Between Christ and Caliph. Lev E. Weitz
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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