George’s canon (and Shemʿon and Hnanishoʿ to a lesser extent) put forward the same notion for a Christian constituency. Like Quranic legislation, George’s East Syrian law unmoored marriage from the civil frameworks—whether regional practice, tribal custom, or imperial law—that might also govern the institution and define its role in forming households and reproducing social relations. To what degree Christians actually followed his prescription is a different question that later chapters take up. But in normative terms, these seventh-century developments in East Syrian tradition asserted that the ancient human business of household formation and reproduction properly served and belonged under the purview of the religious community rather than any other human collectivity. The learned elite of late antiquity’s exclusivist religions largely shared the perspective that confessional belonging was an all-encompassing identity that subsumed other loyalties. Christianizing marriage as a legal institution brought East Syrian tradition in line with its neighbors in propagating that notion; and it undergirded a conception of the church as one of many social bodies within the Islamic caliphate that bishops in later centuries were to amplify and refine.
While the establishment of the seventh-century caliphate did not explode the communal structures of the vast and varied subject populations under its rule, neither did it leave them untouched. The clearing out of former political elites and the accession of new ones interested in little more than tribute, taxes, and obedience from their subjects left room for subject elites to creatively reform their communal institutions. For Christian bishops in Iraq and Iran, that meant assuming more active judicial roles in their local communities, penning new corpora of ecclesiastical law, and asserting the independence of local ecclesiastical organizations from hierarchies established under the Sasanians. Into regions characterized by frequent interaction among individuals of different confessions and loose attitudes toward which religious rituals and communities any individual might participate in, the conquerors added nascent Islam to the mix. For bishops as for other subject religious elites, this created both a necessity and an opportunity to define more explicitly those social and ritual practices attendant to orthodox faith, especially in light of the sometimes uncomfortable proximity between Christian and early Muslim attitudes toward God, Jesus, and prayer.
Central to all of these adaptations to the new order of the seventh century was the Christian household. Bishops in Iraq and Iran mediated inheritance disputes and offered guidelines for the transmission of family property and thus the material constitution of Christian lineages, assuming more explicitly a role for ecclesiastical law that had belonged previously to the Sasanian judiciary. In Syria and Iraq, marriages between conquerors and Christians and a burgeoning interest in polygamy on the part of some laymen made marital practices a newly significant locus for the definition of Christian social distinctiveness. Most strikingly, George I responded to shifting socioreligious dynamics and fractious ecclesiastical politics in eastern Arabia by redefining marriage itself as an exclusively Christian institution. Bringing proper order to the institution that was the linchpin of social reproduction would secure the boundaries of the local Christian community in a changing corner of the caliphate. Thus, beyond the accession of a new political elite and the rising public predominance of a new religion, the establishment of the caliphate in the seventh-century Middle East set off reverberations that, in the form of ecclesiastical regulation, reached even into the households of Christian subjects.
The universalizing claims of George’s synod notwithstanding, each of the creative adaptations by seventh-century Christian religious elites to postconquest conditions was piecemeal and responsive to particular, local circumstances. After the fall of the Umayyads, however, the increasing confidence and formalization of caliphal institutions of governance and Islamic traditions would elicit a different response from Christian elites. Under the rule of the early Abbasid caliphs, Christian bishops—especially West Syrians and East Syrians—undertook a more comprehensive effort at communal institutional reshaping: a reinvention of ecclesiastical law that placed marriage, the household, and the practices of social reproduction squarely at the foundation of Christian churches as non-Muslim social groups within the caliphate.
CHAPTER 3
Forming Households and Forging Religious Boundaries in the Abbasid Caliphate
Humans are distinct and separated from each other, in countries and lands, peoples and languages, customs and laws. Each of them desires a way of life in accordance with the customs and laws in which they have been habituated and raised. Indeed, they never depart from something when they have been habituated and raised in it. They accept change from something when they have been established in it only with difficulty and thousands of dangers; for custom is second nature, as the saying goes…. Who, then, can bring to a unity and gather together that which, a thousand times over, is separate and differentiated according to its [very] nature …?
—East Syrian patriarch Timothy I, Law Book
In 805, Timothy I, the sitting patriarch (r. 780–823) of the Church of the East, composed the words above in the preface to a new book of civil regulations for East Syrian Christians. Although they are highly rhetorical, their sentiment contrasts notably with George I’s remarks delivered to the synod of Bet Qatraye some 129 years earlier. While both concerned the rules that guide human beings’ actions, Timothy expresses none of George’s confidence in the power of bishops to put those rules into effect. Instead, he evokes a near bewildering diversity of peoples for whom God has established no single, unitary law. Human beings are a motley, mixed-up collection of creatures; trying to bring some order to mundane, messy human societies—that human condition “which, a thousand times over, is separate and differentiated according to its [very] nature”—is an unenviable task. Yet despite his protestations of the difficulty involved, this is precisely what Timothy set out to do with his new Law Book: to compile a single law for social practice to govern Christian believers, those peoples united by a shared faith but heretofore diverse in their “way of life.” His interest in doing so was motivated by wider transformations in the institutional order and intellectual life of the caliphate in the late eighth and early ninth centuries. Timothy’s Law Book exemplifies the response of many Christian elites living at the heart of the empire to those transformations: a reformulation of Christian communal belonging rooted in a new confessional law and a new conception of the Christian household.
The first century and a half of the Abbasid dynasty’s rule, beginning in 750, is widely regarded as a crucial phase in the development of medieval Islamic society. Muslim caliphs, administrators, and scholars refined institutions of caliphal governance, from court ceremonial to taxation to the dispensing of justice; the Islamic dispensation realized its universal potential as non-Arab Muslims came to participate in the umma, the Muslim community, as fully as did descendants of the Arab conquerors; foundational intellectual traditions like Islamic law and theology took shape. Yet the early medieval caliphate remained a diverse, multiethnic, multireligious empire, and its vast numbers of non-Muslim subjects, especially the numerous Christians in its core territories west of Iran, both participated in and were affected by the transformations of Muslim state and society. Where early Umayyad rule had come with significant continuities in administration and social organization for the caliphate’s subjects, developments in the Abbasid period spurred non-Muslim elites to rethink and reform their own communal institutions and traditions far beyond the concerns of their seventh-century predecessors. Their efforts to do so offer a vital vantage point—the intersecting interests of the empire and its subject elites—from which to trace the formation of the early Abbasid Caliphate’s social order, so foundational a model of “medieval