and significant end. As Chapter 8 discusses in greater detail, legal regimes that regulate the marriage of women across group boundaries are fundamentally efforts to manage the group’s reproductive resources. It was a standard assumption of the patrilineal societies of the late antique and medieval Middle East that husbands and fathers defined the religious affiliation of their families.56 Therefore, when a Christian woman married a non-Christian man, her reproductive potential was lost to her natal community, as her children would affiliate to her husband’s religion. If ecclesiastical schism and apostasy represented immediate, collective losses to the Church of the East, marriages with the conquerors threatened its communal integrity by draining away potential believers from future generations.
George’s marriage canon was a response to these conditions. Asserting Christian law’s constitutive authority over marriage was an effort to secure the continued reproduction and integrity of the Church of the East as a socially embedded body of believers, particularly in a region with a recent history of ecclesiastical schism and Islamic expansion. Making the institution subject to Christian law and ecclesiastical oversight meant ensuring that marriage was put into proper practice producing future generations of faithful Christians, the very substance of the church as a discrete community within the caliphate’s diverse society. Toward these ends, George took the novel step of redefining the social and legal institution of marriage as an exclusively Christian one.
Marriage and the Religious Community in Islamic Late Antiquity
George’s canon, like other ecclesiastical efforts to regulate Christian households in Syria, Iraq, and Iran, was a response to a host of local contingencies. In this case, it was the unstable ecclesiastical politics and religious dynamics of seventh-century Bet Qatraye that demanded renewed attention to lay marital practices. George’s formulation of Christian marriage, however, had implications that went beyond its local impetuses. Issued as it was by an ecclesiastical synod, George’s canon was couched in a universalizing language that implied universal applicability. Christian women “shall be betrothed to men through Christian law”; anyone who transgresses this principle “shall also be anathematized from the church.” By virtue of the form in which these strictures were issued, they theoretically applied not only to the Christians of Bet Qatraye but to all the laypeople under the purview of the Church of the East. It would take East Syrian bishops another century to revisit in a dedicated fashion the juridical implications of George’s assertion that religious law, rather than that of the state, tribe, or other association, was the ultimate arbiter of the ancient institution of marriage. But already in the Umayyad Caliphate, it implied a reformulation of the social contours of the Christian community and brought East Syrian tradition into step with neighboring religions.
The idea that the law of the religious community had constitutive authority over marriages between its adherents had prevailed for some time among Jewish rabbis and Zoroastrian priests, and it was in the process of articulation as well among seventh-century Muslims. A distinctively Jewish law of marriage was already integral to the Mishnah and two Talmuds, the repositories of communal legal tradition around which rabbinic Judaism coalesced over the course of late antiquity.57 The rabbis crafted a specifically Jewish law of contractual marriage that reshaped biblical prescriptions, aiming thereby to “creat[e] a collective memory, a formation of one Israel through the perception of continuous communal adherence to laws that stretch back to the primal myths.”58 While it is clear that many Jews in antiquity attended to their legal affairs, including contracting marriages, through a variety of civil legal orders,59 the rabbis’ tradition affirmed a fundamental connection between marriage and the wider religious community of their followers. Similar perspectives prevailed in the Zoroastrian priestly tradition: marrying was a meritorious act in the service of the Good Religion, while the prescriptions of Sasanian inheritance law encoded the Zoroastrian emphasis on reproducing male lineages in order to perpetuate the worship of the good deity Ohrmazd.60 Finally, God’s revelation to Muhammad in the Quran contained a considerable body of norms relating to the family and household life.61 Quranic legislation reformed or systematized the marital practices of pre-Islamic Arabia, and in so doing affirmed the authority of God and His law over marriage as an Islamic institution.62
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
