Article

Points of Controversy (Marriage and Divorce)

Beyond the story of Zayd and Zaynab, in the earliest Eastern Christian texts about Islam one finds that the Islamic concept of divorce was generally frowned upon. Christians objected to polygamy and divorce. One of the particular aspects of Islamic regulations of divorce was the legal requirement for a wife, after having been repudiated by her husband three times and having fulfilled a waiting period after each, to first have relations with another man, before she would be permitted to marry again with her first husband (Schacht 2000). The rationale of the law is thought to be that it prevents the first husband from cruelly repudiating his wife multiple times, which could cause the wife to end up in an endless cycle of waiting periods. Christians in the Middle East looked at it quite differently. The topic features, for example, in oneoftheversionsoftheletter which theByzantine EmperorLeoIII(r. 717–741) allegedly sent to the Umayyad Caliph ֒Umar ibn ֒Abd al-֒Az¯ız (r. 717–720). These two sovereigns are believed to have exchanged several letters which became popular reading around the Mediterranean, where they were reworked in Greek, Arabic, Aljamiado, Latin, and Armenian. The complex history of their transmission has finally been fully mapped out (Burman et al. forthcoming; Hoyland 1994; Kim 2017). In addition, the best preserved version, the Letter of Leo III which was preserved in Armenian in the Chronicle of Ghevond, has recently appeared in a new richly annotated English translation (La Porta and Vacca 2024).

1. Caliph ֒Umar II had defended this practice of divorce in his own letter by adducing the Biblical story of David who took Uriah’swife (La Porta and Vacca 2024, p. 152). Emperor Leo was not in the least convinced by the Caliph’s recourse to the Bible. He argued in response that only adultery can be a cause for divorce according to the Gospel. He first expresses his moral indignation about the fact that intercourse with women is described as “tilling the fields” in the Qur֓an (La Porta and Vacca 2024, pp. 152–53). He objects to divorce for random reasons and believes that it is allowed in Islam for the sole purpose of making unlimited sex possible.
2. These forceful words are quoted in a long interreligious debate in Armenian from the ninth or tenth century entitled “History of the religious man holy Makar and the Emir and Ałtap‘ar and the Jew and Nestor and the sorcerer who believed in Christ” (Melkonyan et al. forthcoming). The fact that the passage reappears in this text, which is known in many manuscripts, suggests that Leo’s assessment of man-woman relations impacted the Armenian image of Islam. In a slightly mores ober account that probably partly derives from Leo’s letter, the famous Byzantine theologian John of Damascus (d. c. 749) describes the same remarriage custom (Schadler 2018, pp. 131, 228–29; Glei and Khoury 1995, pp. 80–81; Sahas 1972, pp. 138–39), which he traces straight back to the Zayd and Zaynab affair. Judaism allows divorce and it is not surprising therefore that the anonymous Syriac author regards it as a product of Jewish influence on Islam, which he highlights as part of an attempt to show that Islam is a human construct. In the Fatimid period, a certain learned young man called Ibn Raj¯a֓ converted from Islam to Christianity. He then went on to write a detailed refutation of his former religion. To himtoo, the regulations with regard to divorce are a source of indignation. The first is that the required intercourse that will set the women free, as it were, is not valid if this occurred during menstruation. Secondly, the required intercourse is not valid if the new husband did not have an erection. Ibn Raj¯ a֓ cites a h .ad¯ ıth in which proper sex is graphically described, so as to leave no doubt about what counts as a physical union and what does not count. To Ibn Raj¯a֓ this is a “shameful and despicable tradition which has made you disgraced and contemptible among all peoples” (Bertaina 2022, pp. 290–91).

One of the first things ֒Abd al-Jabb¯ ar raises with regard to the resulting degenerated Christian practice is the general lack of hygiene. Christians do not perform ablutions and reject the concept of ritual cleansing, which leads them to perform their prayers while soiled from defecation and sex. He proceeds to describe the many changes that the Apostle Paul supposedly introduced after contact with the Romans. One specific Roman idea to which he had to give in was monogamy (Reynolds and Samir 2010, p. 101). ֒Abd al-Jabb¯ar claims Roman women detest both divorce and polygamy. When questioned about these topics by the Romans, Paul had hypocritically asserted that his people had the same attitude to these issues. In this way, Christianity was Romanized. A particular aspect of ֒Abd al-Jabb¯ar’s etiology of Christianity is that it provides him with an excuse not to look at the meaning or causes of certain Christian doctrines and rituals; they can be explained away as Pauline accidents. As far as women are concerned, the corollary of this etiology is that women’s behavior and norms are not actually set by Christian norms of chastity and monogamy. This is not stated explicitly, but ֒Abd al-Jabb¯ar makes it sufficiently clear that in the end, Christian women do very much what they want. He speaks mostly of Byzantine women. Looking at scattered remarks about them in the Tathb¯ ıt dal¯a֓il al-nubuwwa, we learn that to them monogamy is a rather empty concept. Women might go to monasteries to look for physical intimacy (Reynolds and Samir 2010, p. 121; see also Sizgorich 2013), they might become informal concubines (Reynolds and Samir 2010, p. 121), or they might decide not to get married in order to be freer in their choices (Reynolds and Samir 2010, p. 116).

1. Circumcision
2. ֒Abd al-Jabb¯ ar’s work draws heavily on the ninth-century thinker and litterateur from Basra, al-J¯ah . iz . (d. 869). He wrote a “Refutation of the Christians” that also has a series of anecdotes about Byzantine women in it. As Nadia el-Cheikh has shown clearly (El-Cheikh 1997, 2015), there were entertaining polemical topoi being transmitted about these women, who were far away enough from the heart of the Caliphate to allow for some fantasy and exaggeration and yet familiar enough because of ֒Abbasid-Byzantine contacts to resonate with readers. Al-J¯ah . iz . reflects on Christian women both from Byzantium and Iraq and presents an intentionally ambiguous picture. He mentions the practice of monastic celibacy, together with wars, sterility, and the prohibition of remarriage, polygamy, and concubinage, and he wonders—certainly not without a tad of irony—how the Christian communities manage to sustain their numbers and whether deep down they are not imitating the austerity of the Manichaeans (Newman 1993, p. 707). Whereas these scattered comments give the impression that Christians are not suc cessful procreators, women are nonetheless unrestrained in their passions. Al-J¯ah . iz . sees their promiscuity as problematic, and believes one of the causes is the lack of strong ad monitions in their scriptures about the fire of hell. The reason for women’s lustfulness is the fact that they are not circumcised (Newman 1993, p. 708). In his Kit¯ab al-h .ayaw¯an al-J¯ ah . iz . also defended female genital mutilation, as he claimed that it increases one’s beauty. More importantly, it reduces a woman’s sexual pleasure, which diminishes the chances of adultery (Al-J¯ah . iz . 2003, p. 38). The reader was probably expected to take the benefits of female circumcision for granted and disregard the subsurface tension with the author’s prior outrage about castration as a form of mutilation.

In the Armenian Letter of Emperor Leo III, the practice of female circumcision features too. Leo pointed out that Muslims cannot claim continuous practice from Judaism. As we have already seen above with ֒Abd al-Jabb¯ ar, Muslim theologians were prone to regarding Christianity as the odd religion out on account of its divergence from laws that Jews and Muslims follow. Emperor Leo replies to this framing of Christianity as having arbitrarily abandoned Mosaic Law. For example, he objects to the Muslim critique of baptism as an unsanctioned substitute for circumcision. Not only is Christ’s own baptism the basis for the Christian practice, but it is also a symbol of a new covenant. Emperor Leo asks “If Christ, the teacher of the true Law, had not eliminated circumcision, sacrifice, and the Sabbath, then what new covenant did He make?” (La Porta and Vacca 2024, p. 147). What he tells his correspondent is that two things clearly go against the idea that Muslims are following in the footsteps of the Jews: the age at which Muslims perform circumcision and the fact that women get circumcised too.

The discussion continued over the centuries. Further intricate arguments can be found in the long critique of the Gospels written by the H .anbal¯ı scholar Najm al-D¯ın al-T . ¯uf¯ı (d. 1316) (Demiri 2013). He rehearses many arguments as to why the Divine commandment to Abraham to cut the foreskin is binding for all of his offspring, whether Sons of Isaac or Sons of Ishmael. The Christians are either living in error or else they are not descendants of Abraham, he argues (Demiri 2013, pp. 458–61). If Christians want to claim that they base themselves on the practice of later Christians (probably meaning the Apostles, lit. khulaf¯a֓uhu, “his [Christ’s] successors”), al-T . ¯uf¯ı is happy to dismiss their judgments as fables. He also alludes to the objection that the author of the above-mentioned Kit¯ab al Majdal presented that God would have imposed it on both genders. Hereferstoothers, who “hold two extreme positions: it being obligatory for both of them [i.e., men and women] and it not being obligatory at all (wa-֒adamuhu). This statement demonstrates that the Christians are misguided.” (Demiri 2013, pp. 458–59). The fact that al-T . ¯uf¯ı only makes a cryptic reference here to the question as to whether women should be circumcised too, probably means he presumed that his readers would recognize the original point to which he responds: Godwouldhaveimposeditoneveryone; not just ononegender. The question is, however, how al-T . ¯uf¯ı replies to that. He does not claim they say “it being obligatory for both of them [i.e., men and women] or it not being obligatory at all”. He clearly states that they claim it as being “obligatory for both of them [i.e., men and women] and it not being obligatory at all (wa-֒adamuhu)”. His point is that it is contradictory of Christians to demand a coherent and just commandment from God (circumcision should be for all) and then reject and disregard it at the same time (there is no circumcision for anyone).

Although al-T . ¯uf¯ı and the author of the Kit¯ab al-Majdal have opposing views, they weave together logical points with a strong sense of indignation about the irrationality of the other.

1. Impurity
2. To quote al-J¯ ah . iz . on the Christians, “His wife, too, is unclean. She does not purify herself from the courses, and in addition to this, she too is uncircumcised”. (Newman 1993, p. 708). Muslims only needed to evoke the image of what bloody part of the female body the supposed “God” of the Christians came from to realize that this religion was very different from theirs (e.g., Griffith 1990, pp. 322–23). The functions and ubiquity of this type of polemical exploitation of the woman’s body have been carefully analyzed by Alexandra Cuffel (Cuffel 2007) and, with regard to early Jewish-Christian interaction, by Charlotte Fonrobert (Fonrobert 2000). Ibn Taymiyya’s well-known al-Jaw¯ ab al-s .ah . ¯ ıh . li-man baddala d¯ ın al-Mas¯ ıh . , “The correct answer to those who altered the religion of Christ”. In what is probably the longest Muslim refutation of Christianity, we find again a cluster of Christian impurities: “one may even pray while in a state of major or minor impurity or while carrying anything that is filthy. They also eat forbidden foods such as blood, dead animals and pork, except for whoever dislikes such foods and people are considered to be free to choose to eat them or not”. (Ibn Taymiyya n.d., p. 79)

1. Equality
2. Ab¯ u Qurra is portrayed as tackling is life after death according to the Qur֓¯an. He denies that there are female companions given to men in heaven: “This is something God never created” (Nasry 2010, p. 127; Nasry 2008, p. 189). He provides the following justification for his bold statement: “If this [paradise] were, as you recounted, prepared for you, who are the husbands of your wives in the hereafter? For behold, you have denied them, and have chosen over them the companions with beautiful, big, and lustrous eyes, and abandoned them [the wives] in anguish and great grief, while you are joyful and glad with the companions with beautiful, big, and lustrous eyes. You attribute to Godtyranny and injustice, for behold He has made wives for the men and did not make husbands for the women” (Nasry 2008, p. 189; 2010, p. 128). There is no answer to Ab¯ u Qurra’s point and the reader has to believe that the Muslims were silenced. The argument lived on. In the twelfth century, an anonymous East-Syrian Christian elaborated on it in his long refutation of Islam that is contained in his “Commen tary on the Nicene Creed”. It is a long text that betrays the author’s profound knowledge of Islamic theology, grammar, and exegesis. When it comes to the issue of the afterlife according to Muslims, he is more outspoken than Ab¯u Qurra about the idea of men and womenhaving been created equal. His reasoning is as follows: men and women are both mukallaf, obliged by Islamic law and accountable to God. In the afterlife, men are given h . ¯ur al-֒ayn, the heavenly maidens, for them to enjoy, while women not only lack that promise, but they will also find themselves without their husbands, for they will be too busy spending time with their new partners and “there is a bias (tah . ¯ amul) in that” (Masri 2011–2021, vol. 3, pp. 237–38).