Expanding claims over lay households in the name of Christian law were among the earliest, most striking responses of bishops like George to the Arab conquests, the establishment of the Islamic caliphate, and the social changes those events brought. Scholars often assert that in the seventh century, when the conquerors and the adherents of their new disposition were few in number and before the caliphate’s techniques of rule had been formalized, life for the vast and diverse subject population of the new empire went on largely as it had before. But the clearing out of the former rulers in fact provided the subject elites who remained the opportunity to articulate new forms of authority, while the conquerors introduced new patterns of religious adherence to an already heterogeneous socioreligious landscape. In the absence of the old imperial orders, Christian religious elites began to make new claims concerning the authority of ecclesiastical law to set norms for laypeople; in conditions of religious diversity and shifting sociopolitical hierarchies, they took an increased interest in marriage and the household as sites for the elaboration of distinctively Christian social practices. Most notably, George I asserted the complete authority of Christian law over the public act of marrying, reformulating that foundational institution of social reproduction as an exclusively Christian one in order to secure the social boundaries of the Church of the East within the caliphate. In doing so, George and other contemporary Syriac bishops brought their Christian traditions in line with an established perspective among the other religions of late antiquity, including rabbinic Judaism, Zoroastrianism, and nascent Islam: that marriage was properly under the purview of religious law and constitutive of the religious community as a social body. In the seventh century, the halting establishment of a nascent Islamic empire thus effected the beginnings of a reformulation of Christian association centered on the link between ecclesiastical authority and believing households.
COMMUNAL INSTITUTIONS AND CHRISTIAN HOUSEHOLDS IN POSTCONQUEST IRAQ AND IRAN
When George I set off for the Persian Gulf in 676, the Islamic caliphate was ruled from Damascus by Muʿawiya, a scion of the Sufyanid branch of the Umayyad clan from Muhammad’s hometown of Mecca. The caliph, leader of a small, mostly Arab political and military elite, presided over a vast subject population of Christians, Zoroastrians, Jews, and others. Contemporary Christian writers would remember Muʿawiya’s long rule (661–80) as a time of stability and prosperity, bookended as it was by two civil wars among the ruling class.4 Modern scholars take special note of Muʿawiya’s caliphate for encompassing both the incipient formation of distinctive institutions of caliphal governance as well as strong continuities with the empires that the caliphate supplanted. On the one hand, Muʿawiya’s fiscal administration appears to have been already quite systematized, and he held the centralized power to appoint members of the conquest elite to regional governorships throughout the lands under caliphal rule.5 On the other, seventh-century Umayyad governance continued to rely on subject elites—scribes, urban notables, landowners, village headmen, and bishops and other religious elites—as administrators, local middlemen, and tax collectors. While later Umayyad caliphs beginning with ʿAbd al-Malik (r. 685–705) would reorganize this system and shift local fiscal and judicial authority away from non-Muslims, on the whole their elites played important roles in the administration of the caliphate throughout the seventh century.6 The other side of this coin was that Umayyad governance left subject elites wide latitude to attend to the internal affairs of their own communities. This was both an administrative practice of convenience and a function, though not yet theorized in especially explicit terms, of Quranic theologies that understood God to have allotted different peoples their own particular legal regimes (as in Quran 5:47–49).7
While Umayyad governance has been framed frequently in terms of continuity, since local elites are thought to have carried on administering communal affairs much as they had before the conquests, it is also clear that the Arabs’ overturning of the old imperial orders left room for considerable institutional innovation.8 Among the Christian communities that made up the majority of the caliphate’s population, East Syrian bishops in Iraq and Iran seized on this opportunity with special vigor to claim new forms of ecclesiastical judicial authority. Moreover, their efforts focused especially on regulating the practices of Christian household formation in new and more intensive ways.
These transformations are evident in the innovative Syriac legal texts produced by seventh-century East Syrian bishops. Immediately striking are the canons of George’s synod in the Persian Gulf. In addition to its assertion that Christian law had constitutive authority over marriages between Christians (to which we will return below), it made another, even broader claim regarding the ecclesiastical judiciary: all litigation between Christians had to be adjudicated before ecclesiastics. East Syrian bishops had never claimed an authority this exclusive under the Sasanians. The fall of the dynasty to the Arab conquerors, however, likely entailed the loss of imperial prestige on the part of its judicial officials; though they no doubt continued to offer judicial services, they now lacked the backing of state power that had made their services attractive for Sasanian subjects of any religious affiliation. In response to this relative vacuum, as well as the permissive stance of caliphal governance, George took the opportunity to claim an entirely new ecclesiastical jurisdiction over laypeople’s civil affairs.9
George’s synod represents the most assertive example of this interest on the part of the East Syrian ecclesiastical hierarchy. Two unique East Syrian legal works from the latter half of the seventh century, both highly innovative in form, genre, and content, provide further evidence. These texts deal especially with the law of inheritance and succession: how property devolves from one generation to another and thereby reproduces the material wealth and social standing of lineages. Through them, we can observe how the establishment of the caliphate entailed not only continuities in Christian communal structures but efforts to strengthen those structures by formalizing an ecclesiastical role in the life of lay families. The first text in question is the Law of Inheritance, a treatise by Shemʿon (fl. mid-seventh century), bishop of Revardashir in Fars province in southwest Iran, composed originally in Middle Persian but extant in a Syriac translation. The second is the collected Judicial Decisions of Patriarch Hnanishoʿ I (r. 686–98, mentioned in Chapter 1). These cover a variety of topics, but the majority convey Hnanishoʿ’s judicial decisions on inheritance disputes, many of which laypeople or lower clergy brought directly to the patriarch.10 The significance of these texts rests in two features: the subjects they address and their genre. As we have seen, East Syrian bishops had cultivated a tradition of ecclesiastical law throughout the Sasanian period. The bulk of that tradition, however, consisted of the hoary genre of canons issued by bishops assembled at synods. By its nature, synodal legislation tended to address the broad areas of immediate concern for which synods were convened, which usually meant church organization more than the affairs of laypeople. Shemʿon and Hnanishoʿ’s texts are different. They concern themselves with detailed points of family law, offering precise, casuistic considerations of how inheritances should be distributed. For example, the cases that Shemʿon treats include a man who dies with only his wife and brother as potential heirs and one who has only a granddaughter and a nephew.11 One of Hnanishoʿ’s decisions concerns a widow whose male in-laws have tried to appropriate her deceased husband’s estate rather than let her son inherit it.12 By contrast, one of the few Sasanian-era synodal canons to treat inheritance prescribes only a general principle: “every Christian who nullifies the will and testaments of the deceased” shall incur divine punishment, a far cry from the detail of Shemʿon’s and Hnanishoʿ’s rulings.13 Furthermore, these seventh-century works differ from synodal canons in that they are not bodies of collective legislation but compositions by individual specialists—bishops who have taken