Umayyad Caliphate. Polygamous household forms had no doubt been customary in many corners of pre-Islamic Arabia and were sanctioned by the Quranic passages understood to allow men four wives and any number of concubines that they could support (e.g., 4:3). When the conquests exported these practices to the conquered territories, the similarities between Christianity and the conquerors’ scriptural religion appear to have made polygamy’s lawfulness a newly live question for some lay Christians. So, a letter written by a mid-seventh-century West Syrian bishop named Yawnon counsels one Theodore, a traveling priest, on how to refute challenges to the Christian principle of monogamy that Theodore had been receiving. Anastasios also takes up the question as to why, when “those under the Law [i.e., the biblical forebears] often had two wives at the same time and were not condemned for it,” Christians may not do the same. A ruling of Jacob of Edessa’s prohibiting anyone from taking multiple spouses is salient here as well.37 In the case of polygamy, the permeable socioreligious boundaries engendered by the conquerors’ settlement in the lands of the old empires gave new currency to a marital practice long condemned by ecclesiastical tradition, and hence to the Christian household as an arena in which the bishops could prescribe differentiating practices.
The responsa of Jacob, Athanasios II, and Anastasios, which fit broadly into the genre of ecclesiastical law by virtue of their prescriptive nature, treat many ritual, liturgical, and administrative matters in addition to the family. The latter subject did not command the overwhelming attention of Chalcedonian and West Syrian bishops in the early caliphate, nor did they newly reshape their legal traditions to cover civil areas like inheritance in the manner of their contemporaries to the east. But in the context of the region’s already varied religious landscape and the new uncertainties introduced by the conquerors’ confession, marriage and the household came into renewed focus for Syrian bishops as institutions requiring ecclesiastical regulation and around which they could articulate the social obligations attendant to Christian belonging.
GEORGE I GOES TO QATAR: CREATING CHRISTIAN MARRIAGE
While social structures in the seventh-century caliphate exhibited strong continuities with the recent past, Christian clerical elites also responded to conditions brought on by the conquests in innovative ways. In Iraq and Iran, East Syrian bishops expanded ecclesiastical law and judicial activity to cover lay inheritance; in Syria, West Syrians and Chalcedonians sought to regulate newly contested lay marital practices as an already diverse indigenous population encountered its new ruling class. These themes—expanding Christian legal institutions, fluid socioreligious boundaries, and practices associated with the household—converge in the most potentially transformative social regulation enacted by a bishop in the seventh-century caliphate: George I’s canon proclaiming that ecclesiastical law and priestly ritual granted unions between laypeople the status of marriage. In the late antique empires, a revisionist Christian sexual morality had coexisted with durable civil legal structures that regulated the public side of marriage; George’s arrogation of the institution to the exclusive authority of ecclesiastical law at the Persian Gulf synod of 676 was therefore a radical move, one enabled by the wide latitude for communal administration that Umayyad rule granted ecclesiastics.38 The canon had immediate and local concerns: it was geared toward securing the integrity of the church of eastern Arabia amid shifting political and socioreligious patterns that nascent Islam had introduced to the region. It also, however, had wider implications. In stressing a fundamental connection between marriage and the public shape of the religious community, George’s canon set a precedent for how to conceive of and regulate Christian social groups within the Islamic empire that bishops in later centuries would develop in novel and significant directions.
The particular prescriptions of George’s canon were several. They revolved around the steps unwed Christians would have to take in order to marry, and the role of priests and the church in that process:
Women who have not [yet] been married39 and are [fit to be] given in betrothal by their fathers’ house[s] shall be betrothed to men through Christian law [b-nāmosā krēsṭyānā], 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 [burktā kāhnāytā]. Because it is easy for Christians, unlike the rest of the nations, strangers to the fear of God, to err in lawful marriage [shawtāputā d-zuwwāgā nāmosāyā] and adhere to something else, it is necessary and all the more beneficial that a contract between the betrotheds [tanway da-mkirē w-da-mkirātā] be [confirmed] in the presence of the Creator of our life and the Giver of our salvation. [This is] so that if they break the pact of their union, the sign of our victory [nishā d-zākutan, cf. Philippians 3:14], through which all our hidden things are revealed and our deeds scrutinized before the tribunal of His fearsome glory, shall seek vindication of them [it [h]u l-hon tāboʿā]. Together and through a priestly blessing, then, [the betrothed ones] shall affirm faithfully that they conclude, by the blessing, the bond of their union [assārā d-shawtāputhon], according to their hope [for salvation in the world to come]. If, however, they transgress against these things because they want to marry in a new way and despise the established law, when they come to deceive each other they shall be left without vindication [tbaʿtā], for they have been deprived of the priestly blessing. They shall not deserve to be freed from the injustices [that they visited upon] each other through [ecclesiastical] decisions.40 Along with these things, they shall also be anathematized from the church.41
In George’s presentation, properly Christian marriage is demanding; the high standards of Christian sexual morality make it much easier for Christians to go astray than it is for adherents of other religions, with their looser sexual and marital norms. Therefore, it is only appropriate that ecclesiastical officials oversee marriages between Christians, ensuring that they have been contracted in the presence (qarributa) of God. Henceforth, the Church of the East shall recognize only betrothals blessed by a priest in a proper Christian ritual as legitimate; the priestly blessing, consent of the spouses’ parents,42 and a vocal affirmation of consent on the part of the spouses themselves are the constitutive elements that bring a valid betrothal contract (tanway da-mkirē w-da-mkirātā) into effect.43 If some dispute arises over the contract or between the spouses, they may seek settlements from ecclesiastical judges. If Christians do not marry through a priestly blessing, however, not only will they be unable to have disputes adjudicated by ecclesiastics. They shall also be banned from the church—that is, from receiving the Eucharist and thereby participating in Christian communion, the path to salvation.
George’s canon offers a considerable reformulation of marriage as a legal institution. There had been a variety of judicial avenues through which Christians in the late antique Middle East contracted marriages and formed households, and though ecclesiastical officials and blessings were often involved, the norms of civil law traditions were commonly understood to grant public recognition of a marital union’s validity. In George’s formulation, marriage is no longer a civil institution within which laypeople are expected to behave in appropriately Christian ways. The institution itself is now under the purview of Christian law (nāmosā krēsṭyānā); to marry requires correct ritual performance in conformity with that law; and as a contract and a legal relationship, marriage is constituted through its ritual elements, chiefly the priestly blessing, rather than consensual cohabitation or handing over a dowry. To fall short of this, moreover, means not only that one’s marriage is not legally valid; it is to lose the right of participation in Christian communion. George, in other words, has remade getting married as a religious practice, an act through which the faithful embody their commitment to a specific divine tradition and its clerical custodians. This formulation is notable for its silence on the other modes of association that marriage traditionally mediated in the late antique Mediterranean world; it evinces no concern to invoke the authority of a king, assert citizenship or subjecthood in an empire, or acknowledge a civil tradition like the “Roman custom” of the Nessana contracts we saw in the previous chapter. If baptism and the Eucharist were the traditional rituals that initiated individuals into Christian communion, George’s canon brings marriage to a similar level as a ritual practice that facilitates
