embodied in the region’s Christian communities.48 That loss was magnified, moreover, by the specter of apostasy occasioned by the Arab conquests and the spread of the Arabs’ new religious movement. According to the Islamic tradition, the coastal regions of eastern Arabia (comprising the caliphal districts of al-Bahrayn, roughly equivalent to Bet Qatraye, and ʿUman) were incorporated into the Arab-Muslim polity fairly swiftly in the 630s.49 However confessionally distinct Islam was or was not at that early date, the Arabs’ new religious movement certainly spread in the region, at the very least among its Arab tribes—and at a cost to the Church of the East. We know from several of Ishoʿyahb’s letters that the Christian inhabitants of Mazun, the Syriac name for the peninsula of ʿUman or a town thereon, had recently joined the religion of the Arabs (Syriac ṭayyāyē). The Mazunites did so to avoid paying a tax imposed by the conquerors: “They forsook the faith [shbaq[w] haymānutā] forever but held onto half [their] possessions [pālgut qenyānē] for a little while.”50 Mazun was a single bishopric, so its apostate Christian community was unlikely to have been large.51 Nevertheless, Ishoʿyahb’s reference demonstrates that losing believers in the Arabian Peninsula to the rulers’ new religious movement was a real possibility in the eyes of the bishops. Significantly, Ishoʿyahb invoked the memory of the Mazunites’ apostasy in his attempts to end the schism between the patriarchate and Bet Qatraye. “A single departure from the faith, like that of the Mazunites, would already have been enough for Satan,” he wrote in a letter to the laypeople of eastern Arabia, “but the bishops of Fars and Bet Qatraye, zealous to forsake Christianity … even more than what Satan wanted [āp yattir men mā d-ṣābē [h]wā sāṭānā], have signed, sealed, and delivered [their] apostasy [ktab[w] wa-ṭbaʿ[w] w-shaddar[w] kāporutā].”52 In the patriarch’s eyes, the Qataris’ ecclesiastical schism and the Mazunites’ apostasy both contributed to the same problem: losing the very believers who constituted the church of eastern Arabia.
Against this background, George’s synod assumed the task of securing the integrity of that social and institutional body. Besides ending the ecclesiastical schism, George’s canons aimed to correct deviant local practices, which would put Bet Qatraye’s Christians back on the path to salvation and simultaneously construct clear social boundaries between them and other locals of different religious affiliations. This aim is apparent in the synod’s canons that regulate interactions with non-Christians, including prohibitions of litigating before non-ecclesiastical judges, socializing at Jewish taverns, and participating in ostentatiously “pagan” mourning rituals.53 Marriage, however, had a special place in this effort. Among the Qataris’ “practices in need of correction” condemned by George’s canons were those same marital ones familiar to us from postconquest Syria: polygamy, concubinage, and marriages between Christian women and non-Christian men. In a region where the East Syrian patriarchate’s hold on the local Christians was already tenuous, these marital practices threatened communal integrity in two distinct ways: by leading believers astray in the current generation and by perverting the divinely mandated, proper method for reproducing future ones. George’s canon §16 states that men who take multiple wives or concubines, according to “pagan customs” (ʿyādē ḥanpāyē) and in contravention of the church’s teachings, “have become estranged … from all Christian honor” (hwaw mnakrēn … l-kul iqārā da-krēsṭyānē).54 Canon §14 castigates Christian women who marry unbelievers (ḥanpē), most likely meaning members of the Arab ruling class, since doing so introduces them to “customs of strangers to the fear of God” (ʿyādē d-nukrāyin l-deḥlat Alāhā)—that is, it pushes them toward apostasy.55 In these respects, aberrant marital practices, like the other modes of interreligious contact addressed by George’s canons, threatened to thin the ranks of believers in Bet Qatraye. George’s prescription of ecclesiastical administration of marriage between Christians was an effort to tamp down this danger—to ensure that marital unions harmonized with ecclesiastical expectations and thereby kept laypeople within the communal fold, particularly in a region where ecclesiastical schism and apostasy had shaken the patriarchate’s confidence in the local church’s foundations.
More than other “practices in need of correction” among the Christians of Bet Qatraye, marriage was further significant because it had implications for future generations of believers in addition to the current one. Marriage was the institution that facilitated the reproduction of the human species in accordance with God’s plan. The problem for George in seventh-century Bet Qatraye was that the institution itself was not necessarily reproducing good, true-believing Christians. This concern is especially evident in George’s condemnation of interreligious marriage, which is gendered—it concerns only women, not men, who marry non-Christians—to a specific and significant end. As Chapter 8 discusses in greater detail, legal regimes that regulate the marriage of women across group boundaries are fundamentally efforts to manage the group’s reproductive resources. It was a standard assumption of the patrilineal societies of the late antique and medieval Middle East that husbands and fathers defined the religious affiliation of their families.56 Therefore, when a Christian woman married a non-Christian man, her reproductive potential was lost to her natal community, as her children would affiliate to her husband’s religion. If ecclesiastical schism and apostasy represented immediate, collective losses to the Church of the East, marriages with the conquerors threatened its communal integrity by draining away potential believers from future generations.
George’s marriage canon was a response to these conditions. Asserting Christian law’s constitutive authority over marriage was an effort to secure the continued reproduction and integrity of the Church of the East as a socially embedded body of believers, particularly in a region with a recent history of ecclesiastical schism and Islamic expansion. Making the institution subject to Christian law and ecclesiastical oversight meant ensuring that marriage was put into proper practice producing future generations of faithful Christians, the very substance of the church as a discrete community within the caliphate’s diverse society. Toward these ends, George took the novel step of redefining the social and legal institution of marriage as an exclusively Christian one.
Marriage and the Religious Community in Islamic Late Antiquity
George’s canon, like other ecclesiastical efforts to regulate Christian households in Syria, Iraq, and Iran, was a response to a host of local contingencies. In this case, it was the unstable ecclesiastical politics and religious dynamics of seventh-century Bet Qatraye that demanded renewed attention to lay marital practices. George’s formulation of Christian marriage, however, had implications that went beyond its local impetuses. Issued as it was by an ecclesiastical synod, George’s canon was couched in a universalizing language that implied universal applicability. Christian women “shall be betrothed to men through Christian law”; anyone who transgresses this principle “shall also be anathematized from the church.” By virtue of the form in which these strictures were issued, they theoretically applied not only to the Christians of Bet Qatraye but to all the laypeople under the purview of the Church of the East. It would take East Syrian bishops another century to revisit in a dedicated fashion the juridical implications of George’s assertion that religious law, rather than that of the state, tribe, or other association, was the ultimate arbiter of the ancient institution of marriage. But already in the Umayyad Caliphate, it implied a reformulation of the social contours of the Christian community and brought East Syrian tradition into step with neighboring religions.
The idea that the law of the religious community had constitutive authority over marriages between its adherents had prevailed for some time among Jewish rabbis and Zoroastrian priests, and it was in the process of articulation as well among seventh-century Muslims. A distinctively Jewish law of marriage was already integral to the Mishnah and two Talmuds, the repositories of communal legal tradition around which rabbinic Judaism coalesced over the course of late antiquity.57 The rabbis crafted a specifically Jewish law of contractual marriage that reshaped biblical prescriptions, aiming thereby to “creat[e] a collective memory, a formation of one Israel through the perception of continuous communal adherence to laws that stretch back to the primal myths.”58 While it is clear that many Jews in antiquity attended to their legal affairs,