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