of ecclesiastical law that placed marriage, the household, and the practices of social reproduction squarely at the foundation of Christian churches as non-Muslim social groups within the caliphate.
CHAPTER 3
Forming Households and Forging Religious Boundaries in the Abbasid Caliphate
Humans are distinct and separated from each other, in countries and lands, peoples and languages, customs and laws. Each of them desires a way of life in accordance with the customs and laws in which they have been habituated and raised. Indeed, they never depart from something when they have been habituated and raised in it. They accept change from something when they have been established in it only with difficulty and thousands of dangers; for custom is second nature, as the saying goes…. Who, then, can bring to a unity and gather together that which, a thousand times over, is separate and differentiated according to its [very] nature …?
—East Syrian patriarch Timothy I, Law Book
In 805, Timothy I, the sitting patriarch (r. 780–823) of the Church of the East, composed the words above in the preface to a new book of civil regulations for East Syrian Christians. Although they are highly rhetorical, their sentiment contrasts notably with George I’s remarks delivered to the synod of Bet Qatraye some 129 years earlier. While both concerned the rules that guide human beings’ actions, Timothy expresses none of George’s confidence in the power of bishops to put those rules into effect. Instead, he evokes a near bewildering diversity of peoples for whom God has established no single, unitary law. Human beings are a motley, mixed-up collection of creatures; trying to bring some order to mundane, messy human societies—that human condition “which, a thousand times over, is separate and differentiated according to its [very] nature”—is an unenviable task. Yet despite his protestations of the difficulty involved, this is precisely what Timothy set out to do with his new Law Book: to compile a single law for social practice to govern Christian believers, those peoples united by a shared faith but heretofore diverse in their “way of life.” His interest in doing so was motivated by wider transformations in the institutional order and intellectual life of the caliphate in the late eighth and early ninth centuries. Timothy’s Law Book exemplifies the response of many Christian elites living at the heart of the empire to those transformations: a reformulation of Christian communal belonging rooted in a new confessional law and a new conception of the Christian household.
The first century and a half of the Abbasid dynasty’s rule, beginning in 750, is widely regarded as a crucial phase in the development of medieval Islamic society. Muslim caliphs, administrators, and scholars refined institutions of caliphal governance, from court ceremonial to taxation to the dispensing of justice; the Islamic dispensation realized its universal potential as non-Arab Muslims came to participate in the umma, the Muslim community, as fully as did descendants of the Arab conquerors; foundational intellectual traditions like Islamic law and theology took shape. Yet the early medieval caliphate remained a diverse, multiethnic, multireligious empire, and its vast numbers of non-Muslim subjects, especially the numerous Christians in its core territories west of Iran, both participated in and were affected by the transformations of Muslim state and society. Where early Umayyad rule had come with significant continuities in administration and social organization for the caliphate’s subjects, developments in the Abbasid period spurred non-Muslim elites to rethink and reform their own communal institutions and traditions far beyond the concerns of their seventh-century predecessors. Their efforts to do so offer a vital vantage point—the intersecting interests of the empire and its subject elites—from which to trace the formation of the early Abbasid Caliphate’s social order, so foundational a model of “medieval Islamic society.”
Christian law and the Christian household lie at the center of this story. If bishops under the Umayyads had claimed new forms of legal authority in piecemeal fashion, the twin development in the late eighth and early ninth centuries of a reforming caliphal judiciary and vigorous traditions of Islamic law spurred bishops to cultivate Christian civil law as a holistic intellectual discipline. Abbasid-era bishops produced legal treatises, synodal legislation, and law books in Syriac and Arabic that sought to regulate an unprecedented array of lay affairs—marriage, inheritance, commercial transactions, even irrigation disputes. For West Syrians and especially East Syrians, the expansion of confessional civil law—and the corollary notion that religious belonging could be embodied in routine social practices—was a signal response to the emerging Abbasid order and an effort to define their place within it. This new Christian law, furthermore, focused on one area of social relations above all others: the family. Where bishops under the Umayyads had made new efforts to regulate marriage or inheritance, under the Abbasids they brought under their authority the full range of material practices by which households were formed and reproduced: marriage contracts, property exchanges and marital gift-giving, the disbursement of inheritances at a spouse’s death. In doing so, the bishops effectively reimagined the Christian character of the institution of the household as resting not only in sexual discipline but in the particular material relationships and social hierarchies of which it was constituted. That triangulation between ecclesiastical authority, confessional law, and the Christian household would define the church as a social body—as a non-Muslim religious community in the emerging public order of an Islamic empire.
STATE AND SOCIETY UNDER THE EARLY ABBASIDS
When George I held his Persian Gulf synod in the second half of the seventh century, the Islamic caliphate’s center was Syria, the powerbase of the Umayyad house whose rule Muʿawiya had established in the 660s. A century later, George’s ecclesiastical successors lived in what was quickly becoming a very different empire. After political upheavals in the mid-eighth century led to the accession of a new ruling dynasty, the Abbasids, the caliphate’s imperial center shifted to the cities of Iraq; and both state and social structures of the caliphate began to change in marked ways. Several interrelated developments underway in the new Iraqi heart of the caliphate had a special impact on its Christian subjects and spurred the significant transformations among them that are our primary concern. These developments included the growth of urban centers of enormous linguistic, ethnic, and religious heterogeneity; the withering of ethnic divisions between Arabs and others within the Muslim umma; the formation of Islamic intellectual disciplines like Hadith study, jurisprudence, and theology; and efforts to centralize or formalize key institutions of caliphal governance, including the courts, the norms of caliphal justice and their connection to Islamic jurisprudence, and the dhimma framework for regulating the caliphate’s non-Muslim subjects.
The Abbasid dynasty came to power in the mid-eighth century on the back of religious and ideological opposition to the Umayyads, which had simmered within the Muslim umma for decades.1 Since the first civil war from which Muʿawiya emerged the victor in 661, the Umayyads had faced frequent discontent from constituencies within the Arab-Muslim elite that saw their rule as tyrannical and hoped to replace it with a just regime led by relatives of the Prophet Muhammad. This politics became attractive as well to many non-Arab Muslims dissatisfied with their second-class status and what they saw as an exclusivist Arab chauvinism built into the Umayyad order. Among the several anti-Umayyad movements of the period, the most successful developed especially in Khurasan in northeast Iran in the 740s. With support from Arab nobles, Persian-speaking soldiers of mixed Arab and Iranian descent, and many more recent converts to Islam, this originally secret movement broke into open revolt in 747. After winning a series of battles against Umayyad armies and exterminating much of the Umayyad family itself, the rebels installed a new ruling clan of closer relation to Muhammad (though not nearly as close as many rebels had hoped): the Abbasids, so called by virtue of their descent from the Prophet’s paternal uncle al-ʿAbbas. The Abbasids shortly moved their base of operations to central Iraq, which had long been a hotbed of support for the Prophet’s family. The region’s agricultural productivity and trade routes made it an economic powerhouse, and from 750 well into the ninth century the Abbasid Caliphate established itself as one of the most powerful states in Afro-Eurasia (rivaled only, perhaps, by Tang China).2
It
