Lev E. Weitz, Between Christ and Caliph: Law, Marriage, and Christian Community in Early Islam
Michael
Penn
Stanford University
Beth Mardutho: The Syriac Institute
George A. Kiraz
James E. Walters
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James E. Walters
Beth Mardutho: The Syriac Institute
2018
Volume 21.2
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https://hugoye.bethmardutho.org/article/hv21n2prpenn
Michael Penn
Review of: Between Christ and Caliph: Law, Marriage, and Christian Community in Early Islam
https://hugoye.bethmardutho.org/pdf/vol21/HV21N2PRPenn.pdf
Hugoye: Journal of Syriac Studies
Beth Mardutho: The Syriac Institute, 2018
vol 21
issue 2
pp 423–428
Hugoye: Journal of Syriac Studies is an electronic journal dedicated to the study
of the Syriac tradition, published semi-annually (in January and July) by Beth
Mardutho: The Syriac Institute. Published since 1998, Hugoye seeks to offer the
best scholarship available in the field of Syriac studies.
File created by James E. Walters
Lev E. Weitz, Between Christ and Caliph:
Law, Marriage, and Christian Community in Early Islam (Pennsylvania:
University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018). viii + 352 pages; $65.00
Weitz’s brilliant book judiciously analyzes Syriac legal traditions to explore
Christian responses to the early Islamic Empire. Weitz persuasively argues that the
seventh through tenth centuries witnessed a revolution in Christian jurisprudence.
Ecclesiastical elites living under Islam transformed Christian law not simply
through a proliferation of legal texts but also through a new focus on the lay
household. Such results would be interesting in and of themselves. But what makes
Between Christ and the Caliph such an important work is
how insightfully Weitz connects his meticulous examination of Syriac sources with
larger, key issues of Islamic Studies and with the study of pre-modern empires more
broadly. The result is essential reading not simply for scholars of Eastern
Christianity, but also for those interested in classical Islam, in interreligious
encounters, in legal history, or in historiography.
The book’s first section consists of three chronologically ordered chapters. They
trace the development of Syriac family law from its infancy in the Roman and
Sasanian Empires, through its rapid transformation under the Umayyads, to its
substantial expansion under the early Abbasids. According to Weitz, the much greater
scale of ecclesiastical law, the focus on the lay household, and the rise of
bishop-jurists trying to shore up Christian identity through jurisprudence
represents nothing short of a legal revolution, a revolution that was both a
reaction to and in conversation with the emerging Islamic Empire, Islamization, and
Islamic law.
Chapter One focusses on late ancient family law and how ecclesiastical ideals for
lay sexuality often were at odds with prevailing norms. Although ecclesiastical
emphasis on male monogamy and prohibitions on divorce influenced Christian emperors,
the conservatism of Roman law made it slow to adopt Christian ideals and, apart from
censure and ritual exclusion, ecclesiastical law lacked clear enforcement
mechanisms. In the Sasanian Empire, ecclesiastical law was in greater tension with
Zoroastrian traditions that permitted polygamy and close-kin marriage. But even in
the sixth century, when one sees an increase in ecclesiastical law, there remains
relatively little church legislation regarding the Christian household.
Chapter Two explores how this legal situation abruptly changed with the
seventh-century rise of Islam. For Christians under Islamic rule, the caliphate
overturned the previous legal order. This provided Christian elites an opportunity
to increase the jurisdiction of ecclesiastical law. Because West Syriacs had
previously been part of the Roman legal apparatus and inherited a robust Roman law
tradition, they initially had less motivation for judicial innovation. In contrast,
the seventh-century Church of the East saw an unprecedented rise of detailed family
law. Unlike earlier East Syriac legal sources that most often consisted of
occasional synod decisions, late seventh-century East Syriac jurist-bishops such as
Shemʿon and Hnanishoʿ I instigated a sustained expansion of ecclesiastical family
law. George I represented a particularly important turning point in Syriac
jurisprudence when he made the unpre-cedented claim that the only valid marriage was
done in a Christian ritual context and with a priest’s blessing.
Chapter Three moves to the early Abbasid era. Especially among East Syriacs, figures
such as Ishoʿbokt, Timothy I, and Ishoʿbarnun produced a novel textual genre of law
books composed by individual jurist-bishops. While contemporary Jews and Muslims
aimed to have religious law cover every aspect of one’s life, Syriac jurists
concentrated almost exclusively on family law, with a particular emphasis on the
economic and social relations within the household. Syriac Christianity already had
a long-standing tradition of ecclesiastical distinction. But, according to Weitz, it
is with this emergence of Syriac family law that issues of Christian identity became
particularly concrete in the everyday lives of laity.
Unlike the chronologically organized first section, the book’s second section has a
more thematic focus. Here Weitz is particularly interested in how early Islam
created certain parameters of discourse and how Christian reactions to the caliphate
can help one better understand the process and effects of Islamization. Weitz is
particularly attuned to limits of ecclesiastical power and the opportunities for lay
resistance.
Chapter Four examines some key facets of Syriac family law including the marriage
contract, inchoate marriage (marriage having two stages, the betrothal and the later
consummation), an emphasis on marriage’s indissolubility, and the bulk of
inheritance going to male offspring. With the exception of the prohibition on
divorce, these generally stemmed from long-standing, middle eastern practices. Weitz
follows this quick background with three chapters each beginning with a particularly
fascinating and illustrative case example.
Chapter Five argues against the view that Christians under Islam constructed fairly
self-enclosed communities. Instead, jurist-bishops had to constantly triangulate
between ecclesiastical ideal, lay participation, and extra-communal norms. Sometimes
this resulted in a certain flexibility. For example, clergy were to anathematize
Christians who brought legal disputes to a Muslim judge. But Christians who went to
Muslim courts to draw up a legal document—such as a marriage contract—were not
anathematized. Syriac Christian law also provided several post-facto mechanisms to
recognize a marriage that had not been overseen by the clergy. In contrast,
jurist-bishops maintained a hard line on other issues, especially the probation
against divorce. This would have been at a cost. For Christian laity there was the
constant temptation of Islamic courts in which Christian men could easily obtain a
divorce and in which Christian women could obtain a divorce if they chose to
apostatize. To illustrate this dynamic Weitz draws upon an apparently ubiquitous
issue in medieval family law: what a woman should do when her husband was absent for
years on end, either presumed dead or having abandoned his family. Both Islamic and
Jewish law had mechanisms to dissolve such a marriage. In contrast, Syriac law
refused to acknowledge any-thing short of a husband’s confirmed death as grounds for
remarriage. Bishop-jurists claimed that they would find any derelict husbands
through their ecclesiastical networks and anathematize them. But this was unlikely
to be of much comfort to an abandoned wife.
Chapter Six uses a legal spat between two patriarchs to make a much broader point
about Christians and the caliphate. In the early ninth century Timothy I abruptly
overturned centuries of middle eastern precedent and prohibited Christian cousins
from marrying. Twenty years later his successor Ishoʿbarnun derided Timothy’s
decision and quickly reverted to the status quo. Weitz notes, however, that what was
at stake really had little to do with kissing cousins. Rather what motivated
Timothy’s initial innovation and Ishoʿbarnun’s subsequent rebuke was the question of
appropriate legal argumentation. Timothy argued against the long-standing tradition
of cousin marriages based not on biblical exegesis but rather by analogy and a
desire for legal consistency. This reflected his desire to systematize law as a
comprehensive ecclesiastical discipline. Ishoʿbarnun took issue with Timothy’s legal
process, reinstating scripture and tradition as the sole arbiters. Weitz
convincingly shows how this intra-Christian dispute paralleled contemporary debates
in Islamic law, Islamic theology, and the Abbasid translation movement (in which
Timothy was himself a key player). The historiographic pay-off is much more than
simply another example of how Islamic thought affected Syriac Christians. It shows
that what previous scholars have depicted as a key debate within Islam “looks to be
one strand of a wider reorientation of scriptural religious traditions in the early
Abbasid heartlands” and that “the heart of the early medieval caliphates’
intellectual history…lies in the encounter of multiple religious traditions, not
only in the specifically Islamic forms that these produced” (167-168).
Chapter Seven moves from cousin marriage to polygamy. Although generally limited to
the most elite of Christians, Christian polygamy illustrates both the expanse and
the limit of ecclesiastical power. Earlier, bishops tended to “overplay their hand”
against polygamy. A key example is Sabrishoʿ I whose opposition to the practice
angered Christian polygamists with strong connections in the Zoroastrian court.
They, in turn, had Sabrishoʿ deposed. Under the Islamic Empire, jurist-bishops more
often discouraged polygamy through inheritance law. Unlike Islamic law,
ecclesiastical law did not recognize the children of second wives or of concubines
as legitimate heirs. Through the regulation of inheritance, Islamic-era bishops were
able to wait for an elite polygamist to be dead and then target the socially weaker
figures of the widowed second wife and her children.
Chapter Eight broadens to intermarriage. Here chronological and confessional
patterns come into play. Although late seventh-century figures such as Jacob of
Edessa were relatively compromising on this issue (that is, they disapproved of
intermarriage but did not exclude the intermarried from Christian communion), later
authors became more hardline. But there remained differences between West and East
Syriac law. In West Syriac circles the focus was more on communal purity and,
starting in the early Abbasid period, this resulted in blanket prohibitions on
intermarriage. In East Syriac circles discussions of intermarriage became a more
gendered discourse that prohibited Christian women from marrying Muslim men, but
allowed Christian men to marry Muslim women. This gendered model paralleled Islamic
law but with two main differences. First, East Syriac jurists assumed that a Muslim
woman with a Christian husband would convert to Christianity. Muslim jurists often
envisioned a mixed-religious household. Second, while Islamic law could enforce a
prohibition against Muslim women marrying Christian men, Syriac law could—at
best—merely expel intermarried Christian women from the church. This asymmetry may
have provided Islam with a long-term demographic advantage.
The book’s final section consists of Chapter Nine that expands the work’s
chronological range to the early fourteenth century. Here Weitz examines the
writings of Bar ʿEbroyo and ʿAbdishoʿ to suggest that changes in Syriac law can be a
barometer helping trace the effects of Islamization. Bar ʿEbroyo represents a
certain irony in West Syriac law. Because in early Abbasid times West Syriacs were
further removed from Islamic intellectual centers, they were much slower in creating
a robust family law tradition in comparison with East Syriac jurists. This meant
that, when scholars like Bar ʿEbroyo expanded West Syriac law, they often had to
draw from Islamic legal traditions. In contrast, during the eighth and ninth
centuries, the Church of the East had been at the center of the Abbasid world
motivating an early expansion of jurisprudence and they passed on to later East
Syriac jurists a much more robust family law tradition. Thus a later East Syriac
scholar, such as ʿAbdishoʿ, could rely much more exclusively on his Syriac
predecessors.
In his introduction and conclusion Weitz appropriately emphasizes religious
heterogeneity as a key component of the caliphate and reminds us that for many
centuries Christians remained the Middle East’s majority population. Yet, unlike
modern studies of most other empires, until recently the study of the early Islamic
Empire has often ignored sources written by the primary subject population. In other
words, “the result is a historiography in which the history of the caliphate is
largely that of its Muslim elite and their activities” (4). Weitz not only joins
others trying to address this problem. He also provides a great case example for how
to do this. There are occasional places where Between Christ and
Caliph briefly strays from topic. But even these short, arguably
unnecessary excursuses (for example on Syriac incantation bowls) seem like the
laying of breadcrumbs for future scholars. Few would mistake a 352-page study of
ecclesiastical law for light bedtime reading. But Weitz’ seamless flow between
specifics and the bigger picture keeps one from ever losing track of why such a
careful study is so worthwhile.