Slaves and matrimony in the legal cultures of the late Sasanian and early Islamic empires -

Abstract

Inquiries into Near Eastern comparative law have been dominated by the ‘influence paradigm.’ This has led to premature conclusions about the origins of Islamic law and its relationship to adjacent systems of jurisprudence. Integrating jurisprudential systems into a larger genealogical scheme, Islamic law has usually been placed at its very bottom allowed a minimal amount of originality at best. This thesis is an effort to move towards non-Orientalist genealogies by using a theoretical combination of legal culture and legal pluralism. In this thesis, I inquire into the legal writings of Zoroastrians, Eastern Christians, and Muslims from the 5th to the 9th centuries. Thematically, I focus on matrimony and slavery. The main argument of this thesis is two-layered. First, I argue that the various forms of matrimony and slavery maintained in Sasanian, East Syrian and Islamic jurisprudence are situated at the nexus of cosmological beliefs and practical concerns of the respective communities-empires. In other words, the cosmological purview of religion is mobilized and transformed into an idiom by lawmakers for the purpose of maintaining the notion of empire-community. Secondly, I argue that the relationship between Sasanian, East Syrian, and Islamic law is marked by varying patterns including competition, interaction, and negotiation.