Between Christ and Caliph. Lev E. Weitz

administrative, and religious authority in their hands. Al-Maʾmun’s (r. 813–33) demand that the ulama assent to particular theological doctrines is perhaps the most well-known example,⁹ but other, more nuts-and-bolts efforts were often more effective in the long run. Scribal formulas that are impressively consistent across tax documents from provinces as distant as Egypt and Khurasan point to a strongly centralized fiscal administration already under al-Mansur (r. 754–75).¹⁰ Similarly significant were the Abbasid efforts to reform the caliphal judiciary. Judicial institutions in the caliphate had been relatively less centralized and systematized under the Medinan caliphs and the Umayyads. Judicial appointments were largely at the discretion of regional governors, and it was entirely unexceptional for individuals not appointed as agents of the ruling house, such as tribal arbitrators and the exceptionally pious, to be treated as figures of judicial authority and recourse.¹¹ Judicial procedure and the norms dispensed by judges, furthermore, appear to have varied considerably from city to city, as the Abbasid vizier Ibn al-Muqaffaʿ famously lamented.¹² While some of these patterns persisted for centuries—no premodern state as large as the caliphate could have put an end to all of them—the Abbasid caliphs nonetheless devoted significant energy to centralizing and adding a degree of systematization to the empire’s diverse and diffuse judicial institutions, often with effective results. Principally, al-Mansur began the practice, brought to fruition under his successors, of centrally appointing the judges (quḍāt, singular qāḍī) of every major town in the caliphate. Harun al-Rashid (r. 786–809) is credited with establishing the office of chief judge (qāḍī l-quḍāt) as a member of the court and advisor to the caliph.¹³ Overall, the Abbasids’ projects brought new consistency to the learned judges’ audiences that increasingly became the model Islamic judicial institution, particularly in populous, closely administered Iraq.¹⁴ This meant, moreover, a degree of imperial patronage and support for the civilian religious scholars who developed the Islamic jurisprudence administered in the courts. While the ulama would long maintain a venerable tradition of reticence to accept state appointments in light of the injustice associated with rulers, the Abbasids appear to have had a hand in spurring the consolidation of the early Hanafi school of law, as caliphs beginning with al-Mahdi (r. 775–85) favored the students of Abu Hanifa for major judicial posts.¹⁵ Caliphal judicial reform and the formation of Islamic jurisprudence thus ran in tandem and partially informed the other’s success.

      Such, then, is the view of the Abbasid revolution and its aftermath from an imperial metropolitan perspective: a diversifying Muslim ruling class and population, the formation of Arabo-Islamic intellectual disciplines, and caliphal institutional reform and centralization. If the crux of early Abbasid history is often presented as these forms of “classical” Islam first beginning to cohere, however, the majority of the Abbasids’ subjects, certainly in the eighth and ninth centuries and perhaps a good deal later, were not Muslim and did not have a direct stake in the urban Muslim elite’s creative wrangling over Islamic identity. But that does not mean that the empire had no impact on their worlds. The religious and political traditions of non-Muslims had informed Islam and the caliphate since their initial formation; in the Abbasid period, we can view the continued development of the caliphate’s socioreligious order in non-Muslims’ adaptations to new Abbasid institutions and trends in Arabo-Islamic intellectual culture. For the ecclesiastical elites of the Christian communities that lived at the heart of the caliphate, the West Syrians in northern Syria and the Jazira (the caliphate’s northern Mesopotamian province) and especially the East Syrians in the Jazira, Iraq, and Iran, playing out the imperatives of Abbasid empire meant buttressing communal judicial institutions and creating newly expansive traditions of Christian law. Above all, that law aimed to extend the authority of the ecclesiastical hierarchy into Christian households and over the full range of practices by which Christians formed and reproduced families, kinship networks, and lineages. From the vantage point of the intellectual labors and administrative interests of contemporary Syriac bishops, the evolving Abbasid social order took shape at the intersection of empire, subject communal institutions, and the Christian household.

      CREATING CHRISTIAN LAW AT THE HEART OF THE ISLAMIC EMPIRE

       Christian Subjects in Muslim Courts

      The formation of new traditions of Christian law and the communal reconfigurations they imagined were one response on the part of Christian elites to the increasing organization of the caliphate’s institutions and the expectations that caliphal governance placed on non-Muslim subjects. If the early caliphate had tended to leave to subject elites the administration of their communities’ civil affairs, in the Abbasid period Muslim jurists and state officials began to articulate this practice of convenience as a more explicit principle of Islamic governance. Their discussions revolved around the concept of the dhimma or “pact of protection.” With roots in the Quran and the seventh-century administration of conquered territories,¹⁶ in the eighth century the dhimma came to denote the legal status of non-Muslims in the Islamic polity. The caliphate granted each non-Muslim religious group the status of a “protected” (dhimmī) community and a certain degree of autonomy to regulate its own affairs; in return, dhimmis were obligated to recognize the caliphate’s supreme authority, obey its commands, pay taxes, and follow regulations that distinguished Muslims from dhimmis and maintained the public predominance of Islam.¹⁷ Muslim jurists and officials began to theorize and spell out in greater detail these strictures especially in the late eighth and ninth centuries, motivated in part by the socioreligious diversity of Abbasid cities and the centralizing interests of the Abbasid caliphs. A variety of treatments of the place of non-Muslims in caliphal state and society circulated or were promulgated in this period, such as the Kitab al-Kharaj of the Abbasid chief judge Abu Yusuf and the regulatory edicts of the caliph al-Mutawakkil (r. 847–61), among others.¹⁸ No single approach to the public regulation of non-Muslims appears to have achieved canonical or official status in this period,¹⁹ but the multiplicity of views on offer makes clear that defining the contours of dhimma governance was a priority for many Muslim jurists and officials in the first Abbasid century.

      In certain respects, the dhimma framework worked in the favor of non-Muslim religious elites: it recognized a high degree of communal authority to rest with bishops, Jewish communal leaders like exilarchs and rabbis, and Zoroastrian priests. The institutional order of the early Abbasid Caliphate, however, presented distinct challenges to this vision even as Muslim officials more or less actively propagated it.²⁰ Caliphal judicial institutions, as they took a more organized form and as interreligious contact in the cities became more intensive under the early Abbasids, appear to have appealed to Christians, Jews, and others as well as Muslims. Principally, state courts were attractive because legal affairs transacted and rulings reached there had the backing of state (or at least local police) power. Contemporary sources contain numerous indications that Christians and Jews made frequent use of the services state courts provided; but this posed problems in turn for non-Muslim religious elites. Already in the seventh century, George I had asserted the exclusive authority of East Syrian bishops to adjudicate disputes among Christians; from the perspective of the caliph and many Muslim jurists too, that prerogative was the proper territory of non-Muslim religious elites. But George’s competition had been a variegated array of lay notables, holy men, and Muslim officials. By the late eighth and ninth centuries, a town or city in the caliphate’s central lands not only retained the local political authority as a figure of judicial recourse; increasingly, its judicial institution of recognizable prominence was the more formalized court of a Muslim qadi, a professional who administered a vigorously developing Islamic jurisprudence and had been favored by an appointment from a regional governor or the caliph himself. The fact of non-Muslim recourse to caliphal courts thus challenged elites’ ideas of communal integrity, which prioritized discrete institutional spaces enclosing all true believers.

      A range of responses to these conditions is discernible across the caliphate’s non-Muslim subject populations. The geonim of central Iraq’s Jewish academies, for example, followed rabbinic precedent in grudgingly tolerating the use of extraconfessional courts under limited circumstances.²¹ Significantly, however, they already had the extensive, detailed law of the Babylonian Talmud, which they considered authoritative for Jewish communal life, to administer in their own rabbinic audiences.²²