gradual conversion and incorporation into the Muslim community of many of these peoples, as well as the cultural and religious materials they brought with them, is one of the most important storylines of Islamic history.4 Yet anyone who browses a textbook on the subject might be forgiven for failing to discern that the majority of the population in much of the Middle East remained non-Muslim until well into the medieval period.5 In such narratives, non-Muslims exist only in the background and rarely merit more than a chapter, and sometimes less than that, of their own.6 The caliphate’s tolerant governance leaves them to their own devices: as long as they stay obedient and pay their taxes, they are accorded “communal autonomy” to attend to their internal, insular affairs. At key moments, they participate in the historical mainstream by providing the stew of ideas from which Islam emerges, keeping the wheels of the caliphal bureaucracy turning, or translating classical texts into Arabic for interested Muslim patrons. But any sense of non-Muslims’ own traditions and transformations is absent; within the standard historiographical framework of Islamic civilization, they are historical actors only insofar as they convert or make other contributions from the sidelines to the grand Islamic synthesis. The tacit implication is that, since most of their descendants would eventually be Muslims anyway, their history is ultimately inconsequential.
That implication runs counter to the tenets and practice of historiography, and it badly distorts the richness of Middle Eastern history. By the same token, making non-Muslims the singular subject of the story is no corrective. While Muslims were a demographic minority in most regions of their polity for a considerable amount of time, demography can also be a distorting prism through which to approach the history of the preindustrial world; sovereignty and the identities of states and societies were based not on popular demographic majorities but on military prowess and claims to divine favor.7 Furthermore, it is easy enough to focus on the history of, say, Christians as the majority population of the early Muslim-ruled Fertile Crescent or Zoroastrians in Iran instead of on Muslims. But that does no more than reproduce from a different angle the problematic framework of discrete religious communities on parallel tracks of development and decline implied by the Islamic civilization model.
Non-Muslims in the Making of the Islamic Empire
How might one write a more integrated history of Muslims and non-Muslims in the highly diverse polities in which they lived? One way to begin is to consider critically some implications of the fact that the Islamic caliphate was an empire. That fact has not always been heeded in the study of the caliphate, and it offers some useful, integrative models with which to frame the interactions of Muslims and non-Muslims in the making of medieval Middle Eastern society.
A widely held historiographical perspective maintains that empires establish their hegemony not only through violent coercion but also by co-opting the peoples they rule. Empires exist tangibly through a range of local agents, intermediaries, and representatives, some with roots in the metropole but many from among subject populations themselves, who do the work of enacting imperial policies and building institutions in one form or another.8 An imperial order thus simultaneously subjects and relies upon the peoples it rules. As a result, outside of conditions of overwhelming violence and in spite of considerable asymmetries of power, the representatives of subject peoples necessarily have some role in establishing the terms and practice of their subjection.9 If those representatives are military elites, they may threaten to take over the imperial order as they are co-opted into it.10 If they fill civilian roles of one kind or another—as administrators or religious leaders, for example—it is frequently their mediation of imperial dictates that constitutes the empire’s institutions and reorders local societies accordingly. Indeed, some historians (particularly of the Spanish Americas) have made the subject or indigenous intermediary the locus of the story of empire itself.11 At that nodal point, we see both the channels of imperial power in operation and a degree of agency among subjugated peoples. The practical reorganization of subject communities and traditions facilitated by subject intermediaries exemplifies the ongoing production of imperial systems in a way that official, schematic descriptions of those systems never can.
The goals and coercive powers of premodern Muslim rulers in the Middle East were a world away from those of later European empires, of course, but many of these insights remain analytically useful. Scholars of the medieval Middle East have put some to productive use while attending to others less assiduously. Provincial Muslim elites and their conflicts with the Umayyad caliphs in Damascus or the Abbasids in Baghdad, for example, are central to scholarly narratives of the caliphate’s political development.12 Scholars have also devoted much attention to the Iranians and Central Asians who were absorbed into the caliphate’s military elite.13 Regarding the empire’s vast numbers of non-Muslim subjects, standard narratives acknowledge their importance to the caliphal administration.14 But largely missing from these narratives is serious consideration that the activities of non-Muslim elites outside the sphere of government service might have transformed their own communities, much less that the transformations they set in motion were constitutive of a new imperial society itself.15 The notion that non-Muslims enjoyed “communal autonomy” from state oversight, coupled with the fact that their histories predate Islam, has been taken too readily to imply that non-Muslims were organized into self-evident social groups that persisted unchanged, other than suffering increasing attrition due to conversion, under their new Muslim rulers.
This book contends, to the contrary, that caliphal rule fundamentally transformed even the most well-established non-Muslim communities. The response of their elites to the structures and imperatives of caliphal rule led to significant reforms to their communal institutions and traditions, and ultimately to the redefinition of their very character as religious communities.16 Moreover, in light of the insights of the historiography of empire discussed above, the reforms undertaken by non-Muslim subject elites should be understood as the very process by which a new imperial society was taking shape. This perspective facilitates an integrative approach to the history of the medieval Middle East that takes into account both its considerable diversity and the central importance of Islam. Organizing historiographical narratives solely within the framework of Islamic civilization ahistorically relegates vast numbers of non-Muslims to the margins; focusing on their elites’ responses to caliphal rule makes them historical actors and returns to historical time the early medieval caliphate’s massively variegated societies. At the same time, this approach in no way empties Middle Eastern history of its “Islamicness.” In fact, it shows us Islamization—in the sense of the rising influence of Islamic traditions, institutions, and norms of social organization—as a process rather than an inevitable fact. Non-Muslim subjects of the caliphate faced new symbols of power, techniques of governance, and intellectual discourses, all connected in one way or another to a new ruling religion. Their adaptive strategies in response show us the uneven but ongoing process by which those facets of Islamic empire became ever more hegemonic. The activities of non-Muslim elites, viewed in the context of the conditions established by caliphal rule, index the great transformations that Islam brought to the peoples and societies of the medieval Middle East.
LAW, THE HOUSEHOLD, AND CHRISTIAN COMMUNITY IN THE MEDIEVAL CALIPHATE
Among the most significant but understudied of those activities were the efforts of Christian bishops in early medieval Syria, Iraq, and Iran to redefine Christian marital practices and reshape Christian households. From the seventh to the tenth century, Syriac- and Arabic-speaking bishops responded to the establishment of the caliphate and the development of Islamic jurisprudence by elaborating new traditions of communal law for their respective churches. They translated legal works from Greek and Syriac into Arabic, compiled newly systematized collections of late antique canon law, convened synods that issued legislation for the faithful, and wrote innovative jurisprudential treatises in various areas of civil law; and they did all of this on a much wider scale than had their ecclesiastical predecessors of late antiquity. The most significant feature of these new traditions of Christian law was their focus on marriage, inheritance, and the structures of the household. While the disciplining of sexuality had long been
