CHRISTIANSfor those who assemble." All this was, again, taken as a sign of faith-
lessness, and Christians were forbidden to bury their dead in silk or
precious cloth or to make such lamentations.1s4 The tension between
the realities of everyday life in a multi faith society and Nestorian
exclusiveness was eventually incorporated into the fabric of canon
law. At the end of the eighth century, the law code of the catholicos
Timothy (780-823) accepted the witness of "a Muslim or another
God-fearing man" in the ecclesiastical court, but made it illegal for a
non-Christian to be appointed as trustee for one's children and house
if a Christian was available.1ss
Some important qualifications of the strength of interfaith barriers
in the sixth and seventh centuries may now be made. There can be
no question that religious differences had become intensified and in-
stitutionalized by the late Sasanian period. Magians, Jews, and Chris-
tians effectively included their respective lay members by the use of
religious education, the liturgy, and law. Among the Nestorians, re-
strictions were already placed on interfaith marriage because of the
problems created by inheritance, and by the end of the eighth century
a. non-Christian could not be a trustee for a Christian's house and
children. But the greatest obstacle to the formation of completely
isolated communities lay in the way they had been institutionalized.
The bonds of a religious communal identity depended on those who
followed religious professions, the monks and the clergy, who, like
the mobadhs and rabbis, represented vested interests. The distinctions
they created were broken down by the laity in their daily contacts
with the members of other religions, by attending their festivals, and
by patronizing Jewish taverns.
In both Sasanian and early Islamic Iraq, the strength of exclusively
religious identities and institutions was effectively limited by the con-
tinuing existence of contact and commerce between Nestorian Chris-
tians and Jews, between pagans and heretics, and between Nestorian
monks and Magians and Monophysites. This practical limitation to
communal barriers is as important for an understanding of early Is-
lamic society as is the existence of the formal barriers themselves.
There was really never any time when intercommunal contact was
154 Chabot, Synodicon, pp. 225, 489.
155 Sachau, Rechtsbucher, n, 106-7. This legal principle was also known to Muslims.
Ibn Abi Laylii regarded the testimony of non-Muslims as valid when no Muslims were
available to witness the will of a Muslim who died on a journey. But this was rejected
by Abii I:Ianifa and his successors (Schacht, Origins, pp. 210-11).