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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 is customary to speak of the Abbasids’ rise to power as a “revolution,” an image evoked by the fact that their movement began as a clandestine one and that it swept aside an old regime.³ Just as important, the accession of the Abbasids created the conditions for significant changes in the social, religious, and political patterns of the caliphate. For one, the caliphate’s urban centers became increasingly diverse homes to a wide range of peoples. How justly the Abbasids ruled is up for debate, but there is little doubt that an unprecedented degree of participation of non-Arabs in the political and cultural affairs of the caliphate characterized the new order. Iranian Muslims from the eastern provinces, the core of the Abbasids’ supporters, filled the caliphate’s high administrative posts, and the Khurasani soldiers settled in Baghdad were a new and very different demographic presence in the Fertile Crescent.⁴ Besides the influx to Iraq of eastern Iranians, the wealth and opportunities for patronage in the empire’s main cities continued to attract the attention of a wide variety of individuals (almost always men) on the make. Civilian non-Arab Muslims, stigmatized in previous generations for their lack of pedigree, rose to prominence as religious scholars, state functionaries, and litterateurs as a matter of course in the early Abbasid period.⁵ Ethnic and religious diversity had certainly already been characteristic of Umayyad cities, but it intensified in the Abbasid period as a result of the partial breakdown of the ethnic hierarchies of the Umayyad order, the magnetic pull of wealth, and the ongoing rise of Arabic as a lingua franca and thus a source of cultural capital irrespective of speakers’ backgrounds. The conditions of Abbasid rule thus made the participation of an enormously diverse population in the high culture and governance of the caliphate increasingly unremarkable. Non-Muslims, especially East Syrian Christians whose demographic weight lay in Iraq but also Melkites, Harranian pagans, and others, gravitated toward the Abbasids’ urban centers and served the empire conspicuously as administrators, physicians, and other professionals.⁶

This mixing of populations set the stage as well for the formation of a host of vital Islamic intellectual traditions. Islam’s doctrinal content and the practical obligations of being Muslim were of course already at issue in the umma’s earliest days. But in the Abbasid Caliphate’s mix of new Muslims, old Muslims, and non-Muslims, many new and different answers were on offer for how an adherent of any given religious tradition was supposed to act and what one was supposed to believe. That setting, combined with Arabic’s growing literary prestige and the introduction of paper as a cheap, easy writing material, facilitated the initial coherence of several disciplines of study that would be foundational to the medieval Islamic tradition.⁷ Scholars dedicated to rationalistic inquiry into metaphysical truth cultivated Arabic theology (kalām) and Arabic philosophy in the tradition of late antique Greek thought (falsafa). The collection, study, and emulation of Hadith, traditions of the Prophet’s sayings and doings, continued among a very large subsection of pious Muslim scholars who had no patience for the speculations of theologians and philosophers. Most germane to our concerns is the formation of Islamic jurisprudence (fiqh).⁸ In the second half of the eighth century, Muslim jurisprudents (or their students) increasingly committed to paper the legal norms and methods of legal analysis they devised through study of the Quran, the example of the Prophet, and various local traditions of legal practice going back to the Prophet’s Companions. The later Sunni schools of law located their origins in the traditions and circles of the major Muslim jurisprudents of this era: Malik ibn Anas (d. 795) in Medina, Abu Hanifa (d. 767), Abu Yusuf (d. 795), and Muhammad ibn al-Hasan al-Shaybani (d. 805) in Iraq, and Muhammad ibn Idris al-Shafiʿi (d. 820) in the Hijaz, Iraq, and Egypt, not to mention other prominent jurists in Kufa, Basra, and Arabia whose traditions of study were subsumed by the other schools.

Closely related to the formation of Arabo-Islamic intellectual traditions was the reorganization and consolidation of institutions of caliphal governance, especially the judicial apparatus in Iraq and elsewhere, under the early Abbasids. In general, Abbasid caliphs and their advisors undertook a variety of projects aimed at centralizing legal, administrative, and religious authority in their hands. Al-Maʾmun’s (r. 813–33) demand that the ulama assent to particular theological doctrines is perhaps the most well-known example,⁹ but other, more nuts-and-bolts efforts were often more effective in the long run. Scribal formulas that are impressively consistent across tax documents from provinces as distant as Egypt and Khurasan point to a strongly centralized fiscal administration already under al-Mansur (r. 754–75).¹⁰ Similarly significant were the Abbasid efforts to reform the caliphal judiciary. Judicial institutions in the caliphate had been relatively less centralized and systematized under the Medinan caliphs and the Umayyads. Judicial appointments were largely at the discretion of regional governors, and it was entirely unexceptional for individuals not appointed as agents of the ruling house, such as tribal arbitrators and the exceptionally pious, to be treated as figures of judicial authority and recourse.¹¹ Judicial procedure and the norms dispensed by judges, furthermore, appear to have varied considerably from city to city, as the Abbasid vizier Ibn al-Muqaffaʿ famously lamented.¹² While some of these patterns persisted for centuries—no premodern state as large as the caliphate could have put an end to all of them—the Abbasid caliphs nonetheless devoted significant energy to centralizing and adding a degree of systematization to the empire’s diverse and diffuse judicial institutions, often with effective results. Principally, al-Mansur began the practice, brought to fruition under his successors, of centrally appointing the judges (quḍāt, singular qāḍī) of every major town in the caliphate. Harun al-Rashid (r. 786–809) is credited with establishing the office of chief judge (qāḍī l-quḍāt) as a member of the court and advisor to the caliph.¹³ Overall, the Abbasids’ projects brought new consistency to the learned judges’ audiences that increasingly became the model Islamic judicial institution, particularly in populous, closely administered Iraq.¹⁴ This meant, moreover, a degree of imperial patronage and support for the civilian religious scholars who developed the Islamic jurisprudence administered in the courts. While the ulama would long maintain a venerable tradition of reticence to accept state appointments in light of the injustice associated with rulers, the Abbasids appear to have had a hand in spurring the consolidation of the early Hanafi school of law, as caliphs beginning with al-Mahdi (r. 775–85) favored the students of Abu Hanifa for major judicial posts.¹⁵ Caliphal judicial reform and the formation of Islamic jurisprudence thus ran in tandem and partially informed the other’s success.

Such, then, is the view of the Abbasid revolution and its aftermath from an imperial metropolitan perspective: a diversifying Muslim ruling class and population, the formation of Arabo-Islamic intellectual disciplines, and caliphal institutional reform and centralization. If the crux of early Abbasid history is often presented as these forms of “classical” Islam first beginning to cohere, however, the majority of the Abbasids’ subjects, certainly in the eighth and ninth centuries and perhaps a good deal later, were not Muslim and did not have a direct stake in the urban Muslim elite’s creative wrangling over Islamic identity. But that does not mean that the empire had no impact on their worlds. The religious and political traditions of non-Muslims had informed Islam and the caliphate since their initial formation; in the Abbasid period, we can view the continued development of the caliphate’s socioreligious order in non-Muslims’ adaptations to new Abbasid institutions and trends in Arabo-Islamic intellectual culture. For the ecclesiastical elites of the Christian communities that lived at the heart of the caliphate, the West Syrians in northern Syria and the Jazira (the caliphate’s northern Mesopotamian province) and especially the East Syrians in the Jazira, Iraq, and Iran, playing out the imperatives of Abbasid empire meant buttressing communal judicial institutions and creating newly expansive traditions of Christian law. Above all, that law aimed to extend the authority of the ecclesiastical hierarchy into Christian households and over the full range of practices by which Christians formed and reproduced families, kinship networks, and lineages. From the vantage point of the intellectual labors and administrative interests of contemporary Syriac bishops, the evolving Abbasid social order took shape at the intersection of empire, subject communal institutions, and the Christian household.

CREATING CHRISTIAN LAW AT THE HEART OF THE ISLAMIC EMPIRE

Christian Subjects in Muslim Courts

The formation 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 Corpus of Ishoʿbokt, a later successor to Shemʿon as metropolitan bishop of Fars. We know little of Ishoʿbokt’s life other than his Persian geographical and cultural background and the 770s as the probable time frame of his ordination as a bishop.²⁹ His Jurisprudential Corpus, composed in Middle Persian but extant in a Syriac translation, is a remarkable text: it draws on Sasanian law to bring an unprecedented breadth of practices under a single ecclesiastical legal regime. In an introductory discourse, Ishoʿbokt notes that he has received requests for a unified Christian law for his eparchy of Fars from his suffragan bishops. He tells the reader that he will create one by committing to writing the laws “adhered to in the tradition [yubbala] of [our] ancestors in our area,” supplemented with the customs of other orthodox Christians.³⁰ In other words, Ishoʿbokt set out to transmute the judicial custom (ʿyādā) of Fars, its churches, and its peoples into a Christian civil law (dinā, dinē) embodied in a written text.³¹ Comparison of the Corpus to a late Sasanian juridical compendium, as well as Ishoʿbokt’s use of technical Middle Persian terminology, demonstrates that the local traditions he drew on were essentially Iranian-Sasanian law, still familiar among non-Muslims in eighth-century Fars.³² Further exceptional was the breadth of his interests: the Corpus comprises six extensive treatises covering legal theory, marriage and divorce, testate and intestate succession, various forms of contract, and judicial procedure. In a single work, Ishoʿbokt claimed the authority to cover practical topics as diverse as what makes for a legitimate betrothal contract, how to give loans and charge interest, and how to pay hired laborers.³³

The Jurisprudential Corpus was highly innovative in the great range of legal subjects it brought under a single ecclesiastical regulatory regime. It was also fairly provincial in its connection to southwest Iran, having been written in Middle Persian rather than Syriac and taking local traditions as its focus. In fact, since we do not know exactly when in the eighth century Ishoʿbokt flourished, it is best to think of his work primarily as continuing a Persian Christian jurisprudential tradition in the vein of Shemʿon even as it responded to caliphate-wide legal developments. In Fars, ecclesiastics like Shemʿon and Ishoʿbokt were literate in Middle Persian, familiar with Sasanian law, and best situated to appropriate that law into their own, provincial sphere of judicial activity as caliphal institutions developed around them. Despite its provincialism, however, the sheer range of Ishoʿbokt’s law book was exceptional; and when it circulated in the Church of the East’s Iraqi heartlands, it became an influential model for East Syrian patriarchs and other jurist-bishops responding to the growing hegemony of Islamic law and the caliphal judiciary. Timothy I, the East Syrian patriarch from 780 to 823, approached Ishoʿbokt’s work in just this manner. Timothy was a particularly prominent bishop whose long reign left an indelible mark on the intellectual culture of Abbasid Iraq and the historical trajectory of Syriac Christianity.³⁴ He was trained in the East Syrian schools of the hill country of the eastern Jazira, the Church of the East’s demographic heartland and home to many monasteries and associated institutions of learning. Timothy is probably best known for his theological disputation with the caliph al-Mahdi dramatized in one of his letters and his Christian missionizing efforts in Central Asia. Just as significant were his more prosaic activities related to East Syrian law. In fact, Timothy stands out as the first patriarch on record to try both to consolidate the disparate, varied Christian legal works of earlier centuries and to bring the provincial concern for civil law evident in Ishoʿbokt’s writings into the broader tradition of the Church of the East. In a word, his efforts mark the formation of East Syrian law as a comprehensive communal tradition encompassing both ecclesiastical and lay affairs.

These efforts are visible, again, in the textual record. Timothy commissioned the translation of Ishoʿbokt’s Corpus from Middle Persian into Syriac; he may have been responsible for the translation of Shemʿon’s legal treatise as well.³⁵ Furthermore, he was likely responsible for a redaction of the East Syrian Synodicon,³⁶ the collected proceedings of the Church of the East’s late antique synods and related legal texts, as well as for incorporating into it the Syro-Roman Law Book,³⁷ a late antique Syriac translation of commentaries on Roman law. Overall, Timothy appears to have had a strong interest in identifying and collecting various received texts that could together define a canon of East Syrian law. But the majority of these received texts did not offer much guidance for regulating the social relations of laypeople, so just as significant are Timothy’s own original legal writings. In addition to several epistles that treat family law,³⁸ Timothy collected ninety-nine of his judicial rulings, prescriptions, and legal responsa into a single composition, his Law Book. Much like Ishoʿbokt’s work, Timothy’s Law Book was a practical juristic collection intended to give ecclesiastical judges the material they might need to adjudicate lay civil affairs and obviate laypeople’s interest in going to caliphal courts, an aim Timothy highlights in the work’s preface.³⁹ To this end, the Law Book covers three major areas: the order and prerogatives of the ecclesiastical hierarchy; marriage and divorce; and inheritance. Though not as long or as systematic as Ishoʿbokt’s Corpus, Timothy’s Law Book thus represents a major evolution in the traditions of Christian law in the Islamic world. It is the first work we know of that not only sought to regulate both ecclesiastical and lay civil affairs in a detailed fashion but, by virtue of having been composed by a sitting patriarch, claimed the authority to do so for the entire Church of the East.

Timothy’s interest in legal canonization and original composition mark the initial coherence of East Syrian law as a lettered tradition encompassing both ecclesiastical and civil affairs. Several other jurist-bishops active in Iraq throughout the ninth century refined that tradition further. Timothy’s successor as patriarch, a monk from the Mosul region named Ishoʿbarnun (r. 823–28), continued the precedent set by Timothy that the Church of the East’s chief bishop should also be a jurist. Ishoʿbarnun had studied with the same esteemed teacher as Timothy and subsequently took monastic vows at one of the eastern Jazira’s most prominent East Syrian monasteries, but his patriarchal career was shorter and less spectacular than Timothy’s—he is perhaps best known for his intense antipathy toward his predecessor and for trying to remove his name from the diptychs of the patriarchal church. Ishoʿbarnun did, however, compose a longer, substantial Law Book of his own on the model of Timothy’s.⁴⁰ Ishoʿbarnun’s work brings together the patriarch’s decisions and responsa to lower ecclesiastics on legal topics, and it covers extensively lay civil affairs. The bulk of the Law Book treats marriage, divorce, and inheritance, while the remainder includes rulings on slavery, loans and debt, theft, and monastic and ecclesiastical order. After Ishoʿbarnun, succeeding generations of East Syrian jurist-bishops took up the task of synthesizing the episcopal law books and the earlier received materials into new treatises and civil law digests. In the mid-ninth century, ʿAbdishoʿ bar Bahriz of Mosul’s Order of Marriage and Inheritance summarized the marriage law provisions of earlier works and offered a new system of inheritance law.⁴¹ Not long after, Gabriel of Basra (fl. late ninth century) compiled excerpts from late antique canon law texts, East Syrian synodal canons, and rulings from the Islamic-period law books into treatises on distinct legal topics, creating the first systematic compendium of East Syrian law.⁴²

ʿAbdishoʿ and Gabriel thus brought the tradition of East Syrian communal law to a clear stage of canonization. By the end of the ninth century, that tradition’s corpus of texts was extensive enough to require new works to streamline its disparate rulings and doctrines. In matters of ecclesiastical law proper, the corpus stretched back to pseudo-apostolic writings from Christianity’s early days and bishops’ synods from the Roman and Sasanian empires. East Syrian civil law, on the other hand, was largely a recent creation of the Islamic period. The civil law sections of ʿAbdishoʿ’s and Gabriel’s systematizing works draw from the legal treatises of Shemʿon, Ishoʿbokt, Timothy, and Ishoʿbarnun but no comparable earlier or unknown sources.⁴³ A tradition of East Syrian communal law that sought to regulate not only ecclesiastical affairs but also the social, economic, and familial relations of lay Christians had thus taken shape as both a response to and a function of institutional conditions in the early Islamic caliphate. By the end of the ninth century, bishops in Fars and especially Iraq had developed that tradition into a coherent intellectual discipline cultivated by ecclesiastical jurists.

CHRISTIAN FAMILY LAW AND THE RELIGIOUS COMMUNITY

While the early Abbasid-era works of Christian jurisprudence were composed as resources for ecclesiastical judges, they were not merely a solution to an administrative problem. They also prescribed new norms of behavior for laypeople; creating Christian civil law was an opportunity for bishops to conceive in new ways of how Christian belonging was to be enacted and Christian communities constituted within caliphal society. To this end, the East Syrian legal works of the early Abbasid Caliphate show that the bishops had one principal area of social relations in view: the family. Where George I had prescribed ecclesiastical oversight of marriage contracts, Abbasid-era works of East Syrian law evince a broader concern to regulate the full range of practices and institutions associated with the formation and reproduction of households—marriage, inheritance, familial property rights. By gathering these into a single regulatory regime, the bishops put forward a new conception of the Christian household as a social institution. In doing so, moreover, they enjoined both a vertical solidarity between ecclesiastics and laypeople and a horizontal uniformity in the shape of lay households. Beyond giving ecclesiastics tools for judicial practice, Christian law marked out the linkage between ecclesiastical authority and the practices that formed laypeople into their most fundamental social units as the key element that constituted the Church of the East (and the West Syrians, as we will see later) as a social collectivity—a subject religious community—in the caliphate.

This operation of Christian law differed both from earlier Christian approaches to marriage and from strategies of socioreligious boundary drawing undertaken by other elites in the early Abbasid Caliphate. Abbasid-era East Syrian bishops focused on the economic relations and social hierarchies that made up households rather than their pious sexual discipline, the major concern of late antique Christian writing on the family, and they devoted far less attention to other realms of social interaction—marketplace commerce, for example—than did Muslim or Jewish jurisprudents. Crucially, the workings of Abbasid-era Christian law also exemplify the formation of the caliphate’s social order at the dovetailing interests of an imperial and a subject elite. The prerogative for dhimmi elites to regulate their communities’ internal affairs was a feature of caliphal governance; the interest in extending ecclesiastical authority further into Christian households and the very notion that there was such a thing as a household with a distinctively Christian material-social constitution were the result of subject elites playing out the imperatives of the circumstances of caliphal rule. Caliphal governance tacitly acknowledged the identities propounded by non-Muslim clerical classes and institutions as discrete social groups and left it to the clerics to fill in their substance; the clerics, for their part, had an interest in twinning theological identity with clear social boundaries and distinctive social practices. In the heartlands of the caliphate the result was a new formulation of Christian community rooted in ecclesiastical law’s new definition of the Christian household. Like other Christian traditions, East Syrians already had distinct (though developing) doctrinal identities, clerical classes, and ecclesiastical institutions prior to the emergence of Islam. It was the extension of ecclesiastical authority into lay households and the prescription of uniform practices of lay social reproduction that newly defined them as a socioreligious group within the public life of the Islamic empire.

Creating the Christian Household

The scope of the East Syrian law produced by Ishoʿbokt, Timothy, and other jurist-bishops differed notably from the legal traditions cultivated by contemporary Muslims and Jews. Muslim ulama aimed to discern, to the best of their abilities, God’s will for proper behavior in every facet of human life, including both ritual duties and social interactions (ʿibādāt and muʿāmalāt). The Babylonian Talmud comprised the rabbis’ Oral Law of equally wide scope as well as centuries’ worth of their dissections and analyses of it. While the East Syrian jurist-bishops sometimes give the impression that they aimed similarly to compile a comprehensive, “unified ecclesiastical legal code,”⁴⁴ the vast majority of their law’s positive content focused on one sphere of social relations: the family.⁴⁵ It did so, moreover, in a particular way: going beyond the interests of earlier ecclesiastical law, its goal was regulating the full complement of material-social practices that formed and reproduced households and lineages.