7.1 Introduction

Recent research on the early centuries of Muslim rule of the Near East has begun to greatly change our understanding of non-Muslim religious communities in that milieu. The standard view of much previous scholarship had been a general acceptance of the image, suggested by the normative legal sources of the period, of fully separate religious communities that manage their internal affairs with their own legal traditions and judicial institutions. Recent studies, however, have emphasized a converse perspective: the very creation of those (imperfectly functioning) institutions and traditions was an attempt on the part of religious elites to impress their vision of discrete, bounded religious communities on a much more intertwining and overlapping social world. That world was one in which individuals were embedded in networks of affiliation, obligation, and common interest that were not perfectly congruent with confessional community.

These insights encourage us to be wary of too easily regarding the religious communities of late antiquity and early Islam as self-evident, internally coherent and consistent cultural formations. At the same time, however, proceeding too far down the road of deconstructing communal boundaries produces a clearly mistaken impression that no one other than elites understood, observed, or enacted communal difference. Over time, distinct patterns of social organisation, styles of intellectual discourse, and constructions of religious identity came to predominate in the areas under Muslim rule as certainly as individuals and communities came to distinguish between one another. With these observations in mind, an instructive approach for scholars studying these dynamics is to examine the contentious, back-and-forth processes through which religious elites and a variety of other actors sought to mark particular social practices, rituals, texts, etc. as constitutive of communal belonging, and to have those markers of difference accepted by the many elements of the communities to which they appealed.

This chapter examines East Syrian Christian discourses on polygyny as just such a process, one through which ecclesiastical elites sought to assert religious distinctiveness in the regulation of particular marital practices while lay parties variously accepted and contested the ecclesiastical vision. The chapter has three main purposes: to document the presence of polygynous practices among Christian communities in Iraq and Iran; to examine the development of ecclesiastical strategies to mark such practices as specifically un-Christian in the context of the sociopolitical transformations of the late antique and early Islamic Near East; and, where possible, to bring to light lay reception and responses to the ecclesiastical position.