Between Christ and Caliph. Lev E. Weitz
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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