of the Middle East’s Christian communities over the course of its first three centuries. In particular, the articulation of caliphal structures motivated ecclesiastical leaders to reorganize Christian social patterns around the ancient institution of marriage in new and innovative ways.
CHAPTER 2
Christianizing Marriage Under Early Islam
For every land and for every nation, [God’s diligence] [bṭlutēh] has put in order regulatory laws [nāmosē mmashshḥē] suitable to the times and the people of [those] times … through Moses, He established a book of diverse laws for the old nation which was a foreshadowing of the mystery of the new. Then, He granted the Gospel of life to His church through the glorious appearance of His beloved one…. In all times, however, the fickleness and great weakness of men … demands that those who have been entrusted by the grace of God with the instruction of [men’s] souls take pains to zealously correct them.
—East Syrian patriarch George I, synodal address, 676
In 676, about a generation after Arabian armies proclaiming the message of the Prophet Muhammad first conquered much of the Sasanian and eastern Roman empires, the East Syrian patriarch George I (r. 660–80) journeyed from his see in central Iraq to a small island named Dayrin in the Persian Gulf. Though it may appear a marginal, unlikely destination for the chief bishop of the largest church in the caliphate’s eastern domains, the Gulf’s Arabian coastline and nearby islands—an area known in Syriac as Bet Qatraye, “the land of the Qataris”—had been home to a significant Christian community for several centuries.1 The local Christians’ deep roots gave George’s visit its urgency, for he had inherited a problem from his patriarchal predecessor: the Christians of eastern Arabia had been going increasingly astray. The bishops of Bet Qatraye had declared themselves independent of the East Syrian patriarchate in the old Sasanian capital of Seleucia-Ctesiphon, while further down the Gulf coast whole communities had traded in their Christian affiliation for the new religion of the Arab conquerors. George, claiming the ecclesiastical mantle of “those who have been entrusted by the grace of God with the instruction of [men’s] souls,” set out to the Gulf to convene a synod with the local bishops, set the church’s affairs aright, and attend to any local “practices in need of correction” (suʿrānē da-sniqin ʿal turrāṣā).2
While George’s stated aim was to bring local life in line with the preestablished, authoritative standard of the central patriarchate, several of the canons he issued were completely unprecedented. Among them was one concerning marriage: “Women who have not [yet] been married or given in betrothal by their fathers shall be betrothed to men through Christian law, according to the custom of the faithful. [This shall be accomplished] through the consent of their parents, the mediation of the holy cross of our Savior, and a priestly blessing.”3 Marriages, according to this canon, would henceforth require sanctification by priests and Christian ritual to be valid. “Christian law” (nāmosā krēsṭyānā), rather than the law of the state or the custom of the village or tribe, was now the sole arbiter of the legitimacy of marital unions. In the traditions of Middle Eastern Christianity, this claim was strikingly new—and it underwrote a new conception of how marriage mediated the relationship between individuals, families, and households, on the one hand, and the larger social bodies to which they belonged, on the other.
Expanding claims over lay households in the name of Christian law were among the earliest, most striking responses of bishops like George to the Arab conquests, the establishment of the Islamic caliphate, and the social changes those events brought. Scholars often assert that in the seventh century, when the conquerors and the adherents of their new disposition were few in number and before the caliphate’s techniques of rule had been formalized, life for the vast and diverse subject population of the new empire went on largely as it had before. But the clearing out of the former rulers in fact provided the subject elites who remained the opportunity to articulate new forms of authority, while the conquerors introduced new patterns of religious adherence to an already heterogeneous socioreligious landscape. In the absence of the old imperial orders, Christian religious elites began to make new claims concerning the authority of ecclesiastical law to set norms for laypeople; in conditions of religious diversity and shifting sociopolitical hierarchies, they took an increased interest in marriage and the household as sites for the elaboration of distinctively Christian social practices. Most notably, George I asserted the complete authority of Christian law over the public act of marrying, reformulating that foundational institution of social reproduction as an exclusively Christian one in order to secure the social boundaries of the Church of the East within the caliphate. In doing so, George and other contemporary Syriac bishops brought their Christian traditions in line with an established perspective among the other religions of late antiquity, including rabbinic Judaism, Zoroastrianism, and nascent Islam: that marriage was properly under the purview of religious law and constitutive of the religious community as a social body. In the seventh century, the halting establishment of a nascent Islamic empire thus effected the beginnings of a reformulation of Christian association centered on the link between ecclesiastical authority and believing households.
COMMUNAL INSTITUTIONS AND CHRISTIAN HOUSEHOLDS IN POSTCONQUEST IRAQ AND IRAN
When George I set off for the Persian Gulf in 676, the Islamic caliphate was ruled from Damascus by Muʿawiya, a scion of the Sufyanid branch of the Umayyad clan from Muhammad’s hometown of Mecca. The caliph, leader of a small, mostly Arab political and military elite, presided over a vast subject population of Christians, Zoroastrians, Jews, and others. Contemporary Christian writers would remember Muʿawiya’s long rule (661–80) as a time of stability and prosperity, bookended as it was by two civil wars among the ruling class.4 Modern scholars take special note of Muʿawiya’s caliphate for encompassing both the incipient formation of distinctive institutions of caliphal governance as well as strong continuities with the empires that the caliphate supplanted. On the one hand, Muʿawiya’s fiscal administration appears to have been already quite systematized, and he held the centralized power to appoint members of the conquest elite to regional governorships throughout the lands under caliphal rule.5 On the other, seventh-century Umayyad governance continued to rely on subject elites—scribes, urban notables, landowners, village headmen, and bishops and other religious elites—as administrators, local middlemen, and tax collectors. While later Umayyad caliphs beginning with ʿAbd al-Malik (r. 685–705) would reorganize this system and shift local fiscal and judicial authority away from non-Muslims, on the whole their elites played important roles in the administration of the caliphate throughout the seventh century.6 The other side of this coin was that Umayyad governance left subject elites wide latitude to attend to the internal affairs of their own communities. This was both an administrative practice of convenience and a function, though not yet theorized in especially explicit terms, of Quranic theologies that understood God to have allotted different peoples their own particular legal regimes (as in Quran 5:47–49).7
While Umayyad governance has been framed frequently in terms of continuity, since local elites are thought to have carried on administering communal affairs much as they had before the conquests, it is also clear that the Arabs’ overturning of the old imperial orders left room for considerable institutional innovation.8 Among the Christian communities that made up the majority of the caliphate’s population, East Syrian bishops in Iraq and Iran seized on this opportunity with special vigor to claim new forms of ecclesiastical judicial authority. Moreover, their efforts focused especially on regulating the practices of Christian household formation in new and more intensive ways.
These transformations are evident in the innovative Syriac legal texts produced by seventh-century East Syrian bishops. Immediately striking are the canons of George’s synod in the Persian Gulf. In addition to its assertion that Christian law had constitutive authority over marriages between Christians (to which we will return below), it made another, even broader claim regarding the ecclesiastical judiciary: all litigation between Christians had to be adjudicated
