Historians of Islam during its formative period have a strong tendency to focus their attention on Muslim elites—who were a minority—at the expense of non-Muslim subjects of the caliphate—who were a majority. In Between Christ and Caliph, Lev Weitz reframes the historical narrative about the emergence of Islam by placing non-Muslims at the center of this narrative, with special attention to the field of law. He argues that Christian, Muslim, and other elites were part of what Hodgson called an “Islamicate” culture that was shared by all subjects of the caliphate. He asks: How did Christians respond to Islamic legal institutions and practices and what effect did this response have on legal institutions and communal identity? He answers: Islamic imperial governance motivated Syriac Christian elites to modify their communal institutions and to redefine their identity as religious communities by creating a new Christian law that treated obligations between husbands, wives, and other family members as defined by new rules relating to marriage, divorce, inheritance, and the household (baytā). The argument unfolds in three parts of uneven length that are framed by an introduction and conclusion: Part I, Empire, Household, and Christian Community from Late Antiquity to the Abbasid Caliphate (chapters 1–3); Part II, Christian Family Law in the Making of Caliphal Society and Intellectual Cultures (chapters 4–8); and Part III, Islamic Family Law and Christian Jurists after Imperial Fragmentation (chapter 9). Each chapter begins with a short selection from a Christian legal source that exemplifies the problematic of that chapter.

In Chapter 1 Weitz reviews the position of the Church on monogamy and the indissolubility of marriage as reflected in the New Testament, second-century church orders, and the proceedings of ecumenical synods in the fourth and fifth centuries, followed by a review of Christian marriage practices in Byzantium and …