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Introduction

What makes [the Christians] great in the hearts of the commoners and beloved to regular folk is that among them are scribes to sultans, attendants to kings, physicians to noblemen, pharmacists, and moneychangers; while you won’t find a Jew other than a dyer, tanner, cupper, butcher, or repairman.

Despite the great number of monks and nuns, and the fact that most priests imitate their [celibacy] … and the fact that anyone among [the Christians] who does marry cannot exchange his wife, marry another in addition to her, or take concubines—despite all this, they have covered the earth, filled the horizons, and conquered the nations in number and progeny. This has compounded our calamities and magnified our tribulation.

—Abu ʿUthman al-Jahiz, al-Radd ʿala l-nasara (The Refutation of the Christians)

To hear Abu ʿUthman al-Jahiz (d. 868/69) tell it, one would think that the Muslims of the ninth-century Abbasid Caliphate were in trouble. Al-Jahiz was one of the medieval Islamic empire’s great litterateurs and spent his life in the thriving cities of its Iraqi heartland. Yet everywhere he looked he claimed to see not the signs of a confident Islamic polity but its prominent, self-satisfied Christian subjects. Christians filled the halls of power, running the imperial bureaucracy and attending to caliphs, generals, and viziers, and received the adulation of the Muslim masses. Just as they did not shy away from taking good Muslim names like Husayn and ʿAbbas, they could get away with slandering the Prophet Muhammad’s mother.¹ Despite their bizarre aversion to sex and infatuation with celibacy, the Christians had managed to become the most populous nation on God’s green earth.

Such is the picture of the ninth-century caliphate that al-Jahiz paints in The Refutation of the Christians, one of the many incisive essays he composed over the course of a long and productive career. Although it is undoubtedly a caricature to a certain degree, embedded in al-Jahiz’s literary stylings are two striking insights into medieval Middle Eastern society that serve as this book’s departure points.

One is that al-Jahiz’s Abbasid Caliphate, two centuries after the emergence of Islam and at a time when the Muslims’ state was at the height of its powers, was not an “Islamic society” in any simple or straightforward way. Whether or not it was filled with Christians to the degree that al-Jahiz laments, his comments remind us that the caliphate was fundamentally an empire—a state governing an expansive territory and a population of great diversity, including Christians, Jews, Zoroastrians, Manichaeans, Mandaeans, Samaritans, and others alongside Muslims. What does the history of the medieval Middle East look like if we recognize non-Muslims to have been as integral to the landscape of the Islamic empire as al-Jahiz suggests that they were?

The second point of interest is al-Jahiz’s focus on Christian sexuality. From the perspective of a ninth-century Iraqi Muslim, Christian distinctiveness rested not only in theological doctrines like the Trinity, rituals like baptism and the Eucharist, and institutions like churches and monasteries but also in social practices—particularly, marriage and the structures of the household. A reverence for celibacy, prohibitions of divorce, polygamy, and concubinage—to al-Jahiz, these principles were characteristic of Christians and decidedly different from the rhythms of Muslim conjugal life. What role did the household play in structuring the myriad religious communities that made up caliphal society in al-Jahiz’s day?

This book examines the making of the multireligious social order of the medieval Middle East with these two questions as its framework. Focusing on the encounter between the Islamic caliphate and its numerous Syriac Christian subjects from the seventh to the tenth century, it argues that bishops in Syria, Iraq, and Iran responded to Islamic law and governance by creating a new Christian law of their own, one centered on marriage, inheritance, and the distinctive features of Christian family life. In essence, caliphal rule spurred Christian elites to root the integrity of their communities in a newly redefined social institution: the Christian household. Above all, this study maintains that processes of interreligious contact such as this are integral to the history of the medieval Middle East. Enormous socioreligious diversity was a definitive feature of the region, but scholarly narratives focused on the triumphant formation of classical Islam often obscure it. Too long neglected, encounters like the one in question—in which the caliphate’s non-Muslim subjects transformed themselves in response to Islamic institutions and traditions—lie at the very heart of the story of the medieval Middle East’s formation.

MUSLIMS AND NON-MUSLIMS IN THE HISTORIOGRAPHY OF THE MEDIEVAL MIDDLE EAST

Non-Muslims on the Margins of Islamic History

The notion that Christians and other non-Muslims might have a more central place in the history of the medieval Middle East than scholars typically accord them arises from a few simple premises in the study of empires. Because empires typically expand through the conquest of new territories, they necessarily bring different peoples under their rule. They are thus fundamentally heterogeneous, no matter how fraught the relationships among their constituent groups. More significantly, an imperial society is never an orderly creation imposed perfectly from above by the ruling elite after the initial phases of conquest. Rather, it is the product of an ongoing process in which the empire’s subjects encounter its institutions and methods of rule. Through varying actions of adoption, adaptation, and resistance, they reproduce those institutions in some form while simultaneously transforming themselves.² This perspective has been extraordinarily productive in the study of many world empires. But in the historiography of the medieval Middle East, it remains underexplored in key respects that distort our understanding of the caliphate’s “Islamic society.” One way to recast that picture is to put at the center of the narrative the caliphate’s interactions with its vast and variegated non-Muslim populations. What do we learn when we consider that their responses to Muslim rule were constitutive of the empire’s institutions and social structures just as much as the activities of the Muslim elite?

From the mid-seventh century to the end of the ninth, adherents of a new religion, Islam, conquered territories from the Iberian Peninsula to the Indus Valley and incorporated them into a single polity, the Islamic caliphate. Especially after the Abbasid dynasty’s assumption of power in 750, new governing institutions, patterns of social organization, and intellectual disciplines took shape that would characterize the caliphate’s Middle Eastern heartlands for centuries. By the time the caliphate’s political unity fragmented in the late ninth century, Muslim elites across the region were united by an emergent high culture rooted in Islamic religion and Arabic literacy, as well as certain military and administrative traditions. This, in a nutshell, is many a historiographical narrative of the Middle East from the seventh century into the tenth—the initial coherence of what became the “classical forms” of Islamic empire, Islamic society, and Islamic tradition.³

While the substance of this narrative is widely accepted and assuredly sound, it is also marked by significant absences and a distorting teleology. Telling the history of the early medieval Middle East as the formation of classical Islamic civilization assumes that certain long-term outcomes—Muslim demographic majorities and the transregional hegemony of Islamic traditions—were self-evident from the beginning. The result is a historiography in which the history of the caliphate is largely that of its Muslim elite and their activities. This picture crucially obscures the caliphate’s populations of extraordinary linguistic, ethnic, and especially religious heterogeneity. Throughout centuries of rule by the Medinan, Umayyad, and Abbasid caliphs, Christian monks from Egypt to Iran cultivated their learned spiritual disciplines in Greek, Coptic, and Syriac. In the Abbasid crown lands of southern Iraq, Jewish, Christian, Zoroastrian, Manichaean, Mandaean, and pagan traditions were mixed up and mashed together by a dense population of Aramaic-, Arabic-, and Persian-speaking villagers and townspeople. Across the Iranian Plateau and into Central Asia, mountaineers and rural noblemen adhered to ancient Iranian religions and aristocratic cultures.

The gradual conversion and incorporation into the Muslim community of many of these peoples, as well as the cultural and religious materials they brought with them, is one of the most important storylines of Islamic history.⁴ Yet anyone who browses a textbook on the subject might be forgiven for failing to discern that the majority of the population in much of the Middle East remained non-Muslim until well into the medieval period.⁵ In such narratives, non-Muslims exist only in the background and rarely merit more than a chapter, and sometimes less than that, of their own.⁶ The caliphate’s tolerant governance leaves them to their own devices: as long as they stay obedient and pay their taxes, they are accorded “communal autonomy” to attend to their internal, insular affairs. At key moments, they participate in the historical mainstream by providing the stew of ideas from which Islam emerges, keeping the wheels of the caliphal bureaucracy turning, or translating classical texts into Arabic for interested Muslim patrons. But any sense of non-Muslims’ own traditions and transformations is absent; within the standard historiographical framework of Islamic civilization, they are historical actors only insofar as they convert or make other contributions from the sidelines to the grand Islamic synthesis. The tacit implication is that, since most of their descendants would eventually be Muslims anyway, their history is ultimately inconsequential.

That implication runs counter to the tenets and practice of historiography, and it badly distorts the richness of Middle Eastern history. By the same token, making non-Muslims the singular subject of the story is no corrective. While Muslims were a demographic minority in most regions of their polity for a considerable amount of time, demography can also be a distorting prism through which to approach the history of the preindustrial world; sovereignty and the identities of states and societies were based not on popular demographic majorities but on military prowess and claims to divine favor.⁷ Furthermore, it is easy enough to focus on the history of, say, Christians as the majority population of the early Muslim-ruled Fertile Crescent or Zoroastrians in Iran instead of on Muslims. But that does no more than reproduce from a different angle the problematic framework of discrete religious communities on parallel tracks of development and decline implied by the Islamic civilization model.

Non-Muslims in the Making of the Islamic Empire

How might one write a more integrated history of Muslims and non-Muslims in the highly diverse polities in which they lived? One way to begin is to consider critically some implications of the fact that the Islamic caliphate was an empire. That fact has not always been heeded in the study of the caliphate, and it offers some useful, integrative models with which to frame the interactions of Muslims and non-Muslims in the making of medieval Middle Eastern society.

A widely held historiographical perspective maintains that empires establish their hegemony not only through violent coercion but also by co-opting the peoples they rule. Empires exist tangibly through a range of local agents, intermediaries, and representatives, some with roots in the metropole but many from among subject populations themselves, who do the work of enacting imperial policies and building institutions in one form or another.⁸ An imperial order thus simultaneously subjects and relies upon the peoples it rules. As a result, outside of conditions of overwhelming violence and in spite of considerable asymmetries of power, the representatives of subject peoples necessarily have some role in establishing the terms and practice of their subjection.⁹ If those representatives are military elites, they may threaten to take over the imperial order as they are co-opted into it.¹⁰ If they fill civilian roles of one kind or another—as administrators or religious leaders, for example—it is frequently their mediation of imperial dictates that constitutes the empire’s institutions and reorders local societies accordingly. Indeed, some historians (particularly of the Spanish Americas) have made the subject or indigenous intermediary the locus of the story of empire itself.¹¹ At that nodal point, we see both the channels of imperial power in operation and a degree of agency among subjugated peoples. The practical reorganization of subject communities and traditions facilitated by subject intermediaries exemplifies the ongoing production of imperial systems in a way that official, schematic descriptions of those systems never can.

The goals and coercive powers of premodern Muslim rulers in the Middle East were a world away from those of later European empires, of course, but many of these insights remain analytically useful. Scholars of the medieval Middle East have put some to productive use while attending to others less assiduously. Provincial Muslim elites and their conflicts with the Umayyad caliphs in Damascus or the Abbasids in Baghdad, for example, are central to scholarly narratives of the caliphate’s political development.¹² Scholars have also devoted much attention to the Iranians and Central Asians who were absorbed into the caliphate’s military elite.¹³ Regarding the empire’s vast numbers of non-Muslim subjects, standard narratives acknowledge their importance to the caliphal administration.¹⁴ But largely missing from these narratives is serious consideration that the activities of non-Muslim elites outside the sphere of government service might have transformed their own communities, much less that the transformations they set in motion were constitutive of a new imperial society itself.¹⁵ The notion that non-Muslims enjoyed “communal autonomy” from state oversight, coupled with the fact that their histories predate Islam, has been taken too readily to imply that non-Muslims were organized into self-evident social groups that persisted unchanged, other than suffering increasing attrition due to conversion, under their new Muslim rulers.

This book contends, to the contrary, that caliphal rule fundamentally transformed even the most well-established non-Muslim communities. The response of their elites to the structures and imperatives of caliphal rule led to significant reforms to their communal institutions and traditions, and ultimately to the redefinition of their very character as religious communities.¹⁶ Moreover, in light of the insights of the historiography of empire discussed above, the reforms undertaken by non-Muslim subject elites should be understood as the very process by which a new imperial society was taking shape. This perspective facilitates an integrative approach to the history of the medieval Middle East that takes into account both its considerable diversity and the central importance of Islam. Organizing historiographical narratives solely within the framework of Islamic civilization ahistorically relegates vast numbers of non-Muslims to the margins; focusing on their elites’ responses to caliphal rule makes them historical actors and returns to historical time the early medieval caliphate’s massively variegated societies. At the same time, this approach in no way empties Middle Eastern history of its “Islamicness.” In fact, it shows us Islamization—in the sense of the rising influence of Islamic traditions, institutions, and norms of social organization—as a process rather than an inevitable fact. Non-Muslim subjects of the caliphate faced new symbols of power, techniques of governance, and intellectual discourses, all connected in one way or another to a new ruling religion. Their adaptive strategies in response show us the uneven but ongoing process by which those facets of Islamic empire became ever more hegemonic. The activities of non-Muslim elites, viewed in the context of the conditions established by caliphal rule, index the great transformations that Islam brought to the peoples and societies of the medieval Middle East.

LAW, THE HOUSEHOLD, AND CHRISTIAN COMMUNITY IN THE MEDIEVAL CALIPHATE

Among the most significant but understudied of those activities were the efforts of Christian bishops in early medieval Syria, Iraq, and Iran to redefine Christian marital practices and reshape Christian households. From the seventh to the tenth century, Syriac- and Arabic-speaking bishops responded to the establishment of the caliphate and the development of Islamic jurisprudence by elaborating new traditions of communal law for their respective churches. They translated legal works from Greek and Syriac into Arabic, compiled newly systematized collections of late antique canon law, convened synods that issued legislation for the faithful, and wrote innovative jurisprudential treatises in various areas of civil law; and they did all of this on a much wider scale than had their ecclesiastical predecessors of late antiquity. The most significant feature of these new traditions of Christian law was their focus on marriage, inheritance, and the structures of the household. While the disciplining of sexuality had long been central to Christian thought, the notion that Christian affiliation could be delineated in legal terms and inscribed in the material relationships of households and lineages took on a new import for the Christian communities of the caliphate.

Several factors recommend this subject as a basis on which to build an integrative narrative of medieval caliphal society. Christians of a variety of churches were the most numerous of the caliphate’s subjects from the Iberian Peninsula to the foothills of the Zagros Mountains; their history is obviously germane to any consideration of the transformations set in motion by Muslim rule. Scholars have examined changes in Christian intellectual culture in this vein, such as the adoption of Arabo-Islamic theological idioms and participation in the Greco-Arabic translation movement.¹⁷ But for the most part, the social history of medieval Middle Eastern Christians has yet to be written, much less integrated into that of the caliphate more widely. Strikingly, the considerable body of Christian legal literature of the period has gone virtually untapped by social historians.¹⁸ This literature, produced mainly in Syriac but also in Arabic, consists of a wide array of episcopal letters to lower clerics and laypeople, records of regulations issued by assemblies of bishops, and treatises penned by individual ecclesiastical jurisprudents.¹⁹ The traditions of Christian civil law embodied in these texts took shape largely in response to Islamic law and the caliphal judiciary; they claimed regulatory authority over lay social practice and thereby defined the requisites of communal affiliation for Christians in the caliphate. These characteristics make Christian law an ideal base of material from which to examine the making of caliphal society and its non-Muslim communities.

The family is a locus of investigation of even wider significance. Because the family, in whatever forms it takes, has usually been the foundational institution through which human societies reproduce themselves—“the social form through which the two deeply related processes of biological reproduction and the transmission of property are pursued”—it provides a crucial vantage point from which to view wider structures of social organization and the “construction of cultural or national identities.”²⁰ Indeed, sexuality and the household proved centrally important to the reorganization of Middle Eastern societies in the centuries after the establishment of Muslim rule. In the overwhelmingly Christian western half of the caliphate from the Iberian Peninsula to northern Iraq, Islam brought new attitudes toward sexuality and family life. The Christian “sexual revolution” of late antiquity had upended ancient attitudes toward sex and reproduction by esteeming virginity and looking askance at human sexuality; Islamic thought and practice, by contrast, reenshrined a typically ancient valorization of sex and worldly family life.²¹ In Iran and Central Asia, Muslim mores encountered and gradually supplanted very different marital and household reproductive practices, including close-kin marriage and polyandry, which were central to local forms of social organization.²²

The establishment of the caliphate thus introduced new and different attitudes toward sexuality, strategies of social reproduction, and household forms to the diverse populations under its rule. Christian family law both reveals and exemplifies the social-institutional transformations that subject communities undertook in response. At times, lay Christians adopted the customs and mores of the new Muslim ruling classes; at others, bishops sought to retrench traditional Christian attitudes to household life in new legal idioms and thereby produced an idea of the Christian household distinct from that of the Muslims, Jews, and Zoroastrians among whom laypeople lived. All such activities were part of an ongoing process of defining the nature of the household and the wider religious community to which it was connected. That process offers us a window onto the encounter between the caliphate and its non-Muslim subjects, as well as the new imperial society that that encounter produced.

THE CHRISTIANS OF THE MEDIEVAL MIDDLE EAST: A SNAPSHOT

The inauguration of Muslim rule thus set in motion transformations to law, the family, the household, and other social institutions across the Middle East’s religiocommunal spectrum. All religious communities, however, did not experience these in the same way. This was particularly true of the region’s large and diverse Christian populations, which were divided among a number of distinct church communities. At the heart of our story will be the Church of the East, whose members are commonly referred to as East Syrians or Nestorians.²³ The Church of the East traced its roots to the hierarchy of bishops and lay believers who lived in the Sasanian Empire, east of Roman territory, in late antiquity. Its adherents were concentrated in northern Mesopotamia, but it also claimed many members and jurisdictions throughout the Fertile Crescent, Iran, and at times Central Asia, India, and China. The chief East Syrian bishop, who took the title of Catholicos and Patriarch of the East, resided in the Sasanian capital of Seleucia-Ctesiphon and, after 775, in Baghdad. East Syrian ecclesiastical identity was defined by the use of Syriac as a literary and liturgical language; fidelity to the teachings of Theodore of Mopsuestia (d. 428), a late antique Christian thinker from Antioch in Syria; and diophysite Christological doctrines that stressed both the human and divine natures of Christ.

For reasons to be examined, the East Syrians developed the most extensive tradition of Christian law in the medieval caliphate and underwent some of the most marked communal-institutional changes. They will be central to our narrative, but other Christian communities will figure in important ways as well, especially the West Syrians and the Melkites. Like the East Syrians, the West Syrians—known also as Jacobites and today as the Syriac Orthodox—used Syriac as their chief literary and liturgical language.²⁴ The West Syrians, however, adhered to a miaphysite Christology that stressed the unity of Christ’s nature and therefore considered East Syrian doctrines heretical. Their chief bishop took the title of Patriarch of Antioch. In the medieval period the West Syrians were concentrated in northern Syria and Mesopotamia and also had a significant presence in central Iraq.

The Melkites were Christians who lived under Muslim rule, adhered to the official orthodoxy of the Byzantine Empire, and quickly adopted Arabic as a literary language after the establishment of the caliphate.²⁵ Their Byzantine orthodoxy was closely associated with the Christological definitions of the Council of Chalcedon of 451 (diophysite but not identical to the East Syrians’ Christology), so they are sometimes referred to as Chalcedonians. We will refer to them as Melkites beginning in the eighth century, when their Arabic literary production gave them an ecclesial identity distinct from the Byzantines even as they continued to share the same doctrinal commitments. The Melkites were concentrated in Syria and Palestine, with a substantial population in parts of Egypt.

While Muslims ruled over many other Christians outside the Fertile Crescent and Iran, transformations to Christian law, the household, and the religious community in the early medieval period took place especially in the core territories of the Umayyad and Abbasid caliphates. We will consider the history of other Christian groups, especially the Copts of Egypt, for comparative purposes at times, but they will remain largely outside the scope of this study.

From the sixth century to the tenth, the Christian communities of the Middle East underwent an array of transformations related to connections among the household, religious affiliation, and imperial rule. In the Islamic caliphate in the latter centuries of this period, increasingly intensive interactions between Christian elites and Islamic institutions spurred the former to reimagine the nature of Christian communities within caliphal society. Part I of this book traces the overall arc of these developments. Chapter 1 sets the backdrop by examining marriage and Christian canon law in the late antique Roman and Sasanian empires, arguing that in both realms ecclesiastical attempts to reform lay sexual practices ran up against enduring civil law traditions that defined marriage as a social institution. The seventh century and the early decades of the Umayyad Caliphate, by contrast, show evidence of the beginnings of a shift, which Chapter 2 explores. Regulating marriage became an increasingly prominent part of Christian bishops’ efforts to define communal boundaries amid the fluid socioreligious and institutional conditions brought on by the fall of the old empires and the introduction of a new ruling religion. In response to apostasy to Islam and intermarriage with the conquerors, bishops asserted for the first time the exclusive authority of ecclesiastical law, rather than civil, tribal, or local custom, to govern marriages between Christians. These Umayyad-era transformations developed into the great elaboration of Christian communal law in the central lands of the Abbasid Caliphate from the late eighth century through the ninth, the fulcrum of the book’s narrative and the subject of Chapter 3. In response to new caliphal institutions of governance and the emergence of robust traditions of Islamic law, ecclesiastics in the Abbasid heartlands made newly comprehensive efforts to define communal boundaries through confessional law. Above all else, they focused on regulating the full range of marital and inheritance practices that facilitated the social reproduction of households and lineages. Christian law thus reformulated the household as a Christian institution not only in theological terms but in its material and social constitution; and it established the link between ecclesiastical legal authority and lay households as the defining feature of Christians as social collectivities within the caliphate.

Prescribing rules, however, was always simpler than achieving their desired end, the reshaping of communal relations. In this vein, the book’s second part focuses on the details of Christian family law in the Abbasid Caliphate to examine how lay practice, Christian confessional law, and Islamic institutions interacted to shape Christian social boundaries around the institution of marriage. It demonstrates further that putting Christian legal materials into conversation with Islamic ones expands our view of the region’s intellectual culture. Bishops drew their basic legal doctrines and instruments, the subject of Chapter 4, from a mix of regional common law traditions, both ancient and Islamic. Christian family law exemplifies in this respect the high diversity of the Middle East’s early medieval legal culture. Chapter 5 takes up ecclesiastical judges and their competition with Muslim courts to administer lay marriage contracts and regulate lay divorce, arguing that Christian social groups were shaped in practice by both communal and extracommunal institutions. Jurist-bishops also devoted considerable attention to the relationship between Christian teachings and certain contested marital practices that functioned as markers of difference between religious communities in the caliphate. Marriage between close relatives, particularly first cousins, was an ancient regional institution but one whose lawfulness became a point of debate for Abbasid-era bishops. The methods of legal reasoning they deployed in this dispute, explored in Chapter 6, push us to recast the standard historiographical account of the formation of Islamic law in a comparative, transreligious framework. Polygamy, the subject of Chapter 7, became a locus of contestation over the boundaries of Christian belonging between ecclesiastical and lay elites in Abbasid cities. Ecclesiastics sought to disinherit the children of polygamous laymen and thereby to sculpt Christian lineages in a form sharply distinct from Muslim ones. Jurist-bishops similarly condemned interreligious marriage, but in this case they shared much common ground with Muslim jurists. Both adopted a gendered approach to the subject, analyzed in Chapter 8, that allowed men to marry outside the religious community but prohibited women from doing so. Christian law thus promoted the same conception favored by Muslim jurists of a social structure built of segmented religious communities.

The processes of Christian communal reordering and interactions with Islamic institutions that began in the early medieval caliphate continued into the later medieval period as well. Part III follows these down to the early fourteenth century in order to argue for the continued historiographical significance of non-Muslims and their traditions even as the Middle East was becoming more straightforwardly Islamic. The later development of Syriac and Arabic Christian family law gauges for us the uneven progress of Islamization, which Chapter 9 charts. Across this period, Islamic legal norms and categories increasingly structured the form and content of much Christian law; but some Christian jurists continued to draw on a diversity of resources other than the dominant Islamic models. Ultimately, Christian family law facilitated both a degree of Christian communal integrity and Christians’ accommodation to the Islamic caliphate and other Islamic polities. These developments call us to reconsider the place of non-Muslim traditions in shaping the societies of the medieval Middle East, the key problem to which the conclusion returns.

A productive historiographical approach to the societies of the medieval Islamic Middle East does justice to the multiple communities and traditions that inhabited and built those societies. This perspective might not have been so foreign to al-Jahiz, despite the very different value system from which it arises. Al-Jahiz’s rhetorical goal in The Refutation of the Christians was to warn of Christian perfidy, but he simultaneously testified to the integral place of Christians and other non-Muslims in the early medieval caliphate. Tracing the formation of caliphal society through the reformulations of Christian law and the Christian household that Muslim rule spurred allows us to apprehend a sliver of the diversity and vitality that, even when he did not approve of it, characterized al-Jahiz’s world.