Making the Islamicate Bishop: Episcopal Governance and Networks under Islam

By overcoming entrenched disciplinary divides and proposing a theoretical reframing, MASLAB explores how the social, religious and political changes of the Islamic period (mid. 7th-10th c.) fashioned episcopal governance, networks and power in the Christian communities of the Near East. Relying, for the first time, on a multi-language and multi-genre corpus, MASLAB looks at the actions that bishops took and the relations and resources they mobilized in handling new socio-political and religious circumstances: the legal codification of non-Muslims’ social status; the downgrading of Christianity from imperially sponsored religion to political minority; the crystallization of intra-Christian confessional boundaries; the more fluid and federalized notion of power and territoriality.This translates into three objectives: 1) Bringing together largely untapped material, and balancing qualitative and quantitative methods, it provides a prosopographic and topographic study of eastern Christian bishops and dioceses that has been lacking for decades. 2) It bridges disciplinary divides by executing unprecedented comparative studies on episcopal encounters with institutional power, interconfessional encounters and socio-spatial analysis of episcopal networks and governance, confronting four areas of specialism (Armenian, East Syrian, Syriac Orthodox, Coptic). 3) It articulates a novel account of episcopal leadership in the Islamic period, deconstructing the dominating communalist paradigm that sees non-Muslim groups as monolithic, state-recognized entities and reads episcopal relation with power only through the dyadic model ‘bishop-caliph’. Looking at the society in which bishops moved as a complex system of entangled elements, open to multiple internal and external impulses, MASLAB shifts emphasis from former binary paradigms to a multi-agent networks model and from a religious to a political interpretation that accounts for the socio-political variables of the Islamic rule.