bishops asserted for the first time the exclusive authority of ecclesiastical law, rather than civil, tribal, or local custom, to govern marriages between Christians. These Umayyad-era transformations developed into the great elaboration of Christian communal law in the central lands of the Abbasid Caliphate from the late eighth century through the ninth, the fulcrum of the book’s narrative and the subject of Chapter 3. In response to new caliphal institutions of governance and the emergence of robust traditions of Islamic law, ecclesiastics in the Abbasid heartlands made newly comprehensive efforts to define communal boundaries through confessional law. Above all else, they focused on regulating the full range of marital and inheritance practices that facilitated the social reproduction of households and lineages. Christian law thus reformulated the household as a Christian institution not only in theological terms but in its material and social constitution; and it established the link between ecclesiastical legal authority and lay households as the defining feature of Christians as social collectivities within the caliphate.
Prescribing rules, however, was always simpler than achieving their desired end, the reshaping of communal relations. In this vein, the book’s second part focuses on the details of Christian family law in the Abbasid Caliphate to examine how lay practice, Christian confessional law, and Islamic institutions interacted to shape Christian social boundaries around the institution of marriage. It demonstrates further that putting Christian legal materials into conversation with Islamic ones expands our view of the region’s intellectual culture. Bishops drew their basic legal doctrines and instruments, the subject of Chapter 4, from a mix of regional common law traditions, both ancient and Islamic. Christian family law exemplifies in this respect the high diversity of the Middle East’s early medieval legal culture. Chapter 5 takes up ecclesiastical judges and their competition with Muslim courts to administer lay marriage contracts and regulate lay divorce, arguing that Christian social groups were shaped in practice by both communal and extracommunal institutions. Jurist-bishops also devoted considerable attention to the relationship between Christian teachings and certain contested marital practices that functioned as markers of difference between religious communities in the caliphate. Marriage between close relatives, particularly first cousins, was an ancient regional institution but one whose lawfulness became a point of debate for Abbasid-era bishops. The methods of legal reasoning they deployed in this dispute, explored in Chapter 6, push us to recast the standard historiographical account of the formation of Islamic law in a comparative, transreligious framework. Polygamy, the subject of Chapter 7, became a locus of contestation over the boundaries of Christian belonging between ecclesiastical and lay elites in Abbasid cities. Ecclesiastics sought to disinherit the children of polygamous laymen and thereby to sculpt Christian lineages in a form sharply distinct from Muslim ones. Jurist-bishops similarly condemned interreligious marriage, but in this case they shared much common ground with Muslim jurists. Both adopted a gendered approach to the subject, analyzed in Chapter 8, that allowed men to marry outside the religious community but prohibited women from doing so. Christian law thus promoted the same conception favored by Muslim jurists of a social structure built of segmented religious communities.
The processes of Christian communal reordering and interactions with Islamic institutions that began in the early medieval caliphate continued into the later medieval period as well. Part III follows these down to the early fourteenth century in order to argue for the continued historiographical significance of non-Muslims and their traditions even as the Middle East was becoming more straightforwardly Islamic. The later development of Syriac and Arabic Christian family law gauges for us the uneven progress of Islamization, which Chapter 9 charts. Across this period, Islamic legal norms and categories increasingly structured the form and content of much Christian law; but some Christian jurists continued to draw on a diversity of resources other than the dominant Islamic models. Ultimately, Christian family law facilitated both a degree of Christian communal integrity and Christians’ accommodation to the Islamic caliphate and other Islamic polities. These developments call us to reconsider the place of non-Muslim traditions in shaping the societies of the medieval Middle East, the key problem to which the conclusion returns.
A productive historiographical approach to the societies of the medieval Islamic Middle East does justice to the multiple communities and traditions that inhabited and built those societies. This perspective might not have been so foreign to al-Jahiz, despite the very different value system from which it arises. Al-Jahiz’s rhetorical goal in The Refutation of the Christians was to warn of Christian perfidy, but he simultaneously testified to the integral place of Christians and other non-Muslims in the early medieval caliphate. Tracing the formation of caliphal society through the reformulations of Christian law and the Christian household that Muslim rule spurred allows us to apprehend a sliver of the diversity and vitality that, even when he did not approve of it, characterized al-Jahiz’s world.
PART I
Empire, Household, and Christian Community from Late Antiquity to the Abbasid Caliphate
CHAPTER 1
Marriage and the Family Between Religion and Empire in Late Antiquity
A man from Babta betrothed a woman to his son in the customary manner.
When the day of the wedding banquet approached, he went to the holy one and convinced our Rabban to pray over them lovingly.
The blessed old man said to him, “Hear what I have to say to you.
See when you go to the Euphrates to bring the bride to your son that no singers inviting destruction go with you on your way.
Instead, gather joyfully priests and chaste Levites.
Go and come in service to the church, and Christ shall be with you.”
… … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … …
When [the man] went [home], his brothers and family would not listen to him, saying,
“We won’t spoil our pleasure, which will be celebrated according to our custom.”
But when they arrived halfway on their way
a demonic vision appeared at once to the bride.
—History of Rabban Bar ʿEdta (d. c. 611)
In the mid-seventh century, an East Syrian monk composed a laudatory biography in Syriac of Rabban Bar ʿEdta, his spiritual master and a Christian holy man who spent his life in the Christian plains and hill country of Sasanian-ruled northern Mesopotamia.1 Among Bar ʿEdta’s many spiritual exploits was the episode recounted above, in which a man from the village of Babta sought the holy man’s blessing for his son’s impending marriage. Bar ʿEdta agreed, as long as the ceremony was to be conducted in an appropriately chaste and pious manner. Here, however, “custom” (ʿyādā) got in the way; the groom’s uncles insisted on having whatever celebratory music the people of Babta were used to hearing at their parties, and no holy man was going to ruin this one. What did these “singers inviting destruction” (zammārē mawbdānē) sound like? Were the rhythms or lyrics of their songs too suggestive for the holy man’s liking? The author gives us no details, but apparently the Babta singers made literal devil’s
