First Contact with the Armenian Apostolic Church Notwithstanding some of the difficulties which the Armenian nation faced throughout their history, it does on the whole appear unlikely for the Armenian Apostolic Church to have survived all of these centuries without some sort of legal precedent that they could invoke and which was recognized as authoritative by their Muslim rulers. From the eighth century onward, the Arabs, began to confiscate and appropriate lands belonging to the Armenian Apostolic Church, as evidenced by Armenian historiography. Ghevond recalls how under the Caliphate of Abū Ja‘far al-Mansūr (754 CE/136 AH–775 CE/158 AH) “the imposition of taxes upon our land of Armenia weighed extremely heavy.” 6 Al-Mansūr oppressed his subjects so much that they, having nothing else to pay, dug up the graves of their dead relatives hoping to find something valuable there as the Arabs collected taxes not only from the living, but also from the deceased. When the ‘Abbāsids acceded to power, the tolerant attitude of the Umayyads toward their subjects changed significantly.
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