Monks, dinars and date palms: hagiographical production and the expansion of monastic institutions in the early Islamic Persian Gulf

Abstract

Recent archaeological studies have documented an expansion of monastic institutions in the Persian Gulf after the Islamic conquest, between the middle of the seventh and the end of the eighth centuries. Although the literary sources have often been invoked to support an earlier dating for the diffusion of coenobitic monasticism in the region, our principal source for the phenomenon — the History of Mar Yonan, hitherto misdated to the fourth century — confirms recent archaeologically informed interpretations. The narrative, moreover, provides an insight into the social and economic structures of monasticism in the seventh- and eighth-century Persian Gulf as well as the ideological conflicts that attended the emergence of those structures.