The family is a locus of investigation of even wider significance. Because the family, in whatever forms it takes, has usually been the foundational institution through which human societies reproduce themselves—“the social form through which the two deeply related processes of biological reproduction and the transmission of property are pursued”—it provides a crucial vantage point from which to view wider structures of social organization and the “construction of cultural or national identities.”20 Indeed, sexuality and the household proved centrally important to the reorganization of Middle Eastern societies in the centuries after the establishment of Muslim rule. In the overwhelmingly Christian western half of the caliphate from the Iberian Peninsula to northern Iraq, Islam brought new attitudes toward sexuality and family life. The Christian “sexual revolution” of late antiquity had upended ancient attitudes toward sex and reproduction by esteeming virginity and looking askance at human sexuality; Islamic thought and practice, by contrast, reenshrined a typically ancient valorization of sex and worldly family life.21 In Iran and Central Asia, Muslim mores encountered and gradually supplanted very different marital and household reproductive practices, including close-kin marriage and polyandry, which were central to local forms of social organization.22
The establishment of the caliphate thus introduced new and different attitudes toward sexuality, strategies of social reproduction, and household forms to the diverse populations under its rule. Christian family law both reveals and exemplifies the social-institutional transformations that subject communities undertook in response. At times, lay Christians adopted the customs and mores of the new Muslim ruling classes; at others, bishops sought to retrench traditional Christian attitudes to household life in new legal idioms and thereby produced an idea of the Christian household distinct from that of the Muslims, Jews, and Zoroastrians among whom laypeople lived. All such activities were part of an ongoing process of defining the nature of the household and the wider religious community to which it was connected. That process offers us a window onto the encounter between the caliphate and its non-Muslim subjects, as well as the new imperial society that that encounter produced.
THE CHRISTIANS OF THE MEDIEVAL MIDDLE EAST: A SNAPSHOT
The inauguration of Muslim rule thus set in motion transformations to law, the family, the household, and other social institutions across the Middle East’s religiocommunal spectrum. All religious communities, however, did not experience these in the same way. This was particularly true of the region’s large and diverse Christian populations, which were divided among a number of distinct church communities. At the heart of our story will be the Church of the East, whose members are commonly referred to as East Syrians or Nestorians.23 The Church of the East traced its roots to the hierarchy of bishops and lay believers who lived in the Sasanian Empire, east of Roman territory, in late antiquity. Its adherents were concentrated in northern Mesopotamia, but it also claimed many members and jurisdictions throughout the Fertile Crescent, Iran, and at times Central Asia, India, and China. The chief East Syrian bishop, who took the title of Catholicos and Patriarch of the East, resided in the Sasanian capital of Seleucia-Ctesiphon and, after 775, in Baghdad. East Syrian ecclesiastical identity was defined by the use of Syriac as a literary and liturgical language; fidelity to the teachings of Theodore of Mopsuestia (d. 428), a late antique Christian thinker from Antioch in Syria; and diophysite Christological doctrines that stressed both the human and divine natures of Christ.
For reasons to be examined, the East Syrians developed the most extensive tradition of Christian law in the medieval caliphate and underwent some of the most marked communal-institutional changes. They will be central to our narrative, but other Christian communities will figure in important ways as well, especially the West Syrians and the Melkites. Like the East Syrians, the West Syrians—known also as Jacobites and today as the Syriac Orthodox—used Syriac as their chief literary and liturgical language.24 The West Syrians, however, adhered to a miaphysite Christology that stressed the unity of Christ’s nature and therefore considered East Syrian doctrines heretical. Their chief bishop took the title of Patriarch of Antioch. In the medieval period the West Syrians were concentrated in northern Syria and Mesopotamia and also had a significant presence in central Iraq.
The Melkites were Christians who lived under Muslim rule, adhered to the official orthodoxy of the Byzantine Empire, and quickly adopted Arabic as a literary language after the establishment of the caliphate.25 Their Byzantine orthodoxy was closely associated with the Christological definitions of the Council of Chalcedon of 451 (diophysite but not identical to the East Syrians’ Christology), so they are sometimes referred to as Chalcedonians. We will refer to them as Melkites beginning in the eighth century, when their Arabic literary production gave them an ecclesial identity distinct from the Byzantines even as they continued to share the same doctrinal commitments. The Melkites were concentrated in Syria and Palestine, with a substantial population in parts of Egypt.
While Muslims ruled over many other Christians outside the Fertile Crescent and Iran, transformations to Christian law, the household, and the religious community in the early medieval period took place especially in the core territories of the Umayyad and Abbasid caliphates. We will consider the history of other Christian groups, especially the Copts of Egypt, for comparative purposes at times, but they will remain largely outside the scope of this study.
From the sixth century to the tenth, the Christian communities of the Middle East underwent an array of transformations related to connections among the household, religious affiliation, and imperial rule. In the Islamic caliphate in the latter centuries of this period, increasingly intensive interactions between Christian elites and Islamic institutions spurred the former to reimagine the nature of Christian communities within caliphal society. Part I of this book traces the overall arc of these developments. Chapter 1 sets the backdrop by examining marriage and Christian canon law in the late antique Roman and Sasanian empires, arguing that in both realms ecclesiastical attempts to reform lay sexual practices ran up against enduring civil law traditions that defined marriage as a social institution. The seventh century and the early decades of the Umayyad Caliphate, by contrast, show evidence of the beginnings of a shift, which Chapter 2 explores. Regulating marriage became an increasingly prominent part of Christian bishops’ efforts to define communal boundaries amid the fluid socioreligious and institutional conditions brought on by the fall of the old empires and the introduction of a new ruling religion. In response to apostasy to Islam and intermarriage with the conquerors, bishops asserted for the first time the exclusive authority of ecclesiastical law, rather than civil, tribal, or local custom, to govern marriages between Christians. These Umayyad-era transformations developed into the great elaboration of Christian communal law in the central lands of the Abbasid Caliphate from the late eighth century through the ninth, the fulcrum of the book’s narrative and the subject of Chapter 3. In response to new caliphal institutions of governance and the emergence of robust traditions of Islamic law, ecclesiastics in the Abbasid heartlands made newly comprehensive efforts to define communal boundaries through confessional law. Above all else, they focused on regulating the full range of marital and inheritance practices that facilitated the social reproduction of households and lineages. Christian law thus reformulated the household as a Christian institution not only in theological terms but in its material and social constitution; and it established the link between ecclesiastical legal authority and lay households as the defining feature of Christians as social collectivities within the caliphate.
Prescribing rules, however, was always simpler than achieving their desired end, the reshaping of communal relations. In this vein, the book’s second part focuses on the details of Christian family law in the Abbasid Caliphate to examine how lay practice, Christian confessional law, and Islamic institutions interacted to shape Christian social boundaries around the institution of marriage. It demonstrates further that putting Christian legal materials into conversation with Islamic ones expands our view of the region’s