Persian Christendom

In 2014, Matthew Payne illuminated Iran's Two Centuries Of Darkness... for the Christians in Fars. He claims that early in al-Mahdî's caliphate r. AD 775-85, one Ishoʿbokht composed a Book of Judgements. He did this in Middle Persian. This allowed the book to pull over a vast summary of Sasanian jurisprudence from two centuries earlier; and, in fact, scholars use it to explain Middle Persian concepts from the Denkard and such which even the Parsees have trouble interpreting.

Particularly marriage and inheritance were concerns of Iraqi Christendom. Mar Enoch of Seleucia may have been attempting such a ktaba in the 640s. If so we don't have it - but Catholicos George, then Hnanishoʿ, maybe Ishoʿyahb III, and breakaway Shimʿon of Rewardashir all got into the mix one way or another. Shimʿon also wrote in Persian; the present Syriac is a translation.

All this is telling me that entire courthouses had shifted to Christianity, in Persia under the Umayyads and first ʿAbbâsids. That is: not to Islam. Richard Bulliet's 1979 study somewhat-famously saw conversions to Islam only really kicking in during the ʿAbbâsî era; and we must always be mindful that the "ʿAbbâsî dawla" itself started as a revolution in religion as well, a "heresy". Buillet seems not to have been controverted except inasmuch as, concentrating on the major cities, it's too liberal for the hinterlands. Courts were held in the cities - which, for Christians, meant the cathedral cities, like Rayy and Rewardashir.

The first conquerers of Iran didn't really want converts until ʿUmar II, and even that one was something of an exception. Umayyad-era Iran was an armed frontier where, who else but dhimmis would pay the army's taxes? Zoroastrianism had a problem here: it wasn't a religion of the [Quran's] Book. Of the Christians (and Jews) meanwhile, Islam required that the locals were not anarchists; that they had a law, preferably in keeping with the Book.

Under the occupying Umayyads, and more so under their underlings who might themselves not have been particularly apt Moslems, the Arabs' legal culture encouraged conversion of uncontrollable Magians (likewise mostly not their own legal experts) toward the Bible. This was easier to Christianity than to Judaism, as today. Hence why oriental "Christian law" was just Sasanian law made Christian-compatible. As fellow Persians, these Christians who were legal experts didn't even have to translate its language.

Patricia Crone suggested in 1987 that the west-Syrians also produced a "Christian" legal-code, in their case from Roman provincial law. We don't have to follow her all the way into Islam to see her point for the Christians.