Map 2. The Medieval Islamic Caliphate
Shemʿon and Hnanishoʿ exemplify how East Syrian bishops stepped into expanded judicial roles after the fall of the Sasanian state and before the formation of a strong caliphal judiciary. Shemʿon’s law book conceptualizes the intergenerational transfer of wealth as an area of social life newly subject to ecclesiastical pastoral care and repackages principles of Sasanian inheritance law as a Christian tradition. Similarly, Hnanishoʿ’s decisions show how a high church official could take on a judicial role in regulating the disbursement of inheritances and, therefore, the reproduction of lineages, which had been one of the primary areas of activity of the Sasanian judiciary.16 Shemʿon’s and Hnanishoʿ’s efforts in this regard were not entirely unprecedented; we have a few Sasanian-era canons that give guidelines for both intestate inheritance and bequests.17 To judge by Shemʿon’s discussion, however, those few precedents in no way added up to an authoritative, comprehensive body of communal law; the very problem from which his treatise followed was that the “teaching of our Lord [mallpānutā d-Māran] … did not determine a law for deciding civil judgments [psāqā d-dinē].”18 In Hnanishoʿ’s case, earlier patriarchs surely adjudicated comparable lay disputes; but there appears to have been no conception that such decisions might constitute a formal body of East Syrian civil law, and only in the seventh century did the ecclesiastical administration take an interest in preserving them.19
Shemʿon’s and Hnanishoʿ’s works, then, exemplify efforts to formalize ecclesiastical rulings as the substantive body of a more comprehensive, specifically Christian civil law tradition in a time of institutional transition effected by the Arab conquests. They point as well to the convergence of marriage, kinship relations, and property rights as the social arena for which laypeople most frequently sought ecclesiastical help and into which the new conditions of caliphal rule most facilitated the extension of ecclesiastical authority. Late antique canon law had enjoined chaste sexual practice within the ancient institution of marriage. The establishment of the Umayyad Caliphate provided bishops of the Church of the East the opportunity to begin bringing the material imperatives of household reproduction under the purview of Christian law as well.
MARRIAGE AND RELIGIOUS BELONGING IN GREATER SYRIA
Unlike their East Syrian contemporaries, bishops in formerly Roman Syria and western Mesopotamia (as well as in Egypt) were not as actively concerned with extending ecclesiastical law into lay civil and household affairs. This difference stems from the fact that the end of Roman rule and the fall of the Sasanians had different implications for the caliphate’s Christian subjects. It is likely that the Christians of formerly Sasanian Iraq and Iran were less interested in going to the Zoroastrian judges of a no longer Zoroastrian state when they could turn to their own clerics instead, a grassroots impetus for the East Syrian ecclesiastical experimentations with communal law in the seventh century. In formerly Roman provinces, by contrast, the same Christian administrators, upper and lower clergymen, and others who served in judicial capacities remained more or less in place in the decades after the conquest (excluding those who fled with the Roman armies). Bishops in Syria thus did not have the same motivation as those in Iraq and Iran to emphasize new loci of judicial authority or to actively reconstitute their legal traditions to encompass inheritance law; they already had Roman law, or whatever was understood as Roman law in any given locale. What they did face was a shifting socioreligious landscape as the conquerors settled in the towns of Syria, bringing their new monotheistic message with them. Against this backdrop, the marital practices of Syrian Christians received heightened pastoral attention, evident in a range of episcopal letters, from bishops seeking to define social boundaries between their flocks and the conquerors.
The contrast between the institutional innovations undertaken by bishops in the eastern caliphate and in Syria is particularly evident among the Chalcedonians, those Christians who adhered to Roman imperial orthodoxy. In the first decades of the seventh century, jurist-bishops in Greek-speaking territories had continued the characteristically late Roman concern with legal codification, as inspired by Justinian, by composing the first nomocanons, novel collections of civil and ecclesiastical law;20 but after the conquests, we have no evidence of comparable endeavors by Chalcedonian bishops living under the Medinan caliphs or the Umayyads. The Syriac Orthodox or West Syrian Church, defined in theological terms by its opposition to Chalcedonian orthodoxy and its adherence to miaphysite Christological doctrines, presents a somewhat different case. Some West Syrian bishops of the later seventh century invested considerable energy in consolidating a communal legal tradition particular to their church. The major figure in this development is Jacob of Edessa (d. 708), a monk and bishop originally from the region around Antioch and known for his reformer’s zeal.21 By Jacob’s time, the West Syrian Church had achieved a degree of institutional distinctiveness in northern Syria and western Mesopotamia, with a hierarchy of bishops parallel to the region’s Chalcedonian one and a network of closely associated monasteries.22 In the late seventh century, Jacob took an interest in consolidating a specifically West Syrian ecclesiastical law that would both tie his church to the early Christian heritage and further define its institutional boundaries. To do so, he translated a variety of Greek pseudo-apostolic canonical works into Syriac. He then brought them together with Syriac versions of other works of canon law, especially ecumenical synods and the epistles of Church Fathers esteemed by miaphysites, into an authoritative collection of ecclesiastical legal texts.23
By and large, the texts in this collection were traditional ecclesiastical ones addressing church affairs. Jacob’s goal was thus to define a West Syrian ecclesiastical canon rather than expand it to newly encompass lay civil matters. In seeking to increase the institutional distinctiveness of the miaphysite church in Syria and focusing on legal canonization, moreover, Jacob was perhaps continuing late Roman trends more than he was responding to immediately postconquest conditions. Importantly, however, canonization was not Jacob’s only concern. He also penned a considerable number of responses to lower clerics on problems related to ritual and social dimensions of lay life.24 These and similar responsa of other bishops in the former Roman east were very much addressed to the particularities of life under Umayyad rule; and they point us toward another central feature, alongside the communal administrative autonomy permitted to subject elites, of the seventh-century caliphate: highly heterogeneous patterns of religious practice and intensive social contacts of individuals across the religious spectrum, which added up to religious identities below the elite level very much at odds with the picture offered by normative, doctrinal texts. Furthermore, the episcopal responsa extant from early Umayyad Syria demonstrate the degree to which the household and marital practice became significant sites for the articulation of communal boundaries in the midst of this diversity. Caliphal rule did not impel bishops in Syria to claim innovative new jurisdictions for Christian law to the degree that their contemporaries did in Iraq and Iran. But they did take an interest in regulating specific marital practices in an effort to define the acceptable modes of interaction between Christians and others, especially the region’s new rulers.
While the religious elites of the late antique and early medieval Middle East had vested interests in keeping their communities clearly differentiated in both social and religious terms, there is good reason to think that those boundaries were often much more fluid, at least from the sixth century into the eighth.25 The sources of this period are littered with examples of less doctrinal, more capacious conceptions of religious belonging that allowed for many modes of social and ritual interaction between individuals of different religious affiliations. The mishmash of peoples, scripts, and magical spirits of the Aramaic incantation bowls—where it is unremarkable to find a Christian commissioning a protective incantation against Iranian demons from a Jewish magician—is one good example. To take a few others from Christian-authored texts, we find that a villager baptized in the Church of the East might feel no compunction receiving communion from