“Jewish and Christian Women’s Use of Islamic Law and Courts in Persia during the 7th cen. CE” by Lindsay Ruth

Beginning in 636, an Arab Muslim army set out to conquer one of the most important empires of the ancient world, the Sasanian Persian Empire. The religiously diverse population experienced new rulers, a new elite class, and even a new religion taking over the once-Zoroastrian dominated former world power.^[1] Since the conversion of subjects was not originally a main goal of the Arab rulers, one of their main challenges was how to balance the various religious communities in Persia and their laws. Persia also had sizeable communities of Jews and Christians. Interestingly, there is evidence from this time on the ways in which Jewish and Christian women used Islamic Law to gain rights they may not have had in their own religious laws. This blog post will give a few examples from Late Antique Persia that show this inter-religious court shopping was occurring and popular amongst women.

Persian Jewish Women’s Usage of Islamic Law

Evidence of Jewish women using Islamic law appears when the Talmud was still a source of law, but at a time when the Geonims were beginning to acquire their power. ^[2] Rabbis made an amendment to the Babylonian Talmudic law that changed the ability of women to initiate a divorce from their husbands.^[3] Originally, the Talmud mandated that women had to be served a divorce by their husbands.^[4] If a woman wanted the Jewish courts to force her husband to divorce her, she had to release her husband from the obligations of her “delayed marriage gift”, a type of monetary gift set up in their marriage agreement, which deprived her of sizeable personal wealth.^[5] However, the new Jewish divorce law, made in the mid to late 7^th century, stated that women could initiate the divorce, and not lose their money or rights to this “marriage gift”.^[6] The rabbis acknowledged that they were pressured into making this change by people going to outside courts.^[7] They wanted to persuade women to stop visiting Muslim courts to resolve their divorces, because under Islamic law a woman was permitted the right to initiate her divorce from her husband.^[8] Unlike in Jewish courts, women did not have to undergo the monetary penalties in the Islamic courts.^[9] This evidence suggests that there must have been many Jewish women seeking the Islamic courts to gain their divorce without having to face the monetary penalties that came with seeking a forced divorce from Jewish courts. Women flocked to outside courts, not only because the laws suited them better, but also to be able to have their divorces enforced by the ruling powers.^[10] Thus, not only were the women looking for better rulings for themselves, but also a power who could ensure the outcome of the ruling.

Persian Christian Women’s Usage of Islamic Courts

In 676 AD, Catholicos of the Church of the East George I held a synod, where he expresses that the usage of Islamic courts had become such an issue that an official canon had to be given restricting this practice. In the introduction to these canons George states that some of these rules had been given before but that they needed to be repeated and made known.^[11]  Canon Six states that Christian lawsuits must take place in churches, in front of bishops and priests, who have knowledge of Christian teachings.^[12] Furthermore, George ruled that adherents should not take the same case to an outside court because they did not like the ruling given to them.[13] The only exception would be in a situation where the “secular” rulers demand that a Christian be in a non-Christian court.[14] Thus, the canon displays the anxiety of church elites over losing control of Christians to a non-Christian authority. It attempts to attract people back to asking the priests/religious elites about their legal issues, and thus restoring power to the leadership of the Church from Muslim authorities. The text also suggests that parishioners were indeed coming to the Church initially for legal troubles and secondly going to the Islamic courts if rulings were not given the way they wanted. Since George acknowledges this practice of court shopping, there must have been large groups using these secular courts, not just a few individuals.

In Canon Fourteen of the same synod, the Catholicos discusses women who marry non-Christians, and commands them not to marry or cohabitate with “pagans”.^[15] If a woman continued to do so then she would be ousted from the Church.^[16] The ruling suggests that the religious hierarchy was concerned with limiting women’s contact with men outside of their religion, likely due to the fear of losing their congregants and future Christian generations. Hence, women marrying pagans (non-Christians) may have been a widely occurring practice in the late 600s. The canon makes us question the possibility that Islamic courts were giving non-Muslim women the opportunity to marry other men, outside of their religion. According to Islamic laws governing non-Muslims of the time, Christian men could not marry Muslim women, but Muslim men could marry Christian women albeit with the legal effect that their children would be considered Muslim.^[17] Thus, Christian elites would have feared losing the next generation through intermarriage. Since reproduction was the only way, the faith could continue due to the laws prohibiting Christians proselytizing, controlling women’s reproduction was the key to keeping the community stable. ^[18] In addition, the synod includes a ruling against men taking multiple wives or concubines, something not allowed in Christian law but allowed in Islamic law.^[19] The problem of polygamy amongst Church of the East Christians must have been wide enough that the Catholicos had to address and reestablish everyday practice of approved Christian marriage.

Conclusion

This short essay focused on evidence of Jewish and Christian women using Islamic courts in Persia in the 7^th century. We have seen that non-Muslims and Muslims were not isolated to their own separate communities. Islamic courts were treated as a secondary option to Jewish and Christian women to receive a better or alternative ruling than their own religious court gave them.

NOTES:

(This blog has been adapted from chapter 4 of the author’s MA Thesis: Ruth, Lindsay M. “‘Skirting’ Society: How Women in Late Antique Persia Used Religious Pluralism to Subvert Gender Boundaries.” Master’s Thesis, Vanderbilt University, 2021.)

FOOTNOTES: 

[1] Richard C. Foltz, Iran in World History, The New Oxford World History (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2016), 46. The Arabs had basically taken control of Persia by 641/642 with their victory over Nihavand, but the Sasanian King was not killed until 651. See Abd Al-Husain Zarrinkūb, “The Arab Conquest of Iran and Its Aftermath,” in The Cambridge History of Iran, ed. Richard Nelson Frye, vol. 4 (Cambridge: Cambride University Press, 1975), 18–25.

[2] Geonims were rabbis who gave response to questions posited by community members. The Geonic Period in the Middle East when these scholar Rabbis were at the forefront of Jewish law begun around the 8^th century, and during the Abbasid Caliphate.

[3] Haleh Emrani, “Marriage Customs of the Religious Communities of the Late Sasanian Empire: An Indicator of Cultural Sharing” (Ph.D. Dissertation, Los Angeles, CA, University of California, Los Angeles, 2011), 234; Michael G. Morony, “Religious Communities in Late Sasanian and Early Muslim Iraq,” Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 17, no. 2 (1974): 123.

[4] Oded Zinger, “Women, Gender and Law: Marital Disputes According to Documents of the Cairo Geniza” (PhD Dissertation, Princeton, N.J., Princeton University, 2014), xviii.

[5] Zinger, “Women, Gender and Law,” 137. See also Robert Brody, The Geonim of Babylonia and the Shaping of Medieval Jewish Culture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998).

[6] Emrani, “Marriage Customs of the Religious Communities of the Late Sasanian Empire,” 234.

[7] Michael Levi Rodkinson, Isaac Mayer Wise, and Godfrey Taubenbaum, New Edition of the Babylonian Talmud Original Text, 1st ed., rev.corr. by Isaac M. Wise. 2nd ed., re-ed.rev.enl., vol. 5 (13), The Making of Modern Law: Foreign, Comparative and International Law, 1600-1926 (Boston: New Talmud Pub. Society, 1916), 119–20; Emrani, “Marriage Customs of the Religious Communities of the Late Sasanian Empire,” 234.

[8] Emrani, “Marriage Customs of the Religious Communities of the Late Sasanian Empire,” 234.

[9] Emrani, “Marriage Customs of the Religious Communities of the Late Sasanian Empire,” 234.

[10] Uriel Simonsohn, “Overlapping Jurisdictions: Confessional Boundaries and Judicial Choice among Christians and Jews under Early Muslim Rule” (ProQuest Dissertations Publishing, 2008), 87–88.

[11] George I, “Canons, George I,” in When Christians First Met Muslims : A Sourcebook of the Earliest Syriac Writings on Islam, trans. Michael Philip Penn (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2015).

[12] Translation from Ibid.; For original Syriac see: Jean Baptiste Chabot, Synodicon Orientale, Ou, Recueil De Synodes Nestoriens (Paris, 1902), 219–20.

[13] George I, “Canons, George I.”

[14] George I, “Canons, George I.”

[15] George I, “Canons, George I,” 75.

[16] George I, “Canons, George I,” 75.

[17] Christoph Baumer, The Church of the East: An Illustrated History of Assyrian Christianity, New edition (London: I.B. Tauris, 2016), 151.

[18] Baumer, The Church of the East, 150–51.

[19] Chabot, Synodicon Orientale, Ou, Recueil De Synodes Nestoriens, 489. For the original Syriac see: Chabot, Synodicon Orientale, Ou, Recueil De Synodes Nestoriens, 224.)

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Lindsay Ruth is a PhD student in the Department of Central Eurasian Studies at Indiana University, with a minor in Gender Studies. Her research focuses on women and gender in 3^rd through 9^th century Persia through the lens of the religions of Zoroastrianism, Babylonian Judaism, Syriac Christianity, and early Islam.