Dhimmī Bishops in a Muslim Polity: Endurance and Adaptation of Syriac Episcopal Leadership in the Umayyad and Early Abbasid Periods

This paper addresses the effects of the transfer from the Byzantine to the Islamic political order on the social and political role of bishops in the Syriac communities, focusing on two issues: a) the administrative and governmental tasks of the bishops. I argue that the newly established political order relied on pre-existent sources of local power represented by both an ecclesiastical and a secular elite, leaving the position bishops held in the Byzantine social system basically unchanged; b) the caliphal intervention in ecclesiastical matters and bishops’ political manoeuvres to gain the support of the caliphal court, contending that a higher degree of political fragmentation and the absence of theological justifications for the caliph to oversee the church accentuated the strictly utilitarian principle in approaching ecclesiastical matters. Increased caliphal engagement in church affairs occurred in periods of political unrest, in the aftermath of the second and third fitna, when caliphs played on the endorsement of individual bishops as one of the means to consolidate their rule. The stabilization of Abbasid rule, by contrast, necessitated a more neutral and reconciliatory policy as caliphs mostly complied with the widest consent that the ecclesiastical community was able to reach.