CONCLUSIONreligious diversity seems to have been normal in Iraq in pre-modern
times. Although Muslims eventually became a virtual majority of the
Iraqi population (probably by the ninth century), significant religious
and ethnic minorities survived, and Muslims themselves came to be
divided along ethnic (Kurds) and sectarian (Shl'l) lines. The evidence
of expansion through competitive conversion efforts by Nestorian and
Monophysite Christians might prove to be applicable to the mass
conversions to Islam during the ninth and tenth centuries that may
have been related, in part, to sectarian conflicts among Muslims. The
behavior and survival of the native population of Iraq in the first
century of Islamic rule and their consequences for continuity might
bear comparison to the behavior of Muslim Persians under Mongol
rule in the thirteenth century.
In the second case, these conclusions might contribute to an un-
derstanding of Late Antiquity as a period of change and suggest the
importance of what was happening just to the east of the Byzantine
empire. How should the incipient formation of socioreligious com-
munal organizations in this period be understood? Do they reflect a
reaction to social disorder, conflict, and change which produced a new
kind of religiously sanctioned social order? Beginning with the massive
crisis during the third century, the fourth and fifth centuries seem to
have been an extended period of economic retraction. The regimes
which sought to stabilize the economy and society became hierarchic,
function-oriented, and religiously intolerant. Religious communal or-
ganization may have represented an alternative, locally generated source
of stability. At one level, the religious pluralism institutionalized by
these communities reflects the realities of social fragmentation. At
another level, there was a degree of practical necessity in learning to
live with pluralism. The unique degree of acceptance of religious plu-
ralism in late Sasanian Iraq may have been a feature of an expanding
economy. The economic expansion that began in Sasanian territories,
especially in Iraq and Khuzistan, and on the Arabian peninsula in the
sixth century, produced new political, economic, social, and religious
circumstances. Among them were a degree of religious toleration and
social and economic mobility. It could be argued that an expanding
economy needed labor and could afford a degree of toleration.
However that may be, the nature of these religious communities has
implications for two other issues. The tendency to explain the emer-
gence of the personality of law in the early middle ages by relating it
to Germanic tribalism in western Europe appears to be undermined