of new traditions of Christian law and the communal reconfigurations they imagined were one response on the part of Christian elites to the increasing organization of the caliphate’s institutions and the expectations that caliphal governance placed on non-Muslim subjects. If the early caliphate had tended to leave to subject elites the administration of their communities’ civil affairs, in the Abbasid period Muslim jurists and state officials began to articulate this practice of convenience as a more explicit principle of Islamic governance. Their discussions revolved around the concept of the dhimma or “pact of protection.” With roots in the Quran and the seventh-century administration of conquered territories,16 in the eighth century the dhimma came to denote the legal status of non-Muslims in the Islamic polity. The caliphate granted each non-Muslim religious group the status of a “protected” (dhimmī) community and a certain degree of autonomy to regulate its own affairs; in return, dhimmis were obligated to recognize the caliphate’s supreme authority, obey its commands, pay taxes, and follow regulations that distinguished Muslims from dhimmis and maintained the public predominance of Islam.17 Muslim jurists and officials began to theorize and spell out in greater detail these strictures especially in the late eighth and ninth centuries, motivated in part by the socioreligious diversity of Abbasid cities and the centralizing interests of the Abbasid caliphs. A variety of treatments of the place of non-Muslims in caliphal state and society circulated or were promulgated in this period, such as the Kitab al-Kharaj of the Abbasid chief judge Abu Yusuf and the regulatory edicts of the caliph al-Mutawakkil (r. 847–61), among others.18 No single approach to the public regulation of non-Muslims appears to have achieved canonical or official status in this period,19 but the multiplicity of views on offer makes clear that defining the contours of dhimma governance was a priority for many Muslim jurists and officials in the first Abbasid century.
In certain respects, the dhimma framework worked in the favor of non-Muslim religious elites: it recognized a high degree of communal authority to rest with bishops, Jewish communal leaders like exilarchs and rabbis, and Zoroastrian priests. The institutional order of the early Abbasid Caliphate, however, presented distinct challenges to this vision even as Muslim officials more or less actively propagated it.20 Caliphal judicial institutions, as they took a more organized form and as interreligious contact in the cities became more intensive under the early Abbasids, appear to have appealed to Christians, Jews, and others as well as Muslims. Principally, state courts were attractive because legal affairs transacted and rulings reached there had the backing of state (or at least local police) power. Contemporary sources contain numerous indications that Christians and Jews made frequent use of the services state courts provided; but this posed problems in turn for non-Muslim religious elites. Already in the seventh century, George I had asserted the exclusive authority of East Syrian bishops to adjudicate disputes among Christians; from the perspective of the caliph and many Muslim jurists too, that prerogative was the proper territory of non-Muslim religious elites. But George’s competition had been a variegated array of lay notables, holy men, and Muslim officials. By the late eighth and ninth centuries, a town or city in the caliphate’s central lands not only retained the local political authority as a figure of judicial recourse; increasingly, its judicial institution of recognizable prominence was the more formalized court of a Muslim qadi, a professional who administered a vigorously developing Islamic jurisprudence and had been favored by an appointment from a regional governor or the caliph himself. The fact of non-Muslim recourse to caliphal courts thus challenged elites’ ideas of communal integrity, which prioritized discrete institutional spaces enclosing all true believers.
A range of responses to these conditions is discernible across the caliphate’s non-Muslim subject populations. The geonim of central Iraq’s Jewish academies, for example, followed rabbinic precedent in grudgingly tolerating the use of extraconfessional courts under limited circumstances.21 Significantly, however, they already had the extensive, detailed law of the Babylonian Talmud, which they considered authoritative for Jewish communal life, to administer in their own rabbinic audiences.22 The situation was different for the bishops of the caliphate, especially the East Syrians who lived in its central territories and were often closely connected to the caliphal court. Their inherited traditions of ecclesiastical law had never appropriated the full prerogatives of the late antique civil law systems alongside which they coexisted before the establishment of the caliphate. In spite of the new judicial territory that Umayyad-era bishops carved out for themselves, Christian writings of the early Abbasid period make clear that no church’s ecclesiastical elite knew a tradition of law extensive enough to govern the full complement of civil affairs for which laypeople might seek the services of extraconfessional courts and officials. The East Syrian patriarch Timothy writes of laypeople “who, on account of lacking [Christian] judgments and laws [laytāyutā da-psāqē d-dinē wa-d-nāmosē], continually go to the audiences of the outsiders [barrāyē] and [their] courts.”23 Another eighth-century bishop tells his audience that “while Jews everywhere have one civil law [dinā]—as does the heresy of Magianism [Zoroastrianism] as well as those who rule over us now [i.e., Muslims]—among Christians, judgments are different … even from district to district and city to city.”24 The same Christian elites report receiving requests for guidance in the administration of civil affairs from bishops in major cities including Basra and Rayy and the provinces of Fars and the eastern Jazira.25 Episcopal letters, of which exceedingly few have survived but of which there must have been many, show bishops responding to similar requests from humble priests in central Iraq, eastern Arabia, and even Yemen.26
In sum, unlike the geonim and contemporary Muslim jurists and in spite of developments under the Umayyads, Christian elites lacked a coherent communal law with which to engage the transforming institutions of the early Abbasid Caliphate. Their response was to create one. In Syria, Iraq, and Iran from the eighth to the tenth century, bishops composed a considerable number of new legal treatises, issued new bodies of synodal legislation, and translated important received texts into Syriac and Arabic. The elaboration of Abbasid imperial institutions thus spurred the formation of newly comprehensive traditions of communal law among the Middle Eastern churches.27 This, moreover, proved an opportunity for bishops to redefine the social practices and obligations attendant to Christian belonging within caliphal society—which they did with special focus on the Christian household. Before we bring that operation into focus, however, we need a sense of the contours of the new traditions of Christian law crafted by Abbasid-era bishops: who the major figures were and what their major contributions were. The extent of bishops’ engagements with law varied across the caliphate; for reasons we will examine, East Syrians cultivated law as an intellectual discipline most concertedly and creatively, while West Syrians and Melkites did so to lesser degrees. The following focuses on the East Syrians’ response to the evolving Islamic empire and the transformations to law, community, and the lay household that it involved. Using East Syrian materials as a touchstone, we can then index other churches’ engagements with communal law and, in turn, the differential impacts that the caliphate’s institutions had on the shaping of its non-Muslim subject communities.
East Syrian Law in Abbasid Iraq and Iran
The emergence of East Syrian law as a newly dynamic intellectual tradition in the early Abbasid Caliphate is evident in the steady stream of innovative Syriac and Arabic legal treatises, compendia, and translations produced by East Syrian bishops beginning in the eighth century. The characteristic feature of this tradition is a novel textual genre: the law book or legal treatise composed by the individual jurist-bishop.28 Shemʿon of Revardashir’s mid-seventh-century Law of Inheritance had been an early step in this direction and a departure from the East Syrians’ earlier ecclesiastical law. In the early Abbasid period, East Syrian bishops followed this precedent and composed many more such specialized jurisprudential treatises; but rather than treating a single topic, the East Syrian law books of the Abbasid period aimed for a greater degree of topical comprehensiveness. They thus became the base material of a wide-ranging Christian communal law meant to address the needs of dhimmi life in the caliphate.
The first, signal example of this new trend is the Jurisprudential
