Chapter 12
CHRISTIANS
CHRISTIANS AND THE STATE: SASANIAN IRAQ
Christianity was spreading in Iraq in the late Sasanian period at the
expense of Magians, Jews, and pagans. The relationship of Christians
to the Sasanian state tends to be put in terms of persecution or tol-
eration, but it seems more productive to describe it in terms of political
loyalty, the consequences of toleration, and the effects of factionalism
among Christians. Since Christians may have been the largest single
religious group in Iraq by the end of the sixth century, it is important
to determine the nature of their institutions as the members of a subject
religion and the extent to which Christians constituted a religious
community under the Sasanians. As with the Jews, this goes to the
heart of the question of whether or not such communities appeared
as a consequence of Muslim rule or already existed before the conquest.
Among Christians, as among Jews, this is a matter of the effectiveness
of internal bonds and external boundaries and concerns both the re-
lationship of Christians to non-Christians and the sectarian separation
of Nestorian and Monophysite Christians in Iraq.
Apart from the intrinsic value of dealing with these issues, there is
an additional advantage in discussing Christians. Because most of the
seventh-century sources concern Christians, more is known about them
than about any other group on the basis of contemporary information.
Conclusions which may be reached by inference with regard to other
groups may often be demonstrated explicitly in the case of Christians.
Such materials thus provide a useful vehicle for discovering some of
the reasons why late Sasanian conditions and policies were continued
or changed in early Islamic Iraq.
To begin with the question of persecution and religious toleration,
the most important opposition to toleration came from the Magian
priesthood, which was concerned mainly with the defection of Persian
aristocrats from the state religion and with preventing Christians from
capturing the state. There seems to have been a good deal of built-in
religious friction from the Magian point of view. Christians wrote
books attacking the Magians. Magians in turn accused Christians of
refusing to worship the Sun, Fire, and Stars, or to perform rituals; of
being monotheistic and celibate, of defiling the earth by burying their