Abbasids’ rise to power as a “revolution,” an image evoked by the fact that their movement began as a clandestine one and that it swept aside an old regime.3 Just as important, the accession of the Abbasids created the conditions for significant changes in the social, religious, and political patterns of the caliphate. For one, the caliphate’s urban centers became increasingly diverse homes to a wide range of peoples. How justly the Abbasids ruled is up for debate, but there is little doubt that an unprecedented degree of participation of non-Arabs in the political and cultural affairs of the caliphate characterized the new order. Iranian Muslims from the eastern provinces, the core of the Abbasids’ supporters, filled the caliphate’s high administrative posts, and the Khurasani soldiers settled in Baghdad were a new and very different demographic presence in the Fertile Crescent.4 Besides the influx to Iraq of eastern Iranians, the wealth and opportunities for patronage in the empire’s main cities continued to attract the attention of a wide variety of individuals (almost always men) on the make. Civilian non-Arab Muslims, stigmatized in previous generations for their lack of pedigree, rose to prominence as religious scholars, state functionaries, and litterateurs as a matter of course in the early Abbasid period.5 Ethnic and religious diversity had certainly already been characteristic of Umayyad cities, but it intensified in the Abbasid period as a result of the partial breakdown of the ethnic hierarchies of the Umayyad order, the magnetic pull of wealth, and the ongoing rise of Arabic as a lingua franca and thus a source of cultural capital irrespective of speakers’ backgrounds. The conditions of Abbasid rule thus made the participation of an enormously diverse population in the high culture and governance of the caliphate increasingly unremarkable. Non-Muslims, especially East Syrian Christians whose demographic weight lay in Iraq but also Melkites, Harranian pagans, and others, gravitated toward the Abbasids’ urban centers and served the empire conspicuously as administrators, physicians, and other professionals.6
This mixing of populations set the stage as well for the formation of a host of vital Islamic intellectual traditions. Islam’s doctrinal content and the practical obligations of being Muslim were of course already at issue in the umma’s earliest days. But in the Abbasid Caliphate’s mix of new Muslims, old Muslims, and non-Muslims, many new and different answers were on offer for how an adherent of any given religious tradition was supposed to act and what one was supposed to believe. That setting, combined with Arabic’s growing literary prestige and the introduction of paper as a cheap, easy writing material, facilitated the initial coherence of several disciplines of study that would be foundational to the medieval Islamic tradition.7 Scholars dedicated to rationalistic inquiry into metaphysical truth cultivated Arabic theology (kalām) and Arabic philosophy in the tradition of late antique Greek thought (falsafa). The collection, study, and emulation of Hadith, traditions of the Prophet’s sayings and doings, continued among a very large subsection of pious Muslim scholars who had no patience for the speculations of theologians and philosophers. Most germane to our concerns is the formation of Islamic jurisprudence (fiqh).8 In the second half of the eighth century, Muslim jurisprudents (or their students) increasingly committed to paper the legal norms and methods of legal analysis they devised through study of the Quran, the example of the Prophet, and various local traditions of legal practice going back to the Prophet’s Companions. The later Sunni schools of law located their origins in the traditions and circles of the major Muslim jurisprudents of this era: Malik ibn Anas (d. 795) in Medina, Abu Hanifa (d. 767), Abu Yusuf (d. 795), and Muhammad ibn al-Hasan al-Shaybani (d. 805) in Iraq, and Muhammad ibn Idris al-Shafiʿi (d. 820) in the Hijaz, Iraq, and Egypt, not to mention other prominent jurists in Kufa, Basra, and Arabia whose traditions of study were subsumed by the other schools.
Closely related to the formation of Arabo-Islamic intellectual traditions was the reorganization and consolidation of institutions of caliphal governance, especially the judicial apparatus in Iraq and elsewhere, under the early Abbasids. In general, Abbasid caliphs and their advisors undertook a variety of projects aimed at centralizing legal, 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
