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CHAPTER 2

Christianizing Marriage Under Early Islam

For every land and for every nation, [God’s diligence] [bṭlutēh] has put in order regulatory laws [nāmosē mmashshḥē] suitable to the times and the people of [those] times … through Moses, He established a book of diverse laws for the old nation which was a foreshadowing of the mystery of the new. Then, He granted the Gospel of life to His church through the glorious appearance of His beloved one…. In all times, however, the fickleness and great weakness of men … demands that those who have been entrusted by the grace of God with the instruction of [men’s] souls take pains to zealously correct them.

—East Syrian patriarch George I, synodal address, 676

In 676, about a generation after Arabian armies proclaiming the message of the Prophet Muhammad first conquered much of the Sasanian and eastern Roman empires, the East Syrian patriarch George I (r. 660–80) journeyed from his see in central Iraq to a small island named Dayrin in the Persian Gulf. Though it may appear a marginal, unlikely destination for the chief bishop of the largest church in the caliphate’s eastern domains, the Gulf’s Arabian coastline and nearby islands—an area known in Syriac as Bet Qatraye, “the land of the Qataris”—had been home to a significant Christian community for several centuries.¹ The local Christians’ deep roots gave George’s visit its urgency, for he had inherited a problem from his patriarchal predecessor: the Christians of eastern Arabia had been going increasingly astray. The bishops of Bet Qatraye had declared themselves independent of the East Syrian patriarchate in the old Sasanian capital of Seleucia-Ctesiphon, while further down the Gulf coast whole communities had traded in their Christian affiliation for the new religion of the Arab conquerors. George, claiming the ecclesiastical mantle of “those who have been entrusted by the grace of God with the instruction of [men’s] souls,” set out to the Gulf to convene a synod with the local bishops, set the church’s affairs aright, and attend to any local “practices in need of correction” (suʿrānē da-sniqin ʿal turrāṣā).²

While George’s stated aim was to bring local life in line with the preestablished, authoritative standard of the central patriarchate, several of the canons he issued were completely unprecedented. Among them was one concerning marriage: “Women who have not [yet] been married or given in betrothal by their fathers shall be betrothed to men through Christian law, 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.”³ Marriages, according to this canon, would henceforth require sanctification by priests and Christian ritual to be valid. “Christian law” (nāmosā krēsṭyānā), rather than the law of the state or the custom of the village or tribe, was now the sole arbiter of the legitimacy of marital unions. In the traditions of Middle Eastern Christianity, this claim was strikingly new—and it underwrote a new conception of how marriage mediated the relationship between individuals, families, and households, on the one hand, and the larger social bodies to which they belonged, on the other.

Expanding claims over lay households in the name of Christian law were among the earliest, most striking responses of bishops like George to the Arab conquests, the establishment of the Islamic caliphate, and the social changes those events brought. Scholars often assert that in the seventh century, when the conquerors and the adherents of their new disposition were few in number and before the caliphate’s techniques of rule had been formalized, life for the vast and diverse subject population of the new empire went on largely as it had before. But the clearing out of the former rulers in fact provided the subject elites who remained the opportunity to articulate new forms of authority, while the conquerors introduced new patterns of religious adherence to an already heterogeneous socioreligious landscape. In the absence of the old imperial orders, Christian religious elites began to make new claims concerning the authority of ecclesiastical law to set norms for laypeople; in conditions of religious diversity and shifting sociopolitical hierarchies, they took an increased interest in marriage and the household as sites for the elaboration of distinctively Christian social practices. Most notably, George I asserted the complete authority of Christian law over the public act of marrying, reformulating that foundational institution of social reproduction as an exclusively Christian one in order to secure the social boundaries of the Church of the East within the caliphate. In doing so, George and other contemporary Syriac bishops brought their Christian traditions in line with an established perspective among the other religions of late antiquity, including rabbinic Judaism, Zoroastrianism, and nascent Islam: that marriage was properly under the purview of religious law and constitutive of the religious community as a social body. In the seventh century, the halting establishment of a nascent Islamic empire thus effected the beginnings of a reformulation of Christian association centered on the link between ecclesiastical authority and believing households.

COMMUNAL INSTITUTIONS AND CHRISTIAN HOUSEHOLDS IN POSTCONQUEST IRAQ AND IRAN

When George I set off for the Persian Gulf in 676, the Islamic caliphate was ruled from Damascus by Muʿawiya, a scion of the Sufyanid branch of the Umayyad clan from Muhammad’s hometown of Mecca. The caliph, leader of a small, mostly Arab political and military elite, presided over a vast subject population of Christians, Zoroastrians, Jews, and others. Contemporary Christian writers would remember Muʿawiya’s long rule (661–80) as a time of stability and prosperity, bookended as it was by two civil wars among the ruling class.⁴ Modern scholars take special note of Muʿawiya’s caliphate for encompassing both the incipient formation of distinctive institutions of caliphal governance as well as strong continuities with the empires that the caliphate supplanted. On the one hand, Muʿawiya’s fiscal administration appears to have been already quite systematized, and he held the centralized power to appoint members of the conquest elite to regional governorships throughout the lands under caliphal rule.⁵ On the other, seventh-century Umayyad governance continued to rely on subject elites—scribes, urban notables, landowners, village headmen, and bishops and other religious elites—as administrators, local middlemen, and tax collectors. While later Umayyad caliphs beginning with ʿAbd al-Malik (r. 685–705) would reorganize this system and shift local fiscal and judicial authority away from non-Muslims, on the whole their elites played important roles in the administration of the caliphate throughout the seventh century.⁶ The other side of this coin was that Umayyad governance left subject elites wide latitude to attend to the internal affairs of their own communities. This was both an administrative practice of convenience and a function, though not yet theorized in especially explicit terms, of Quranic theologies that understood God to have allotted different peoples their own particular legal regimes (as in Quran 5:47–49).⁷

While Umayyad governance has been framed frequently in terms of continuity, since local elites are thought to have carried on administering communal affairs much as they had before the conquests, it is also clear that the Arabs’ overturning of the old imperial orders left room for considerable institutional innovation.⁸ Among the Christian communities that made up the majority of the caliphate’s population, East Syrian bishops in Iraq and Iran seized on this opportunity with special vigor to claim new forms of ecclesiastical judicial authority. Moreover, their efforts focused especially on regulating the practices of Christian household formation in new and more intensive ways.

These transformations are evident in the innovative Syriac legal texts produced by seventh-century East Syrian bishops. Immediately striking are the canons of George’s synod in the Persian Gulf. In addition to its assertion that Christian law had constitutive authority over marriages between Christians (to which we will return below), it made another, even broader claim regarding the ecclesiastical judiciary: all litigation between Christians had to be adjudicated before ecclesiastics. East Syrian bishops had never claimed an authority this exclusive under the Sasanians. The fall of the dynasty to the Arab conquerors, however, likely entailed the loss of imperial prestige on the part of its judicial officials; though they no doubt continued to offer judicial services, they now lacked the backing of state power that had made their services attractive for Sasanian subjects of any religious affiliation. In response to this relative vacuum, as well as the permissive stance of caliphal governance, George took the opportunity to claim an entirely new ecclesiastical jurisdiction over laypeople’s civil affairs.⁹

George’s synod represents the most assertive example of this interest on the part of the East Syrian ecclesiastical hierarchy. Two unique East Syrian legal works from the latter half of the seventh century, both highly innovative in form, genre, and content, provide further evidence. These texts deal especially with the law of inheritance and succession: how property devolves from one generation to another and thereby reproduces the material wealth and social standing of lineages. Through them, we can observe how the establishment of the caliphate entailed not only continuities in Christian communal structures but efforts to strengthen those structures by formalizing an ecclesiastical role in the life of lay families. The first text in question is the Law of Inheritance, a treatise by Shemʿon (fl. mid-seventh century), bishop of Revardashir in Fars province in southwest Iran, composed originally in Middle Persian but extant in a Syriac translation. The second is the collected Judicial Decisions of Patriarch Hnanishoʿ I (r. 686–98, mentioned in Chapter 1). These cover a variety of topics, but the majority convey Hnanishoʿ’s judicial decisions on inheritance disputes, many of which laypeople or lower clergy brought directly to the patriarch.¹⁰ The significance of these texts rests in two features: the subjects they address and their genre. As we have seen, East Syrian bishops had cultivated a tradition of ecclesiastical law throughout the Sasanian period. The bulk of that tradition, however, consisted of the hoary genre of canons issued by bishops assembled at synods. By its nature, synodal legislation tended to address the broad areas of immediate concern for which synods were convened, which usually meant church organization more than the affairs of laypeople. Shemʿon and Hnanishoʿ’s texts are different. They concern themselves with detailed points of family law, offering precise, casuistic considerations of how inheritances should be distributed. For example, the cases that Shemʿon treats include a man who dies with only his wife and brother as potential heirs and one who has only a granddaughter and a nephew.¹¹ One of Hnanishoʿ’s decisions concerns a widow whose male in-laws have tried to appropriate her deceased husband’s estate rather than let her son inherit it.¹² By contrast, one of the few Sasanian-era synodal canons to treat inheritance prescribes only a general principle: “every Christian who nullifies the will and testaments of the deceased” shall incur divine punishment, a far cry from the detail of Shemʿon’s and Hnanishoʿ’s rulings.¹³ Furthermore, these seventh-century works differ from synodal canons in that they are not bodies of collective legislation but compositions by individual specialists—bishops who have taken on the role of jurist to delineate norms for civil life or to provide justice to laypeople in need.¹⁴ Shemʿon’s treatise gives a theoretical justification for this role: God has entrusted the “leaders of the church” (mdabbrānē d-ʿēdtā) with administering His “magnificent laws and teaching” (nāmosē tmihē w-mallpānutā) that guide human life.¹⁵

Map 2. The Medieval Islamic Caliphate

Shemʿon and Hnanishoʿ exemplify how East Syrian bishops stepped into expanded judicial roles after the fall of the Sasanian state and before the formation of a strong caliphal judiciary. Shemʿon’s law book conceptualizes the intergenerational transfer of wealth as an area of social life newly subject to ecclesiastical pastoral care and repackages principles of Sasanian inheritance law as a Christian tradition. Similarly, Hnanishoʿ’s decisions show how a high church official could take on a judicial role in regulating the disbursement of inheritances and, therefore, the reproduction of lineages, which had been one of the primary areas of activity of the Sasanian judiciary.¹⁶ Shemʿon’s and Hnanishoʿ’s efforts in this regard were not entirely unprecedented; we have a few Sasanian-era canons that give guidelines for both intestate inheritance and bequests.¹⁷ To judge by Shemʿon’s discussion, however, those few precedents in no way added up to an authoritative, comprehensive body of communal law; the very problem from which his treatise followed was that the “teaching of our Lord [mallpānutā d-Māran] … did not determine a law for deciding civil judgments [psāqā d-dinē].”¹⁸ In Hnanishoʿ’s case, earlier patriarchs surely adjudicated comparable lay disputes; but there appears to have been no conception that such decisions might constitute a formal body of East Syrian civil law, and only in the seventh century did the ecclesiastical administration take an interest in preserving them.¹⁹

Shemʿon’s and Hnanishoʿ’s works, then, exemplify efforts to formalize ecclesiastical rulings as the substantive body of a more comprehensive, specifically Christian civil law tradition in a time of institutional transition effected by the Arab conquests. They point as well to the convergence of marriage, kinship relations, and property rights as the social arena for which laypeople most frequently sought ecclesiastical help and into which the new conditions of caliphal rule most facilitated the extension of ecclesiastical authority. Late antique canon law had enjoined chaste sexual practice within the ancient institution of marriage. The establishment of the Umayyad Caliphate provided bishops of the Church of the East the opportunity to begin bringing the material imperatives of household reproduction under the purview of Christian law as well.

MARRIAGE AND RELIGIOUS BELONGING IN GREATER SYRIA

Unlike their East Syrian contemporaries, bishops in formerly Roman Syria and western Mesopotamia (as well as in Egypt) were not as actively concerned with extending ecclesiastical law into lay civil and household affairs. This difference stems from the fact that the end of Roman rule and the fall of the Sasanians had different implications for the caliphate’s Christian subjects. It is likely that the Christians of formerly Sasanian Iraq and Iran were less interested in going to the Zoroastrian judges of a no longer Zoroastrian state when they could turn to their own clerics instead, a grassroots impetus for the East Syrian ecclesiastical experimentations with communal law in the seventh century. In formerly Roman provinces, by contrast, the same Christian administrators, upper and lower clergymen, and others who served in judicial capacities remained more or less in place in the decades after the conquest (excluding those who fled with the Roman armies). Bishops in Syria thus did not have the same motivation as those in Iraq and Iran to emphasize new loci of judicial authority or to actively reconstitute their legal traditions to encompass inheritance law; they already had Roman law, or whatever was understood as Roman law in any given locale. What they did face was a shifting socioreligious landscape as the conquerors settled in the towns of Syria, bringing their new monotheistic message with them. Against this backdrop, the marital practices of Syrian Christians received heightened pastoral attention, evident in a range of episcopal letters, from bishops seeking to define social boundaries between their flocks and the conquerors.

The contrast between the institutional innovations undertaken by bishops in the eastern caliphate and in Syria is particularly evident among the Chalcedonians, those Christians who adhered to Roman imperial orthodoxy. In the first decades of the seventh century, jurist-bishops in Greek-speaking territories had continued the characteristically late Roman concern with legal codification, as inspired by Justinian, by composing the first nomocanons, novel collections of civil and ecclesiastical law;²⁰ but after the conquests, we have no evidence of comparable endeavors by Chalcedonian bishops living under the Medinan caliphs or the Umayyads. The Syriac Orthodox or West Syrian Church, defined in theological terms by its opposition to Chalcedonian orthodoxy and its adherence to miaphysite Christological doctrines, presents a somewhat different case. Some West Syrian bishops of the later seventh century invested considerable energy in consolidating a communal legal tradition particular to their church. The major figure in this development is Jacob of Edessa (d. 708), a monk and bishop originally from the region around Antioch and known for his reformer’s zeal.²¹ By Jacob’s time, the West Syrian Church had achieved a degree of institutional distinctiveness in northern Syria and western Mesopotamia, with a hierarchy of bishops parallel to the region’s Chalcedonian one and a network of closely associated monasteries.²² In the late seventh century, Jacob took an interest in consolidating a specifically West Syrian ecclesiastical law that would both tie his church to the early Christian heritage and further define its institutional boundaries. To do so, he translated a variety of Greek pseudo-apostolic canonical works into Syriac. He then brought them together with Syriac versions of other works of canon law, especially ecumenical synods and the epistles of Church Fathers esteemed by miaphysites, into an authoritative collection of ecclesiastical legal texts.²³

By and large, the texts in this collection were traditional ecclesiastical ones addressing church affairs. Jacob’s goal was thus to define a West Syrian ecclesiastical canon rather than expand it to newly encompass lay civil matters. In seeking to increase the institutional distinctiveness of the miaphysite church in Syria and focusing on legal canonization, moreover, Jacob was perhaps continuing late Roman trends more than he was responding to immediately postconquest conditions. Importantly, however, canonization was not Jacob’s only concern. He also penned a considerable number of responses to lower clerics on problems related to ritual and social dimensions of lay life.²⁴ These and similar responsa of other bishops in the former Roman east were very much addressed to the particularities of life under Umayyad rule; and they point us toward another central feature, alongside the communal administrative autonomy permitted to subject elites, of the seventh-century caliphate: highly heterogeneous patterns of religious practice and intensive social contacts of individuals across the religious spectrum, which added up to religious identities below the elite level very much at odds with the picture offered by normative, doctrinal texts. Furthermore, the episcopal responsa extant from early Umayyad Syria demonstrate the degree to which the household and marital practice became significant sites for the articulation of communal boundaries in the midst of this diversity. Caliphal rule did not impel bishops in Syria to claim innovative new jurisdictions for Christian law to the degree that their contemporaries did in Iraq and Iran. But they did take an interest in regulating specific marital practices in an effort to define the acceptable modes of interaction between Christians and others, especially the region’s new rulers.

While the religious elites of the late antique and early medieval Middle East had vested interests in keeping their communities clearly differentiated in both social and religious terms, there is good reason to think that those boundaries were often much more fluid, at least from the sixth century into the eighth.²⁵ The sources of this period are littered with examples of less doctrinal, more capacious conceptions of religious belonging that allowed for many modes of social and ritual interaction between individuals of different religious affiliations. The mishmash of peoples, scripts, and magical spirits of the Aramaic incantation bowls—where it is unremarkable to find a Christian commissioning a protective incantation against Iranian demons from a Jewish magician—is one good example. To take a few others from Christian-authored texts, we find that a villager baptized in the Church of the East might feel no compunction receiving communion from miaphysites, or that Christian Arab tribesmen might readily join Muslims on raiding expeditions and slide into praying alongside them.²⁶ These individuals and countless others like them were embedded in any number of social networks, from villages to business partnerships to tribes and even marriages, not perfectly congruent with their confessional communities.²⁷ Especially in rural areas, where the vast majority of the region’s population resided, hints in the sources suggest that loyalty to local leaders and local sources of sacred power could mean as much to conceptions of religious affiliation as the lettered elite’s doctrines; the religious practices and social obligations that confessional belonging entailed thus look increasingly varied the further away any given community was from the instruction and oversight of literate, trained religious elites like bishops, rabbis, or Zoroastrian priests.²⁸ Overall, it appears that many subjects of the late antique empires did not understand religious belonging as an identity so exclusive as to determine all social ties, institutions, and ritual activities in which one could participate. The emergence of nascent Islam, moreover, likely intensified these already heterogeneous and hybrid socioreligious patterns. What were the faith commitments of the new ruling Arab tribesmen, whom their Christian subjects called magaritai and mhaggrāyē in reference to their self-designation as “militant emigrants” (muhājirūn in the seventh-century Arabic usage) who had come from Arabia to conquer the known world?²⁹ They proclaimed the God of Abraham and venerated Jesus the Messiah. In Syria they tended to settle in old urban centers (rather than found new garrison cities as in Egypt and Iraq), and in the early days after the conquests they sometimes performed their prayers in churches.³⁰ If some non-elites already did not know or care much about the distinctions between Chalcedonians, miaphysite West Syrians, and Nestorians, what made these new Abrahamic monotheists so different? The general indeterminacy of the relationship between the Arabs’ religious movement and other scriptured traditions likely rendered the boundaries between conquerors and conquered uncertain in the eyes of many.

That uncertainty should not be taken to imply that religion “on the ground” was a free-for-all, however, and here the responsa of bishops like Jacob enter the picture. Most late antique subjects must have understood themselves to belong to one religious community or another, whatever they understood the content of its traditions to be; there were certain actors for whom religious difference was very clear and to be enforced with violence;³¹ and local institutions (such as kin networks and village leaders) created boundaries of their own that made religious difference socially concrete, as most assuredly did political hierarchies between conqueror and conquered. This, in fact, is where the writings of religious elites like bishops, rabbis, and Muslim ulama become especially instructive. They frequently focus on the specific contested practices around which elites and others made competing claims as to how religious belonging should impact social relations and how religious difference should be enacted; beyond simply attesting to fluid socioreligious boundaries, elite prescriptive texts identify the particular institutions through which they sought to solidify those boundaries. For our purposes, the responsa literature of seventh-century Syrian bishops underscores the significance of marriage in just this respect. The Arab conquerors, as a new element introduced to already diverse socioreligious environments, refocused ecclesiastical attention on defining the marital practices and attitudes toward sexuality that were a chief feature distinguishing Christians from others.

Two areas of concern are especially evident in the responsa: sexual contact between Christians and the new rulers and polygamous marriages. Regarding the former, for example, Jacob of Edessa responds in a letter to the priest Adday to the question of whether a Christian woman married to a Muslim (mhaggrāyā) can still receive communion—a concern especially pressing because, in this case, “her husband is threatening to kill the priest [gāzem baʿlāh ʿal kāhnā d-qāṭel lēh] if he does not give her the Eucharist.”³² Elsewhere, Jacob takes up the question of the appropriate penance for a Christian who commits adultery with a non-Christian.³³ An epistle of the West Syrian patriarch Athanasios II of Balad (r. 684–87) and a series of questions and answers by the Chalcedonian monk Anastasios of Sinai (fl. late seventh century) also address the permissibility of interreligious marriage.³⁴ Anastasios considers as well the spiritual status of enslaved Christian concubines of Muslim masters.³⁵ The ecclesiastics disapprove of all of these cases, though they accommodate them to differing degrees and to different ends that we will examine in detail in Chapter 8. For now, it suffices to note that household ties and sexual contact between the Arab conquerors and subject Christians were not uncommon in the first decades after the conquest, whether through marriage or because women among the considerable numbers of captives taken by the conquerors could be pressed into slave concubinage.³⁶ This spurred bishops to assert that religious difference required social separation: whatever they were, the Arab conquerors were not orthodox believers, and as such marriage with them was to be avoided.

Polygamy crops up conspicuously as well in bishops’ responsa from seventh-century Syria, and it too has significant implications for the confessional stew of the 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 continued membership in that communion.

To those familiar with the sacrament of marriage of later Christian traditions, the idea that getting married is fundamentally a religious practice defined by religious law may seem unexceptional. Nothing, however, is necessary or natural about that idea. When George issued his canon in the late seventh century, there was no systematic sacramental theology of marriage in any major Christian tradition, including the Latin one; these would develop only later in the medieval period.⁴⁴ The notion that administering the formation of marriage bonds was exclusively the domain of the religious tradition and its clerics was decidedly novel. In fact, given that East Syrian synods of the Sasanian period routinely issued a smattering of canons related to marriage, it is all the more striking that only in 676, under the rule of the caliphate, did George make marriage the Church of the East’s canonically delimited territory.⁴⁵

Why did he do so when he did? Particular conditions arising from the Arab conquests and initial spread of Islam, concentrated in this case in eastern Arabia, provide the answer. These conditions included ecclesiastical schism, the specter of apostasy to Islam, and the unacceptable heterogeneity of local marital practices, especially the pattern of Christian women marrying non-Christian men. From the point of view of East Syrian bishops like George, these developments impinged alarmingly upon the social integrity of eastern Arabia’s Christian communities and, ultimately, the Church of the East as a whole. One way to attend to this threat was to affirm a constitutive connection between the religious community and marriage, that ancient institution whose purpose was to facilitate the formation of households and the social reproduction of the human species. Bringing that institution under the purview of ecclesiastical law was an effort to ensure its proper practice in service to the religious community: reproducing not only the species in general but the true-believing individuals and households that together made up the church. By making marriage exclusively subject to the law of the religious tradition, George promoted a specific vision of East Syrian Christians as a distinct social collectivity within the caliphate.

Rebellion, Apostasy, and Polygamy on the Persian Gulf Coast

The immediate impetus for George’s synod of 676 on the Persian Gulf island of Dayrin was ending a schism between the East Syrian patriarchate and the ecclesiastics of Bet Qatraye that had developed a generation earlier.⁴⁶ Under George’s predecessor as patriarch, Ishoʿyahb III (r. 649–59), the bishops of Fars—the ecclesiastical province on the Iranian side of the Gulf to which the Qataris were subordinate—had declared their autonomy from the patriarchate in Seleucia-Ctesiphon, the former Sasanian capital in central Iraq. Fars was an old and venerable see that claimed apostolic foundation; it appears that when the Arabs overthrew the Sasanians, the ecclesiastics of Fars saw no reason to recognize the bishop of a now defunct imperial capital as their superior.⁴⁷ While they ultimately reconciled with Ishoʿyahb, their fellow bishops of Bet Qatraye continued to claim autonomy for themselves. Only under George did the various factions come to terms; he and six Qatari bishops convened the synod of 676 to formalize the reconciliation.

From Ishoʿyahb and George’s perspective, an ecclesiastical schism like the Qataris’ represented a major loss to the Church of the East. The bishops of Bet Qatraye severed an entire province from its ecclesiological structure when they removed themselves from communion with Seleucia-Ctesiphon. The laypeople of Bet Qatraye were in danger of losing their chance at salvation, as the ecclesiastical stewards who mediated their communion with the body of Christ had disconnected their link with the true church. The patriarchate, moreover, lost the spiritual, human, and material resources embodied in the region’s Christian communities.⁴⁸ That loss was magnified, moreover, by the specter of apostasy occasioned by the Arab conquests and the spread of the Arabs’ new religious movement. According to the Islamic tradition, the coastal regions of eastern Arabia (comprising the caliphal districts of al-Bahrayn, roughly equivalent to Bet Qatraye, and ʿUman) were incorporated into the Arab-Muslim polity fairly swiftly in the 630s.⁴⁹ However confessionally distinct Islam was or was not at that early date, the Arabs’ new religious movement certainly spread in the region, at the very least among its Arab tribes—and at a cost to the Church of the East. We know from several of Ishoʿyahb’s letters that the Christian inhabitants of Mazun, the Syriac name for the peninsula of ʿUman or a town thereon, had recently joined the religion of the Arabs (Syriac ṭayyāyē). The Mazunites did so to avoid paying a tax imposed by the conquerors: “They forsook the faith [shbaq[w] haymānutā] forever but held onto half [their] possessions [pālgut qenyānē] for a little while.”⁵⁰ Mazun was a single bishopric, so its apostate Christian community was unlikely to have been large.⁵¹ Nevertheless, Ishoʿyahb’s reference demonstrates that losing believers in the Arabian Peninsula to the rulers’ new religious movement was a real possibility in the eyes of the bishops. Significantly, Ishoʿyahb invoked the memory of the Mazunites’ apostasy in his attempts to end the schism between the patriarchate and Bet Qatraye. “A single departure from the faith, like that of the Mazunites, would already have been enough for Satan,” he wrote in a letter to the laypeople of eastern Arabia, “but the bishops of Fars and Bet Qatraye, zealous to forsake Christianity … even more than what Satan wanted [āp yattir men mā d-ṣābē [h]wā sāṭānā], have signed, sealed, and delivered [their] apostasy [ktab[w] wa-ṭbaʿ[w] w-shaddar[w] kāporutā].”⁵² In the patriarch’s eyes, the Qataris’ ecclesiastical schism and the Mazunites’ apostasy both contributed to the same problem: losing the very believers who constituted the church of eastern Arabia.

Against this background, George’s synod assumed the task of securing the integrity of that social and institutional body. Besides ending the ecclesiastical schism, George’s canons aimed to correct deviant local practices, which would put Bet Qatraye’s Christians back on the path to salvation and simultaneously construct clear social boundaries between them and other locals of different religious affiliations. This aim is apparent in the synod’s canons that regulate interactions with non-Christians, including prohibitions of litigating before non-ecclesiastical judges, socializing at Jewish taverns, and participating in ostentatiously “pagan” mourning rituals.⁵³ Marriage, however, had a special place in this effort. Among the Qataris’ “practices in need of correction” condemned by George’s canons were those same marital ones familiar to us from postconquest Syria: polygamy, concubinage, and marriages between Christian women and non-Christian men. In a region where the East Syrian patriarchate’s hold on the local Christians was already tenuous, these marital practices threatened communal integrity in two distinct ways: by leading believers astray in the current generation and by perverting the divinely mandated, proper method for reproducing future ones. George’s canon §16 states that men who take multiple wives or concubines, according to “pagan customs” (ʿyādē ḥanpāyē) and in contravention of the church’s teachings, “have become estranged … from all Christian honor” (hwaw mnakrēn … l-kul iqārā da-krēsṭyānē).⁵⁴ Canon §14 castigates Christian women who marry unbelievers (ḥanpē), most likely meaning members of the Arab ruling class, since doing so introduces them to “customs of strangers to the fear of God” (ʿyādē d-nukrāyin l-deḥlat Alāhā)—that is, it pushes them toward apostasy.⁵⁵ In these respects, aberrant marital practices, like the other modes of interreligious contact addressed by George’s canons, threatened to thin the ranks of believers in Bet Qatraye. George’s prescription of ecclesiastical administration of marriage between Christians was an effort to tamp down this danger—to ensure that marital unions harmonized with ecclesiastical expectations and thereby kept laypeople within the communal fold, particularly in a region where ecclesiastical schism and apostasy had shaken the patriarchate’s confidence in the local church’s foundations.

More than other “practices in need of correction” among the Christians of Bet Qatraye, marriage was further significant because it had implications for future generations of believers in addition to the current one. Marriage was the institution that facilitated the reproduction of the human species in accordance with God’s plan. The problem for George in seventh-century Bet Qatraye was that the institution itself was not necessarily reproducing good, true-believing Christians. This concern is especially evident in George’s condemnation of interreligious marriage, which is gendered—it concerns only women, not men, who marry non-Christians—to a specific and significant end. As Chapter 8 discusses in greater detail, legal regimes that regulate the marriage of women across group boundaries are fundamentally efforts to manage the group’s reproductive resources. It was a standard assumption of the patrilineal societies of the late antique and medieval Middle East that husbands and fathers defined the religious affiliation of their families.⁵⁶ Therefore, when a Christian woman married a non-Christian man, her reproductive potential was lost to her natal community, as her children would affiliate to her husband’s religion. If ecclesiastical schism and apostasy represented immediate, collective losses to the Church of the East, marriages with the conquerors threatened its communal integrity by draining away potential believers from future generations.

George’s marriage canon was a response to these conditions. Asserting Christian law’s constitutive authority over marriage was an effort to secure the continued reproduction and integrity of the Church of the East as a socially embedded body of believers, particularly in a region with a recent history of ecclesiastical schism and Islamic expansion. Making the institution subject to Christian law and ecclesiastical oversight meant ensuring that marriage was put into proper practice producing future generations of faithful Christians, the very substance of the church as a discrete community within the caliphate’s diverse society. Toward these ends, George took the novel step of redefining the social and legal institution of marriage as an exclusively Christian one.

Marriage and the Religious Community in Islamic Late Antiquity

George’s canon, like other ecclesiastical efforts to regulate Christian households in Syria, Iraq, and Iran, was a response to a host of local contingencies. In this case, it was the unstable ecclesiastical politics and religious dynamics of seventh-century Bet Qatraye that demanded renewed attention to lay marital practices. George’s formulation of Christian marriage, however, had implications that went beyond its local impetuses. Issued as it was by an ecclesiastical synod, George’s canon was couched in a universalizing language that implied universal applicability. Christian women “shall be betrothed to men through Christian law”; anyone who transgresses this principle “shall also be anathematized from the church.” By virtue of the form in which these strictures were issued, they theoretically applied not only to the Christians of Bet Qatraye but to all the laypeople under the purview of the Church of the East. It would take East Syrian bishops another century to revisit in a dedicated fashion the juridical implications of George’s assertion that religious law, rather than that of the state, tribe, or other association, was the ultimate arbiter of the ancient institution of marriage. But already in the Umayyad Caliphate, it implied a reformulation of the social contours of the Christian community and brought East Syrian tradition into step with neighboring religions.

The idea that the law of the religious community had constitutive authority over marriages between its adherents had prevailed for some time among Jewish rabbis and Zoroastrian priests, and it was in the process of articulation as well among seventh-century Muslims. A distinctively Jewish law of marriage was already integral to the Mishnah and two Talmuds, the repositories of communal legal tradition around which rabbinic Judaism coalesced over the course of late antiquity.⁵⁷ The rabbis crafted a specifically Jewish law of contractual marriage that reshaped biblical prescriptions, aiming thereby to “creat[e] a collective memory, a formation of one Israel through the perception of continuous communal adherence to laws that stretch back to the primal myths.”⁵⁸ While it is clear that many Jews in antiquity attended to their legal affairs, including contracting marriages, through a variety of civil legal orders,⁵⁹ the rabbis’ tradition affirmed a fundamental connection between marriage and the wider religious community of their followers. Similar perspectives prevailed in the Zoroastrian priestly tradition: marrying was a meritorious act in the service of the Good Religion, while the prescriptions of Sasanian inheritance law encoded the Zoroastrian emphasis on reproducing male lineages in order to perpetuate the worship of the good deity Ohrmazd.⁶⁰ Finally, God’s revelation to Muhammad in the Quran contained a considerable body of norms relating to the family and household life.⁶¹ Quranic legislation reformed or systematized the marital practices of pre-Islamic Arabia, and in so doing affirmed the authority of God and His law over marriage as an Islamic institution.⁶²

George’s canon (and Shemʿon and Hnanishoʿ to a lesser extent) put forward the same notion for a Christian constituency. Like Quranic legislation, George’s East Syrian law unmoored marriage from the civil frameworks—whether regional practice, tribal custom, or imperial law—that might also govern the institution and define its role in forming households and reproducing social relations. To what degree Christians actually followed his prescription is a different question that later chapters take up. But in normative terms, these seventh-century developments in East Syrian tradition asserted that the ancient human business of household formation and reproduction properly served and belonged under the purview of the religious community rather than any other human collectivity. The learned elite of late antiquity’s exclusivist religions largely shared the perspective that confessional belonging was an all-encompassing identity that subsumed other loyalties. Christianizing marriage as a legal institution brought East Syrian tradition in line with its neighbors in propagating that notion; and it undergirded a conception of the church as one of many social bodies within the Islamic caliphate that bishops in later centuries were to amplify and refine.

While the establishment of the seventh-century caliphate did not explode the communal structures of the vast and varied subject populations under its rule, neither did it leave them untouched. The clearing out of former political elites and the accession of new ones interested in little more than tribute, taxes, and obedience from their subjects left room for subject elites to creatively reform their communal institutions. For Christian bishops in Iraq and Iran, that meant assuming more active judicial roles in their local communities, penning new corpora of ecclesiastical law, and asserting the independence of local ecclesiastical organizations from hierarchies established under the Sasanians. Into regions characterized by frequent interaction among individuals of different confessions and loose attitudes toward which religious rituals and communities any individual might participate in, the conquerors added nascent Islam to the mix. For bishops as for other subject religious elites, this created both a necessity and an opportunity to define more explicitly those social and ritual practices attendant to orthodox faith, especially in light of the sometimes uncomfortable proximity between Christian and early Muslim attitudes toward God, Jesus, and prayer.

Central to all of these adaptations to the new order of the seventh century was the Christian household. Bishops in Iraq and Iran mediated inheritance disputes and offered guidelines for the transmission of family property and thus the material constitution of Christian lineages, assuming more explicitly a role for ecclesiastical law that had belonged previously to the Sasanian judiciary. In Syria and Iraq, marriages between conquerors and Christians and a burgeoning interest in polygamy on the part of some laymen made marital practices a newly significant locus for the definition of Christian social distinctiveness. Most strikingly, George I responded to shifting socioreligious dynamics and fractious ecclesiastical politics in eastern Arabia by redefining marriage itself as an exclusively Christian institution. Bringing proper order to the institution that was the linchpin of social reproduction would secure the boundaries of the local Christian community in a changing corner of the caliphate. Thus, beyond the accession of a new political elite and the rising public predominance of a new religion, the establishment of the caliphate in the seventh-century Middle East set off reverberations that, in the form of ecclesiastical regulation, reached even into the households of Christian subjects.

The universalizing claims of George’s synod notwithstanding, each of the creative adaptations by seventh-century Christian religious elites to postconquest conditions was piecemeal and responsive to particular, local circumstances. After the fall of the Umayyads, however, the increasing confidence and formalization of caliphal institutions of governance and Islamic traditions would elicit a different response from Christian elites. Under the rule of the early Abbasid caliphs, Christian bishops—especially West Syrians and East Syrians—undertook a more comprehensive effort at communal institutional reshaping: a reinvention 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.