umayyad dynasty and its political fate were closely bound to the institution of crucifixion” (p. 1). The fact that such an important topic has not attracted much scholarly attention is explained by three main factors: 1) the false assumption that the practice was first and foremost a pre-Christian Roman punishment; 2) the wrong notion that the Islamic practice was a radical departure from previous centuries; and that, overall, 3) crucifixion was narrowly understood on the sole basis of Jesus of Nazareth's death and its abundant iconography. In fact, Anthony argues, crucifixion should be more broadly defined as the act of fastening “a body, living or dead, to a piece of wood fashioned for the purpose of execution and/or suspension for ignominious display” (p. 5).
Anthony advocates approaching the phenomenon in a Late Antique framework and begins with the study of Roman (ch. 2) and Sasanid (ch. 3) practices. It seems that it is only in the Roman period that damnatio ad crucem became a means of execution, whereas it had been restricted to the “exposition of dead bodies” in pre-Roman times (p. 7). If the slow process of Christianization of the Roman Empire had a “mitigating effect” on crucifixions, the practice did not brutally end with Constantine as often assumed (p. 8). This perpetuation of the practice is perhaps best explained by various adjustments, most notably the “watershed moment” of the replacement of the crux by the furca, or fork, in the fifth century in the West and in the sixth in Byzantium (p. 9).
In the Sasanid realm, crucifixion was – just as in the Roman world – used to suppress rebellion, but seems to have particularly targetted Zoroastrian apostates who converted to Christianity (p. 18). This had largely to do with the issue of purity in Zoroastrian doctrine, where “the soul's exit from the body rendered human flesh impure” (p. 24). Thus, exposing the dead body of the apostate and letting scavengers dispose of it was a way to “seal the martyr's fate as forcibly included within the Zoroastrian community by virtue of this last rite” (p. 26). By contrast, the Persian Martyr Acts reveal that crucifixion was rarely used for Christian martyrs (p. 20). This important discussion could have benefitted from further engagement with the various studies of C. Jullien (see in particular “Martyrs en Perse dans l'hagiographie syro-orientale: le tournant du vie siècle”, in J. Beaucamp et al. (eds), Juifs et chrétiens en Arabie aux v eet vi esiècles: regards croisés sur les sources (Paris, 2011), 279–90), and could now be complemented by P. Wood's recent analysis of The Chronicle of Seert: Christian Historical Imagination in Late Antique Iraq (Oxford, 2013).
Anthony then turns to the early Islamic period (ch. 4) and makes the case for the “profound impact” of late Roman and Sasanid practices on the Umayyads (p. 27). Crucifixion became increasingly visible during the lifetime of Muḥammad's companions (p. 29) before becoming a caliphal prerogative that proved “remarkably uniform” throughout the immense Umayyad Empire (p. 27). From a legal perspective, crucifixion became, as in the Quran, the “just recompense (jazāʾ) of ‘those who wage war against God and His Messenger and spread corruption in the land’”, i.e. those guilty of ḥirāba (p. 27). In practice, the label of muḥārib was capacious enough “to accommodate a range of malefactors” (p. 28) (e.g. apostates, heretics, rebels and brigands of various sorts), thus leading to competing legal interpretations (pp. 31–3). Umayyad-era crucifixions also had a historiographical component since they prompted the rise of martyrologies that are discussed in chapter 5.
Focusing on the specific examples of ʿAbd Allāh b. al-Zubayr (d. 73/692) and Zayd b. ʿAlī (d. c. 122/740, and not 720 as wrongly stated on p. 40 and again on p. 46 n. 20), Anthony shows how crucifixions served Umayyad purposes. Ibn al-Zubayr was thus turned into a mulḥid to be blamed for Mecca's fate, while Zayd was anathematized as “imam al-ḍalāla, a leader unto perdition” (p. 50). In these two examples of post-mortem crucifixions, the logic was the exact opposite of the Sasanid end reserved to apostates: the principle was here to deprive bodies from the “purity and corporeal dignity guarded by believers in early Muslim burial practices” (p. 43), thus delineating “the boundaries of communal identities” (p. 44) into death through public display of corpses. Crucifixion, therefore, fulfilled an important function in the affirmation of Umayyad legitimacy. Anthony studies in detail The Martyrdom of Peter of Capitolias (that only survives in Georgian) and The Passion of David of Dwin (in Armenian), two relatively neglected texts that offer a rich material on Umayyad-era crucifixion. He also suggests that Islamic historiography “preserves a unique twist on the martyrological genre that […] inverts the basic conventions of late antique martyrology and is thus an ‘anti-martyrology’”: instead of the martyr's salvation, the anti-martyr is eventually unmasked as a fraud (p. 61). Several examples are examined, but the discussion of Ghaylān al-Dimashqī would have benefitted from S.C. Judd's historiographical analysis (“Ghaylan al-Dimashqi: The isolation of a heretic in Islamic historiography”, International Journal of Middle East Studies 31, 1999, 161–84).
Anthony concludes (ch. 6) by pointing out that crucifixion was appropriated by the Umayyads as a “punitive institution” (p. 64) and used on a “massive scale and as a key tactic” (p. 66) in rebellious provinces. A clear surge of the phenomenon is observed under Marwān II, the last Umayyad ruler, whose accession “was virtually announced by his exhumation of the deceased caliph Yazīd III's corpse, which he crucified upside down” (p. 67). Anthony also provides a translation of neglected martyrologies in three appendices.
If the adoption of a Late Antique perspective should be applauded, the chronological contours of this slim book raise some questions with regard to the author's definition of Late Antiquity. Why, indeed, end with the demise of the Umayyads when the practice of crucifixion continued well into Abbasid times, and was notably used against Christian “neo-martyrs” (see for instance A. Binggeli, “Converting the caliph: A legendary motif in Christian hagiography and historiography of the early Islamic period”, in A. Papaconstantinou, M. Debié and H. Kennedy (eds), Writing ‘True Stories’: Historians and Hagiographers in the Late Antique and Medieval Near East (Turnhout: Brepols, 2010), 77–103)? The place granted to pre-Islamic Arabia (pp. 34–9) is also quite meagre in comparison to chapters devoted to Rome and Persia, even though the Peninsula was an area of intense competition between the two Empires. It is true that sources impose their limitations, but it is for instance worth pointing out that the Book of the Himyarites constantly refers to the Himyarite king Joseph (r. c. 522–c. 525/531) as the “crucifier” (Syriac: ṣlūbā), thus suggesting that the practice was well established. It is, in fact, quite interesting to note that if Anthony speaks of Roman and Sasanid Late Antiquity, he never uses the late T. Sizgorich's happy formula of an “Islamic Late Antiquity”, thus sticking to a more conventional view of Late Antiquity centred around the Roman and Persian Empires.
A final point has to do with the absence of a more theoretical discussion of the spectacular dimension of crucifixion, making the book's title somewhat misleading. The abundant scholarship on ritual violence and its public representation is indeed largely absent, even if Anthony duly acknowledges that the phenomenon “must be understood as a public and ritualized form of violence” (p. 67). From this perspective, recent scholarship such as L. Tracy and J. Massey (eds), Heads Will Roll: Decapitation in the Medieval and Early Modern Imagination (Leiden: Brill, 2012), would have been useful. Be that as it may, Anthony has provided an extremely valuable contribution to a much-neglected topic and set the stage for further studies.
