Between Christ and Caliph. Lev E. Weitz

Muslims on raiding expeditions and slide into praying alongside them.²⁶ These individuals and countless others like them were embedded in any number of social networks, from villages to business partnerships to tribes and even marriages, not perfectly congruent with their confessional communities.²⁷ Especially in rural areas, where the vast majority of the region’s population resided, hints in the sources suggest that loyalty to local leaders and local sources of sacred power could mean as much to conceptions of religious affiliation as the lettered elite’s doctrines; the religious practices and social obligations that confessional belonging entailed thus look increasingly varied the further away any given community was from the instruction and oversight of literate, trained religious elites like bishops, rabbis, or Zoroastrian priests.²⁸ Overall, it appears that many subjects of the late antique empires did not understand religious belonging as an identity so exclusive as to determine all social ties, institutions, and ritual activities in which one could participate. The emergence of nascent Islam, moreover, likely intensified these already heterogeneous and hybrid socioreligious patterns. What were the faith commitments of the new ruling Arab tribesmen, whom their Christian subjects called magaritai and mhaggrāyē in reference to their self-designation as “militant emigrants” (muhājirūn in the seventh-century Arabic usage) who had come from Arabia to conquer the known world?²⁹ They proclaimed the God of Abraham and venerated Jesus the Messiah. In Syria they tended to settle in old urban centers (rather than found new garrison cities as in Egypt and Iraq), and in the early days after the conquests they sometimes performed their prayers in churches.³⁰ If some non-elites already did not know or care much about the distinctions between Chalcedonians, miaphysite West Syrians, and Nestorians, what made these new Abrahamic monotheists so different? The general indeterminacy of the relationship between the Arabs’ religious movement and other scriptured traditions likely rendered the boundaries between conquerors and conquered uncertain in the eyes of many.

      That uncertainty should not be taken to imply that religion “on the ground” was a free-for-all, however, and here the responsa of bishops like Jacob enter the picture. Most late antique subjects must have understood themselves to belong to one religious community or another, whatever they understood the content of its traditions to be; there were certain actors for whom religious difference was very clear and to be enforced with violence;³¹ and local institutions (such as kin networks and village leaders) created boundaries of their own that made religious difference socially concrete, as most assuredly did political hierarchies between conqueror and conquered. This, in fact, is where the writings of religious elites like bishops, rabbis, and Muslim ulama become especially instructive. They frequently focus on the specific contested practices around which elites and others made competing claims as to how religious belonging should impact social relations and how religious difference should be enacted; beyond simply attesting to fluid socioreligious boundaries, elite prescriptive texts identify the particular institutions through which they sought to solidify those boundaries. For our purposes, the responsa literature of seventh-century Syrian bishops underscores the significance of marriage in just this respect. The Arab conquerors, as a new element introduced to already diverse socioreligious environments, refocused ecclesiastical attention on defining the marital practices and attitudes toward sexuality that were a chief feature distinguishing Christians from others.

      Two areas of concern are especially evident in the responsa: sexual contact between Christians and the new rulers and polygamous marriages. Regarding the former, for example, Jacob of Edessa responds in a letter to the priest Adday to the question of whether a Christian woman married to a Muslim (mhaggrāyā) can still receive communion—a concern especially pressing because, in this case, “her husband is threatening to kill the priest [gāzem baʿlāh ʿal kāhnā d-qāṭel lēh] if he does not give her the Eucharist.”³² Elsewhere, Jacob takes up the question of the appropriate penance for a Christian who commits adultery with a non-Christian.³³ An epistle of the West Syrian patriarch Athanasios II of Balad (r. 684–87) and a series of questions and answers by the Chalcedonian monk Anastasios of Sinai (fl. late seventh century) also address the permissibility of interreligious marriage.³⁴ Anastasios considers as well the spiritual status of enslaved Christian concubines of Muslim masters.³⁵ The ecclesiastics disapprove of all of these cases, though they accommodate them to differing degrees and to different ends that we will examine in detail in Chapter 8. For now, it suffices to note that household ties and sexual contact between the Arab conquerors and subject Christians were not uncommon in the first decades after the conquest, whether through marriage or because women among the considerable numbers of captives taken by the conquerors could be pressed into slave concubinage.³⁶ This spurred bishops to assert that religious difference required social separation: whatever they were, the Arab conquerors were not orthodox believers, and as such marriage with them was to be avoided.

      Polygamy crops up conspicuously as well in bishops’ responsa from seventh-century Syria, and it too has significant implications for the confessional stew of the Umayyad Caliphate. Polygamous household forms had no doubt been customary in many corners of pre-Islamic Arabia and were sanctioned by the Quranic passages understood to allow men four wives and any number of concubines that they could support (e.g., 4:3). When the conquests exported these practices to the conquered territories, the similarities between Christianity and the conquerors’ scriptural religion appear to have made polygamy’s lawfulness a newly live question for some lay Christians. So, a letter written by a mid-seventh-century West Syrian bishop named Yawnon counsels one Theodore, a traveling priest, on how to refute challenges to the Christian principle of monogamy that Theodore had been receiving. Anastasios also takes up the question as to why, when “those under the Law [i.e., the biblical forebears] often had two wives at the same time and were not condemned for it,” Christians may not do the same. A ruling of Jacob of Edessa’s prohibiting anyone from taking multiple spouses is salient here as well.³⁷ In the case of polygamy, the permeable socioreligious boundaries engendered by the conquerors’ settlement in the lands of the old empires gave new currency to a marital practice long condemned by ecclesiastical tradition, and hence to the Christian household as an arena in which the bishops could prescribe differentiating practices.

      The responsa of Jacob, Athanasios II, and Anastasios, which fit broadly into the genre of ecclesiastical law by virtue of their prescriptive nature, treat many ritual, liturgical, and administrative matters in addition to the family. The latter subject did not command the overwhelming attention of Chalcedonian and West Syrian bishops in the early caliphate, nor did they newly reshape their legal traditions to cover civil areas like inheritance in the manner of their contemporaries to the east. But in the context of the region’s already varied religious landscape and the new uncertainties introduced by the conquerors’ confession, marriage and the household came into renewed focus for Syrian bishops as institutions requiring ecclesiastical regulation and around which they could articulate the social obligations attendant to Christian belonging.

      GEORGE I GOES TO QATAR: CREATING CHRISTIAN MARRIAGE

      While social structures in the seventh-century caliphate exhibited strong continuities with the recent past, Christian clerical elites also responded to conditions brought on by the conquests in innovative ways. In Iraq and Iran, East Syrian bishops expanded ecclesiastical law and judicial activity to cover lay inheritance; in Syria, West Syrians and Chalcedonians sought to regulate newly contested lay marital practices as an already diverse indigenous population encountered its new ruling class. These themes—expanding Christian legal institutions, fluid socioreligious boundaries, and practices associated with the household—converge in the most potentially transformative social regulation enacted by a bishop in the seventh-century caliphate: George I’s canon proclaiming that ecclesiastical law and priestly ritual granted unions between laypeople the status of marriage. In the late antique empires, a revisionist Christian sexual morality had coexisted with durable civil legal structures that regulated the public side of marriage; George’s arrogation of the institution to the exclusive authority of ecclesiastical law at the Persian Gulf synod of 676 was therefore a radical move, one enabled by the wide latitude for communal administration that Umayyad rule granted ecclesiastics.³⁸ The canon had immediate and local concerns: it was geared toward securing the integrity of the church of eastern