Bar-Sahde’s bowl vividly evokes a sphere of late antique household religiosity, intimately connected to sexual and familial order but largely outside the purview of Christian orthodoxies and formal hierarchies. To protect his family and household, Bar-Sahde took recourse to a Jewish magician and received an incantation invoking Jewish and Iranian powers. Besides the religious boundary crossing involved, the conspicuous feminine gendering of certain elements of Bar-Sahde’s incantation—its concern for matrilineal descent, the malevolent demon wife who must be divorced—evinces the domestic orientation of magical forms of ritual power and their difference from the more public, institutionalized ritual practices of the church (although the figure of the lilith is suggestive of a concern for the destructive potential of uncontrolled female sexuality common to many high-normative traditions as well).81 Late antique householders thus understood ritual practices like those surrounding Bar-Sahde’s bowl as specially attuned to the uncertainties and problems of desire, domesticity, and family life. Christian powers could certainly be harnessed to similar ends; psalm-chanting priests ward off demons in the story of Rabban Bar ʿEdta, for example, and East Syrian synodal canons mention learned and even ordained Christians who compose incantations, amulets, and auguries—indeed, we have plenty of incantation bowls written in Syriac, a number of which invoke the power of Christ and the Trinity.82 The telling point, however, is that high ecclesiastics condemned incantation writing, but not psalm chanting, as unlawful “demonic servitude” (pulḥānā d-shēdē): the former was part of a diverse tradition of ritual practice that bled out across the communal boundaries imagined by religious elites, operated outside the purview of more official hierarchies, and undermined Christian doctrine’s claim to exclusive authority over sexuality and domestic life. To high ecclesiastics, salvation came only through their prescribed forms of Christian piety and the singular mysteries of the Eucharist and baptism. But many laypeople decided they could not afford to bank on such an exclusivist model, and domestic religiosity, sexuality, and familial order in the late antique world were thus much more heterogeneous affairs than the normative ecclesiastical vision.
Figure 1. Syriac incantation bowl with an illustration of a magician. The incantation seeks protection against various demons for one Nuri and her house, husband, sons, and daughters. It invokes the Trinity, among other protective powers (see Moriggi, Corpus of Syriac Incantation Bowls, 27–31). The Catholic University of America, Semitics/ICOR Collections H156, with thanks to Dr. Monica Blanchard. Photo by author.
Marriage was foundational to the social organization of the late ancient world, as it had been to human societies for millennia. It was the chief institution around which the practices of social reproduction were organized, rendering sex between a man and a woman legitimate and defining the familial and kinship relations that transmitted property, status, and social identity. In the late antique eastern Roman and Sasanian empires, marriage bore considerable cultural weight and sat at the intersection of multiple normative orders: the imperial legal traditions that regulated the public meaning of cohabitation, sex, and associated property relations; religious traditions that ascribed cosmological significance to human sexuality and sought to direct its practice accordingly; and any number of local customs (regional, tribal, magical, etc.) by which subjects throughout the two empires conducted their domestic affairs.
While there was much interpenetration among these moral-legal-practical orders, a foundational story of late antique societies was the major challenge posed by Christian theologies of sex to other, long-established systems. In societies that by the sixth century were majority Christian as far east as the foothills of the Iranian Plateau, Christian traditions valorized virginity, downgraded the moral and theological significance of marriage and childbearing, and condemned a host of ancient and legally recognized practices: divorce, sex outside marriage for men, and, in the Sasanian Empire, close-kin unions and polygamy. But the Christian vision was not hegemonic. Even as Christian principles made their way piecemeal into Roman legislation and Christian clerics became influential community leaders, ecclesiastical law never had the authority to determine the public validity of marriage and the kinship and property relations that it established. Clerics preached, prescribed penitential punishments, and catechized, and all this undoubtedly prodded the sexual lives of laypeople toward the orthodox ideal, especially in cities and other territories with thick ecclesiastical presences. But it is clear that many of those ostensibly un-Christian practices associated with ancient marriage persisted in late antique societies, not least because they remained generally lawful in the eyes of the empires. The same held true for the rituals of domestic life, love, and religiosity decried as sorcery by ecclesiastics. Marriage remained an institution that inducted late antique subjects into multiple loyalties: to spouse, kin, and imperium as well as to the religious community.
The imperial orders of late antiquity, however, were soon to change. In the first half of the seventh century, armies from the Arabian Peninsula conquered the entire eastern Mediterranean world south and east of the Taurus Mountains. They brought with them a new religious dispensation, particular attitudes toward sex and marriage, and quickly developing ideas about how their Christian, Jewish, Zoroastrian, and other subjects were supposed to relate to their rule. The encounter with this new empire, the Islamic caliphate, transformed the social and intellectual worlds of the Middle East’s Christian communities over the course of its first three centuries. In particular, the articulation of caliphal structures motivated ecclesiastical leaders to reorganize Christian social patterns around the ancient institution of marriage in new and innovative ways.
CHAPTER 2
Christianizing Marriage Under Early Islam
For every land and for every nation, [God’s diligence] [bṭlutēh] has put in order regulatory laws [nāmosē mmashshḥē] suitable to the times and the people of [those] times … through Moses, He established a book of diverse laws for the old nation which was a foreshadowing of the mystery of the new. Then, He granted the Gospel of life to His church through the glorious appearance of His beloved one…. In all times, however, the fickleness and great weakness of men … demands that those who have been entrusted by the grace of God with the instruction of [men’s] souls take pains to zealously correct them.
—East Syrian patriarch George I, synodal address, 676
In 676, about a generation after Arabian armies proclaiming the message of the Prophet Muhammad first conquered much of the Sasanian and eastern Roman empires, the East Syrian patriarch George I (r. 660–80) journeyed from his see in central Iraq to a small island named Dayrin in the Persian Gulf. Though it may appear a marginal, unlikely destination for the chief bishop of the largest church in the caliphate’s eastern domains, the Gulf’s Arabian coastline and nearby islands—an area known in Syriac as Bet Qatraye, “the land of the Qataris”—had been home to a significant Christian community for several centuries.1 The local Christians’ deep roots gave George’s visit its urgency, for he had inherited a problem from his patriarchal predecessor: the Christians of eastern Arabia had been going increasingly astray. The bishops of Bet Qatraye had declared themselves independent of the East Syrian patriarchate in the old Sasanian capital of Seleucia-Ctesiphon, while further down the Gulf coast whole communities had traded in their Christian affiliation for the new religion of the Arab conquerors. George, claiming the ecclesiastical mantle of “those who have been entrusted by the grace of God with the instruction of [men’s] souls,” set out to the Gulf to convene a synod with the local bishops, set the church’s affairs aright, and attend to any local “practices in need of correction” (suʿrānē da-sniqin ʿal turrāṣā).2
While George’s stated aim was to bring local life in line with the preestablished, authoritative standard of the central patriarchate, several of the canons he issued were completely unprecedented. Among them was one concerning marriage: “Women who have not [yet] been married or given in betrothal by their fathers shall be betrothed to men through Christian law, according to the custom of the faithful. [This shall