CHRISTIANSagainst the way communal bonds tended to be broken down by the
laity in their daily relations with t,he members of other religions. For
the Nestorians this was partly because the enforcement of a communal
identity depended on those who followed religious professions and
partly because conversion meant the continual need to assimilate con-
verts who brought non-Christian attitudes and customs with them.
It was also among the Nestorians in the late Sasanian period that
the main aspects of the policy of official toleration in return for taxes
and loyalty were applied to Christians in Iraq. This arrangement had
several important consequences. It meant that toleration was expressed
in terms of the requirement for permission for the building of churches
and monasteries, for Christian burial, and for the election of a ca-
tholicos. It also meant that the extent of the Nestorian Church co-
incided with that of the Sasanian empire, and it meant the adoption
of hierarchic principles, titles, and royal symbolism by the Nestorians.
Loyalty was expressed formally by prayers for the head of state, and
the entire arrangement was based on a theory of double sanction. The
Nestorians expected the state to enforce their ecclesiastical decisions,
and the Sasanian state expected the Nestorians to provide excom-
munications against Christian rebels. An equally important conse-
quence of toleration was the development of a conflict between the
desire of the government for stability and loyalty through the nomi-
nation of its own candidate as catholicos, and the desire of the clergy
for ecclesiastical autonomy through the canonical election of the cath-
olicos. This was aggravated by the exercise of patronage by aristocratic
Christians and by the emergence of two factions within the church in
the Sasanian period. On one side were the aristocrats who favored
official toleration because of the opportunities for patronage that af-
forded them and who were briefly allied with the Monophysites, the
physicians from the medical school at Nasibin, and the followers of
I:Ienana. On the other side were the monks and clergymen who hoped
to be able to control an autonomous church.
One of the major points to be made here is that with a few exceptions
the relationships and institutions of the religious communities in Iraq
were ignored by the early Islamic regime. The weight of evidence
indicates that there was no official recognition of the Nestorians as a
community at the time of the conquest. Christians, as such, were not
treated as protected people during the conquest. Both Monophysite
and Nestorian monasteries were raided. Monks were killed, taken
prisoner, or driven to take refuge elsewhere. Large numbers of Mon-