Hnanishoʿ offended the caliph ʿAbd al-Malik with a tactless remark about Islam, which gave his enemies the opportunity to dethrone him in 691.
He spent the next two years of his reign either in prison or, after surviving a murder attempt, in hiding, while the throne of Seleucia-Ctesiphon was occupied by the anti-patriarch Yohannan Garba ('the Leper').
When ʿAbd al-Malik, son of Marwan, the king of the Arabs arrived in the land of Senʿar [Babylonia], Hnanishoʿ came to meet him and offered him the usual presents.
Meanwhile Yohannan had borrowed large sums of gold in order to bribe the governor of ʿAqula, and when the time came for repayment was unable to meet his obligations.
[6] His letters are an essential source for understanding the functioning of justice in the East Syrian world at the end of the 7th century.
He had been buried in the monastery of Jonah, on the east bank of the Tigris opposite Mosul, and when the tomb was opened his body, lying in a coffin of planewood, was said to have been found to be in a miraculous state of preservation.
The monastery was confiscated and turned into a place of Muslim pilgrimage shortly afterwards, and when Timur Leng visited it in 1393 it had undergone a remarkable transformation.
The 'tomb of Jonah' still exists, and visitors are still shown a heavy planewood coffin, reverently shrouded with a green cloth, in which the prophet supposedly lies buried.
Some historians suspect that for the past six centuries the Muslim faithful have been paying their devotions to the petrified corpse of a Christian patriarch.