Between Christ and Caliph: Law, Marriage, and Christian Community in Early Islam.

• Author: Tolan, John
• Position: Book review

Between Christ and Caliph: Law, Marriage, and Christian Community in Early Islam. By LEV E. WEITZ. Divinations: Rereading Late Ancient Religion. Philadelphia: UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA PRESS, 2018. Pp. viii + 340. $65.

Around 680, a West Syrian Miaphysite priest refused to give communion to a woman; since she had married a Muslim she was no longer fit to receive the Eucharist and to be considered part of the Church. The woman's Muslim husband came to see the priest and threatened to kill him if he did not give his wife communion. What to do? The question was put to monk and bishop Jacob of Edessa (d. 708) whose response was cautious. In theory, by marrying an infidel this woman had broken Church law and placed herself outside the community of the faithful; excommunication was the appropriate response, and hence the priest was right to refuse her communion. Yet, Jacob wrote, such harsh treatment would only push her to apostatize, to convert to Islam. Better to find an intermediate solution, to ask her to perform penance and to permit her to receive communion and to remain a member of the Church (see pp. 201-2). While the threat of murder made this incident unusual, it is otherwise a common example of the constantly porous and shifting nature of confessional boundaries in what the historiography tends to call the "Muslim" world.

Lev Weitz examines a rich mine of documentation, principally in Syriac and Arabic, concerning the Western Syrian Miaphysite Church (often known as "Jacobite") and the Eastern Syrian Church (Nestorian) from late antiquity until the thirteenth century. He shows how authorities from these two churches navigate the shifting legal and confessional landscape of the region, delimiting their religious communities and affirming their jurisdiction over them. Other religious communities of the caliphate (Jews, Copts, Melkites) are more briefly evoked for useful comparisons. The Christian authors of the legal texts and letters Weitz analyzes were not the simple perpetuators of ecclesiastical tradition or the passive beneficiaries of a preconceived dhimma system. They were actors and builders of the system, a complex network of confessional communities and overlapping jurisdictions. Muslim law and theology did not spring like Athena fully grown, clothed and armed from the head of Zeus, as the last several decades of research have amply shown. What Weitz brings to this picture is detailed documentation of the constant interplay of...