The Arabic translation of the Colección Canónica Hispana—recently titled the Collectio Canonum Arabicorum Ecclesiae Andalusiae (hereafter: CCAEA or al-Qānūn al-Muqaddas 1)—is a unique source for the medieval history of the Iberian Church. This magnificent codex, preserved solely in ms. árabe 1623 of the Royal Library of El Escorial, is a testament to the unbroken cultivation of an Iberian canonical tradition by the Christians of al-Andalus. Like the Latin (Visigothic) exemplars that first circulated in the seventh century, the CCAEA gathers conciliar acts and papal decretals into a uniform canon collection presumably intended for ecclesiastical use.2 As a variant of the Hispana Systematica, however, it possesses an idiosyncratic arrangement of legal material revealing Christian intellectual activity in an Arabic cultural milieu. Disposing of an impressive number of canons added and removed from the Latin corpus, laws taken from the Liber Iudiciorum, and countless textual alterations resulting from authorial insertions throughout the translation process, it is unlike any known variant. The only manuscript at our disposal dates to c. 1049 but the latest reappraisals of the text suggest that an Arabic Hispana had likely circulated by the tenth century. The energetic revision of this “Holy Canon” attests to profound changes in the cultural orientation of the Iberian Church under Muslim rule; even so, the CCAEA highlights the Hispana’s sustained role in the communal life of the Christians of al-Andalus.

Since the manuscript’s discovery in the eighteenth century, specialists have debated the social and cultural context of the Hispana’s translation to Arabic.3 For Kassis, the al-Qānūn al-Muqaddas emerged amid a local desire for Arabic scriptures that began in the tenth century,4 and as a result of Iberian Christian efforts to rectify clerical conduct in the face of Cluniac influence in the eleventh century.5 Echevarría has additionally suggested external pressures from Muslim officials adjudicating over local Christians.6 An internal colophon dating the Escorial manuscript to c. 1049 has nevertheless provided a relatively safe terminus ad quem for the genesis of an Arabic Hispana. Maser has most recently conducted a meticulous reassessment of the external and internal evidence for the manuscript’s nebulous origins.7 He has posited a multi-stage historical process where the CCAEA emerges as a recension of earlier translations tied to the scribal environment and literary output of Andalusi Christians in the tenth century. Loose folios of a separate Arabic copy housed in Coimbra, Portugal, yield cogent proof of the wider, perhaps earlier, circulation of local variants throughout the Peninsula, though their places of origin remain unknown.8 The continued production of Latin copies up to the eleventh century, two of which contain extensive Arabic glosses, firmly grounds the CCAEA in a multilingual Iberian context concerned with the preservation of pre-Islamic conciliar legislation.9 What has yet to be fully considered, however, is the global cultural context of Christian canonical translations to Arabic across the Islamic world, a phenomenon that intimately links the CCAEA to the legal, literary, and intellectual history of the Eastern churches.10

Indeed, for the Christian communities of the broader Islamic world, just as for coreligionists in the Latin and Byzantine realms, canonical “laws” had regimented church governance and doctrinal observance purportedly since the age of the apostles.11 For each, the early Church had bequeathed a shared heritage of written norms that modeled Christian conduct and ecclesial organization on scriptural, apostolic, and patristic precepts. Following the Councils of Nicaea (325) and Chalcedon (451), however, the canon-legal traditions of the early medieval churches gradually ramified as they canonized divergent sources of holy custom and passed new legislation in episcopal gatherings. Local churches from Ireland to Persia subsequently enshrined their separate codes of church law in canonical compendiums tailored to the differing practices of each confession.12 It was precisely to these sacred sources of legal norms that churches subsumed into the dār al-islām had first had recourse to in their adjustment to new societal realities. As evidenced by the life of West Syrian bishop Jacob of Edessa (d. 708), the leaders of the Eastern churches—deprived of state judicial structures and charged to oversee the mundane affairs of their congregations—resorted to canon-legal channels to administer to their flocks.13 A steady stream of translations to Arabic of pre-Islamic sources central to confessional identification and internal administration under Islam followed, as would occur in al-Andalus.14 It is more than likely, in fact, that the church leaders of the Islamic West had made similar claims as Eastern ecclesiasts to the authority vested in the normative traditions of canonical sources to regulate Christian conduct.

This article explores the cultural reception and evolution of these pre-Islamic canonical traditions among the churches of the Islamic Mediterranean through a close analysis of the legal vocabulary employed by Arabic translators to refer to the norms enshrined in canon collections. At its heart is a comparative study of the terms used by Arabic-speaking Christians to label the sacred “rules” and “traditions” preserved in their confessional codes of canon law. In the absence of Christian juristic writings or records of Christian judicial activity from al-Andalus, an evaluation of the CCAEA’s legal descriptors provides additional clues for understanding how its translators curated the Iberian canonical tradition. Moreover, it supplies another channel through which to question the penetration of Islamic law into the legal thought of Andalusi Christians. Wagschal, noting the importance of legal terminology for Byzantine canon-legal texts, writes that “how the canonical tradition ‘names itself’ potentially reveals much about the nature of the system as a whole, and how it relates itself to other normative traditions.”15 The Christians who transferred their canonical heritage to the new cultural milieu of Arab-Islam had surely intended the faithful conservation of these sacred texts. Translators thus embraced the language and concepts of Islamic jurisprudence (fiqh) to render these customary norms intelligible and applicable within a new socio-legal order. In the East, this occurred alongside a profound reformulation of Christian legal thought as pre-existing notions of temporal legislation rubbed against Islamic claims to divinely revealed law; whether the same occurred among Andalusi Christians has yet to be examined.

Here, it must be stressed that canon collections were not merely codes of a strictly applied law but were rather reservoirs of long-held normative texts inherited from centuries of customary observance. While the canonical traditions they sought to record may have comprised “a coherent and demarcated set of church rules,” these “rules” were deeply embedded in semi-sacred texts of moral guidance that often touched on matters of orthodoxy rather than orthopraxy.16 For the compilers of the Latin Hispana, the collection had brought together “the discipline of ecclesiastical order,” providing “paternal rules” and “spiritual examples” for the Iberian Church.17 Central to such normative texts stood the weight of Christian tradition itself, which translators and compilers alike labored to curate and interpret in order to meet contemporary needs.18 Despite vast cultural differences between the churches of the Islamic world, Arabic translators resorted to a fairly uniform set of conceptual terms to refer to their inherited traditions. Indeed, the most prevalent word used to label the canonical customs of the distinct churches was the multivalent term sunna, meaning legal usage, communal tradition, or divine “Law.” In medieval fiqh, it denoted Islam’s prophetic tradition, singularly derived from the normative precedents established in reports of the sayings and actions of the prophet Muhammad (the ḥadīṯ and sīra) and his early followers.19 This denotation evolved from an earlier meaning akin to revelation as the inherited, lived traditions (or “law”) of a community (similar to early Greek νόμος).20 Among Arabic-speaking Christians, sunna sat alongside a host of Arabic terms that designated the collective legal tradition of the Church as well as the discrete written precepts of canon collections.

The article proceeds in four sections dedicated to the legal terminology of Arabic canon collections. The first two sections focus on the Arabic Hispana and its translators’ use of Islamic vocabulary to capture the meaning of key Latin words related to law, custom, and Christian tradition. Subsequently, the third section widens the scope of analysis to Eastern collections, situating the CCAEA within a broader context of canonical translations to Arabic. Lastly, the fourth section investigates the crucial terms sunna and šarī‘a, shared among Andalusi and Eastern Christians alike, in relation to Muslim-Christian polemical discourse. Within this discourse, Arabic canon collections served as demonstrable records of Christian confessional law, filtering into larger debates about the validity of conciliar legislation as a source of revealed law. In response, Arabic-speaking Christians appropriated the sacred legal vocabulary of Islamic fiqh, imbuing key Islamic terms like sunna and šarī‘a with distinctly Christian meanings tied to Church tradition. The elaboration of a “Christian sunna” in Arabic canonical texts reified a normative model of licit communal practice that also countered Islamic critiques of Christian law.

The penetration of Islamic concepts into the legal vocabulary of Andalusi Christians has already been noted in earlier studies of the CCAEA’s lexicon. These studies have showcased two noteworthy lexical features unique to Iberian Christian-Arabic legal writings.21 In the first place, Andalusi translators labored to curate a Latinate vocabulary in Arabic through the direct transliteration of ecclesiastical terminology (e.g. responsoria/rašfunšūriyya, gloria/al-ḡlūrīa, concilia/qunjīliyyāt). While this certainly preserved a distinctive cultural-linguistic identity for the Andalusi Church amid the diffusion of Arabic, it is not unusual for Latin terms to be accompanied by formal translations (e.g. concilium/qunjīliyya/maḥfil). Secondly, a degree of Islamization is discernable in the adoption of expressly Islamic vocabulary such as kāfir (“infidel”), ḵawārij (“heretics”), nikāḥ (“marriage” distinct from tazwīj or zawāj), and imām (for priests). Monferrer-Sala has understood the presence of this “hybrid lexis” as evidence for translators’ familiarity with various cultural-linguistic traditions (Latin-Christian, Arabic-Islamic, and Eastern Arabic-Christian) that likely influenced the semantic register through which the CCAEA was written and interpreted.22 These two lexical features indicate that Andalusi Christians were aware of the Islamic and non-Islamic connotations of Arabic words, and that translators were well adept at shifting between cultural-linguistic registers as they deemed fit.

Generally speaking, the al-Qānūn al-Muqaddas shows a predilection for Islamizing, rather than merely transliterating, important canon-legal concepts. This is clear in the pervasive use of the Islamic terms farā’iḍ [sg. farḍ] and ḥudūd [sg. ḥadd] to translate an expansive list of Latin terms for ecclesiastical “rules” available in the Early Middle Ages (i.e. constitutiones, decreta, privilegia, statutae, praecepta, regulae, etc.). In their Islamic sense, both farā’iḍ and ḥudūd are juridical terms that encapsulate religious duties considered divinely ordained and obligatory (wājib) for believers.23 Despite their preferential use within the CCAEA, these terms were occasionally replaced by more general appellations for judicial “decrees” or “stipulations,” such as the less overtly religious aḥkām, šurūṭ, and nawāmīs [sg. nāmūs, from Greek νόμος, “law”]. Following this double-register, then, the Latin leges [sg. lex, “law”] can become either aḥkām [sg. ḥukm, “decree”] or šarā’ī‘ [sg. šarī‘a, “(religious) law”].24 The translators’ interpretations of the Latin text evidently determined their choice of words: a reference to the ‘secular’ lex romana is thus translated as aḥkām mulūk al-rūmaniyyin (“decrees of the kings of the Romans”) while the phrase in lege Domini instructus (“instructed in the law of the Lord”) becomes māhiran fī šarā’ī‘ al-kanīsa (“proficient in the [sacred] laws of the Church”).25

Although the CCAEA’s translators favored farā’iḍ and ḥudūd, the text’s internal rhetoric betrays a creative use of Arabic terms to describe the Hispana’s canonical “laws.” This creativity comes through wherever Islamic terminology accentuates the sacred properties of Latin legal concepts. For example, Pope Hilarius’s (d. 468) exhortation to safeguard the “precepts of the divine laws” (divinae legis praecepta) becomes a proscription against violating “the fixed decrees (al-aḥkām) established according to the precepts of God’s book” (farā’iḍ kitāb Allah).26 A reference to “ancient privileges and paternal statutes” (privilegiorum veterum et statutorum paternorum) remodels these into “the ancient laws (nawāmīs), decrees (ḥudūd) and holy ordinances (farā’iḍ) attributed to the fathers.”27 The predilection for Islamic terms might suggest that the CCAEA’s translators wished to appropriate their sacred connotations to excise the equivocal secular meanings of the Latin. Consequently, Islamic terminology predominates where allusions to “the canons” are concerned: to act “against the decrees of the canons” (contra decreta canonum) is to be ‘alā ḵilāf farā’iḍ al-qānūn (“contrary to the ordinances of the canons”); similarly, the “constitutions and decrees of the canons” (constituta canonumque decreta) are suitably the al-farā’iḍ al-wājiba wa-šurūṭ al-qānūn (“the obligatory ordinances and stipulations of the canons”).28 The Latin canones are typically qawānīn, although the singular qānūn often designates a generic notion of the broader canonical tradition (shared with Greek κανών).29

The seamless integration of Islamic religious vocabulary served, on the one hand, to faithfully capture the sacred tenor of the Latin Hispana; on the other hand, the Arabic phrasing of the CCAEA’s canon-legal concepts reflected how the translators understood (or hoped to portray) the sacred norms contained within the collection. In large part, the corpus’ canons are presented as divine injunctions in line with Islamic farā’iḍ—that is, holy obligations decreed upon the faithful. Yet, adhering to the Latin, translators also closely reproduced the technical-legal language preserved in the acts of late antique and early medieval canonical texts, which gradually blended Roman and ecclesiastical legal formulas.30 The “sacred canons” of the Iberian Church are thus construed as both divine instructions and worldly “rulings”—that is, as both farā’iḍ and nawāmīs, as both aḥkām and ḥudūd. Despite the penetration of Islamic terminology, it must be noted that the translators remained faithful to the Latin Hispana’s conception of the “legislative sources” of the canons: that is, scripture, the apostles, councils, and episcopal forefathers. Conciliar decrees, for example, are simply the judicial decisions of councils (al-qunjiliyyāt).31 The “constitutions of the fathers” (constituta patrum) are the farā’iḍ al-ābā’ (“ordinances of the fathers”) and the “precepts of holy scripture” (sanctarum scripturarum praeceptis) are similarly the farā’iḍ al-kutub al-muqaddasa (“ordinances of holy scripture”).32

A Latin term that encapsulates the complex nature of the CCAEA’s melding of cultural-linguistic registers in its legal vocabulary is regula (“rule”). Jointly denoting secular regulations as well as religious instructions (e.g. for monastic orders),33 the term delimits illicit actions for the clergy and laity within the Hispana and is rendered variably as nāmūs, šurṭ, farḍ, ḥadd, qānūn, sunna, and even ḥukm al-rāḡula (for regulariter, “according to the rule”). The variety of Arabic terms used for canonical regulae suggests a concrete overlapping of religious and legal connotations. In turn, one finds that regulae ecclesiasticae correspond to the qānūn al-bī‘a (“the canon of the Church”) and the regulae clericorum become the nawāmīs al-qlāriqīn (“laws of clerics”);34 the regulae feminarum (“rules for women”) are the sunnat al-nisā’ (“the customs of women”) and the antiquas regulas constitutas (“ancient established rules”) are the farḍ al-qawānīn al-qadīma al-ṯābita (“the ordinance of the fixed, ancient canons”).35 The selection of any given Arabic concept over another in the translation of regula merits a fuller case-by-case analysis which cannot be undertaken here; nonetheless, the point stands that Andalusi Christians made use of a vast Arabic vocabulary with overlapping Islamic and non-Islamic meanings to render the sacred legal terminology suitable to their canonical corpus.

In the same way that farā’iḍ and ḥudūd consolidate a variety of Latin words for ecclesiastical “rules” in the CCAEA, the Arabic terms sunna and šarī‘a stand in for the Hispana’s recurrent allusions to Christian “tradition.” Naturally, the notion of a living tradition of communal norms that linked written rules to past authorities was not unique to Iberian canonical texts, much less to Christian doctrine. According to Wagschal, a key element of the literary-rhetorical style of Byzantine canonical sources, which grounded rulings in older normative “customs,” was precisely a “discourse of tradition” suffused with allusions to past authorities.36 This discourse relied on certain Greek “tradition-vocabulary words” that reified a living “tradition” of established Christian norms, including such concepts as παράδοση (“tradition”), έθη (“custom”), συνήθεια (“usage”), and κανών (the “canon” in a collective sense). Latin canonical sources not only fostered the same tradition-laden language, they also embraced their own set of conceptual terms for the task. In the Hispana, nebulous words like consuetudo, mos, usus, ordo, ritus, and traditio comprise the “tradition-vocabulary” of the Iberian canonical corpus, denoting how Latin ecclesiasts referred to the inherited norms embodied in the canons. Each carried closely-related meanings tied to long-standing modes of customary practice, ritual observance, or communal conduct. Upon their translation in the CCAEA, the Arabic word embraced by Andalusi translators to best convey their references to past tradition was sunna, with occasional uses of šarī‘a.

The use of sunna and šarī‘a by Arabic-Christian authors to refer to the traditions of the Church—that is, to the customs of the Fathers and the early Christian community—is amply documented in both the Islamic East and West. Their meanings, though intimately related, are semantically varied (both can denote divine revelation, ritual law, customary practice, or the collective traditions of a religious community); moreover, their usage by Muslims and Christians evolved over the course of the Middle Ages. In a series of studies conducted by Daga Portillo, she has argued that, prior to the eleventh century, šarī‘a chiefly designated revelation while the plural šarā’ī‘ meant religious precepts (as a semantic calque of Syriac namūse).37 Conversely, sunna, not šarī‘a, originally denoted “law” as the collective inherited norms, practices, and prescriptions of a community but similarly related to a notion of revealed Law (akin to early Greek νόμος).38 In the CCAEA, šarī‘a and sunna are closely linked but the former is almost exclusively the preferred translation of Latin traditio (“tradition,” bearing a generic, cultic sense tied to “religion”). It is juxtaposed with sunna in the Council of Nicaea’s seventh canon where the mos antiquus (“old way”) and the vetusta traditio (“ancient tradition”) become the al-sunna al-qadīma… wa-l-šarī‘a al-’ūla (“the old custom… and the first/prior law”).39 Šarī‘a retains a sacred-legal meaning broadly tied to the conventions of a religious community, however: cultum fidei (“observance of the faith”) is rendered as the šarī‘a al-diyāna al-qaṯūliqiyya (“the law of the Catholic creed”).40 Yet both terms were also used interchangeably to denote religious precepts: the apostolica traditione (“apostolic tradition”) was equally the sunna al-ḥawāriyyin (“the custom of the apostles”) as the šarā’ī‘ al-ḥawāriyyin (“the šarī‘a-s of the apostles”).41

Separate from šarī‘a, however, sunna in the al-Qānūn al-Muqaddas holds its early Islamic meaning as construed by Daga Portillo: customary religious norms transmitted from generation to generation, used in the singular either as a discrete custom, a revealed law, or a collective inherited tradition (like Greek κανών or the CCAEA’s qānūn). In this way, the Andalusi translators approximated Qur’anic rhetoric when expanding the ordo antiquitatis (“order of antiquity”) into the sunnat al-ābā’ wa-sabīl al-āwā’il (“the custom of the fathers and the path of the ancients”).42 As already seen, the common phrase mos antiquus (“old way”), referencing the ancient conventions of the early Church, recurs as the al-sunna al-qadīma (“the old custom”).43 Importantly, the translators employed a lexical double-register when interpreting the Hispana’s “tradition-vocabulary,” as is clear whenever they opted for the term ‘āda [pl. ‘ādāt]—meaning “habit, custom, or usage” with no particular sacred undertone—over sunna. Hence one can find consuetudine ecclesiastica (“ecclesiastical convention”) rendered as ‘ādat al-kanīsa (“the practice of the Church”)44 and ecclesiasticos mores (“ecclesiastical usages”) simply as al-‘ādāt (“the customs”).45 The interchangeable use of ‘āda and sunna complicates the reading of the former as merely a secular alternative to the latter; rather, they each defined the traditions inherited from the early Church as ancient practices or customs.

The repeated use of ‘āda and sunna together in the CCAEA confirms that they alluded specifically to church practices. The 5^th Council of Toledo’s first canon (adding new litanies to December masses) presents nova… consuetudo (“new convention”) as al-‘āda al-jadīda wa-l-sunna al-ṭāri’a (“the new practice and novel custom”).46 Elsewhere, jure apostolico ecclesiis (“by the apostolic law of the Church”) appears as ka-‘ādat al-ḥawāriyyin wa sunani-him (“as the practice of the apostles and their customs”).47 The 2^nd Council of Vaison’s (529) inclusion of the Sanctus hymn to the Kyrie Eleison prescribes that “this holy convention (ista tam sancta consuetudo) be introduced into every church,” which the CCAEA expands into a directive that “this sacred practice (tilka al-‘āda al-muqqadasa) be admitted and this custom established (yusnan bi-tilka al-sunna) in all our churches.”48 A creative interplay in the religious and non-religious meanings of these words occasionally arises with their joint use: for example, the title of the Hispana’s ninth book (de abdicatione haereticorum et usibus eorum) appears as fī qaṭ‘ al-ḵawārij wa-‘ādāt sunani-him (“On the removal of heretics and the practices of their [religious] traditions”).49 Similarly, a prohibition against following the “convention of the pagans” (paganorum consuetudinem) becomes a proscription against “preserving the tradition of pagans (sunnat al-majūs) and keeping their practice (‘ādata-hum).”50 In such cases, sunna appears to retain its definition tied to religious customs while ‘āda labels specific practices.

Consequently, sunna itself also designates Christian observances presented as normative traditions to be followed. Concerning the chant of the Hymn of the Three Holy Children (qaṣīdat al-ṯalāṯ ḡilma), for example, the 4^th Council of Toledo’s fourteenth canon says:

For the translators, the canon effectively puts in place a holy convention (consuetudo)—the observance of the prescribed rite—that is interpreted as a sunna. By extension, then, what the canons of the CCAEA decree (ḥakama) is seemingly the creation and observance of their specified sunna-s. As a result, the collection’s “rules” (farā’iḍ) are frequently linked to their prescribed practices (sunan): thus the Epistle of Pope Hormisdas (r. 514-24) commands “the preservation of the ordinances of the fathers (farā’iḍ al-ābā’) and their customs (sunana-hum)” where the Latin merely orders the observance of “what the fathers decreed” (a patribus decreta serventur).52 As will be discussed below, Eastern canonists, too, referred often to the canons as possessing sunan, illustrated in repeated allusions to al-qawānīn wa-sunan-ha (“canons and their sunna-s”).

Lastly, sunna in the al-Qānūn al-Muqaddas also groups disparate customs into a unified term for the collective traditions of a religious community. When referring to Jewish practices, for example, the translators rendered judaizare (“to follow Jewish customs”) precisely as “to take up the sunna of the Jews” (yāḵuḏū bi-sunnat al-yahūd).53 More to the point, “Jewish rites” (judaicos ritos) were brought together as the “law of the Jews” (sunnat al-yahūd).54 Consequently, the same is done with internal references to the canonical tradition enshrined in the canons, as shown by the recurrent phrase sunnat al-qānūn (“the law/custom/tradition of the canon”): the fourteenth canon of the 1^st Council of Carthage excommunicates “laymen contemptuous of the canons” (laici contemptores canonum), explained in the CCAEA as “laymen transgressing the sunnat al-qānūn” (al-layqīn iḏā ta‘addū sunnat al-qānūn).55 Elsewhere, the same concept appears as the sunnat al-qawānīn (“law of the canons”), which reifies a unitary tradition of diverse canonical rules.56 It is difficult to confirm through the CCAEA alone whether the Arabic canons outlined lived practices (applied in courts or ritually observed) for Andalusi readers: a comparative glance at Coptic legal activity strongly suggests otherwise.57 Regardless, the conversion of the canones into a sunnat al-qānūn demonstrates the endurance and creative cultivation of the Hispana’s canonical tradition among Andalusi Christians.

In the end, the closely related meanings of šarī‘a, sunna and ‘āda permeate the CCAEA’s internal rhetoric concerning the normative traditions or “laws” enshrined in its canons. Like the constellation of Arabic terms (farā’iḍ/ḥudūd/šarā’ī‘/aḥkām/nawāmīs/šurūṭ) used to express various Latin legislative concepts, the words sunna/šarī‘a/‘āda similarly complement one another, hinting at the translators’ broader conception of the CCAEA’s written customs. In essence, they are the Arabic terms embraced by the Christians of al-Andalus to present their canons as inherited traditions rooted in past authoritative models (conciliar, papal, apostolic, scriptural). In the eyes of Andalusi Christians, then, the Hispana documented concrete practices that could properly be labeled sunan, šarā’ī‘, or ‘ādāt. Each term accurately rendered its Latin referent (consuetudo/mos/usus/ordo/ritus/traditio) to an approximate meaning in Arabic. It is apparent, however, that the term sunan and the singular sunna captured a legal-religious denotation with a greater consequence in the Islamic setting for the precepts of the Latin canons. Within the genre of fiqh, the term had applied to collections of ḥadīṯ emerging in the late eighth/early ninth century with the title sunan (e.g. Sunan al-Dārimī [d. 869] and Sunan al-Nasā’ī [d. 915]).58 In both cultural spheres, the term denoted “exemplary traditions of normative practice” central to their respective religious communities, and Andalusi Christians actively applied the concept to the ecclesiastical customs embedded in their canonical traditions.59

Though the al-Qānūn al-Muqaddas remains a unicum in the source record of the Christians of al-Andalus, Arabic canon collections had long circulated among the churches of the medieval Middle East. Taking the form of chronological compendiums, systematic collections, nomocanons, and theological treatises, these sources have survived in a substantial cache of manuscripts that jointly tell the story of Eastern Christian legal adaptation to Islamic rule. As recently traced by Griffith, Treiger, and Kaufhold, Melkite and East Syrian ecclesiasts had labored to translate their canonical heritage into Arabic as early as the eighth century, followed by Copts, Maronites, and (less prominently) the West Syrians.60 The eleventh century, in particular, witnessed a notable surge of canonical translations to Arabic on both sides of the Mediterranean. Copts, for example, had copied collections in Coptic up to (and beyond) the eleventh century, when a compiler of unknown background, Abū Ṣulḥ (Ṣāliḥ) Yūnus ibn ‘Abdallāh, produced the earliest known Coptic nomocanon in Arabic.61 At around the same time, the East Syrian intellectual Ibn al-Ṭayyib (d. 1043) composed the best-known systematized collection of canons in Arabic, his Fiqh al-Naṣrāniyya (‘Jurisprudence of Christianity’), and a Maronite collection circulated under the title Kitāb al-Hudā (‘Book of Guidance’). On western shores, Andalusi scribes copied the extant version of the Arabic Hispana—the al-Qānūn al-Muqaddas. All the while, of course, the distinct churches produced new compilations in local languages. By the eleventh century, each sizable Arabic-speaking Christian community in the Islamic Mediterranean had begun to transfer their Syriac, Greek, Coptic, and Latin canon-legal traditions to the Arabic language.

To compare the vocabulary, purpose, and cultural orientation of these diverse sources of Arabic-Christian legal literature, the explanatory prefaces of Eastern canon collections provide useful case studies.62 Unfortunately, the first folios of the al-Qānūn al-Muqaddas have not survived to preserve any such preface. Early copies of the Latin Hispana, arranged chronologically rather than thematically, had once circulated with an introduction narrating the history and significance of church councils.63 Similar descriptions abound in prefaces to early medieval compilations dating back to the works of Dionysius Exiguus (d. ca. 526-556), who famously translated the early Greek canons to Latin in an effort to harmonize the traditions of East and West.64 In the Islamic context, an example is provided by a thirteenth-century manuscript preserving the Arabic collection of the East Syrian Elias ibn ‘Ubaid (fl. 878-903), also known as Īlīyā al-Jawharī, the archbishop of Damascus in the late ninth century.65 The work’s preface explains that “such was translated from Syriac to Arabic by Elias the Metropolitan of Damascus, whose prayers we keep; he translated it from the book titled sinhūḏus to be of use and learned by whoever does not understand Syriac.”66 Indeed, these authors, like the CCAEA’s translators, though writing in separate periods under separate circumstances, had all labored to preserve, in the elite language of the day, the normative canonical traditions of their churches.

Concerning the use of Arabic legal language, Elias ibn ‘Ubaid’s ninth-century collection serves as an early point of comparison with Eastern Christians. In fact, he describes the Synodicon Orientale—the collection of the East Syrian Church’s synodal acts—in similar terms as the CCAEA:

The text refers frequently to the canons (qawānīn) of Elias’s church as sunan, going as far as to refer to the written canons as “sunna-s”: in his brief introduction to the Council of Ancyra (314), for example, he narrates that “there gathered that day in the city of Ancyra within the region of Galatia twenty-four bishops from among its chiefs and they established twenty customs (‘ašrīn sunna) which we have translated.”68 He selected these canons because “the Fathers translated from Greek to Syriac these customs (tilka al-sunan) which the Christians of the East (naṣārā al-mašriq) needed.”69 For Elias, like the CCAEA’s translators, the ancient customs of the East Syrian church, transmitted in canon collections such as the Synodicon Orientale, are rightly labeled sunan, a series of established customs for his community to follow.

If canon collections recorded sunan, Eastern ecclesiasts nonetheless understood their diverse rulings as comprising a collective sunna linked to the tradition of the Church. Daga Portillo has already analyzed this meaning of the term in the writings of Theodore Abū Qurra (ca. 750-820).70 Another example is vividly illustrated in a letter from the Melkite Patriarch Mark III of Alexandria (r. ca. 1180-ca.1209). In it, Mark III responds to questions from Abbot George of Damietta about the proper administration of certain liturgical rites. When asked about those partaking in “frequent communion,” the Patriarch fervently disapproves, for:

Like the CCAEA’s translators, Mark III also interpreted the canons as comprising the written record of a living Christian tradition labeled a sunna.

Mark III’s sunnat al-ābā’—much like the CCAEA’s sunnat al-qānūn, al-sunna al-qadīma, or very own sunnat al-ābā’—reveals how Arabic-speaking ecclesiasts employed the concept to express the weight of canonical tradition and its underlying authority. It effectively provided the Patriarch with an intelligible, authoritative source through which to model the ritual practices of his community. Šarī‘a, on the other hand, signified Christian revelation. When explaining the proper days for liturgical celebrations, the Patriarch says that the šarī‘a has ordained Wednesdays and Fridays as days of fast; instead, prayers are best conducted on Saturdays and Sundays at the hour when the Holy Spirit had descended upon the apostles, for “this is how the practice of the Church (sunnat al-kanīsa) has been after them, under their successors and to this day.”72 His response alludes to the liturgical Book of Typikon and to the Canons of the Apostles, which Treiger has traced references to in Arabic manuscripts thereof, from where Mark of Alexandria may have taken the term sunnat al-kanīsa.73 Like ecclesiasts from all Mediterranean traditions, the Melkite Patriarch had recourse to canonical texts to find the normative sources of Christian custom and the authoritative traditions from which they derive. Whether as sunnat al-qānūn or sunnat al-kanīsa, Arabic-speaking Christians often embraced the term sunna to harken back to the established precedent of inherited practice.

The writings of the prolific East Syrian priest Ibn al-Ṭayyib reveal how deeply the concept of a Christian sunna had infiltrated the legal thought of Eastern Christians by the eleventh century. In a short treatise on marriage and divorce, he adds an account of the legal history of his church, eloquently revealing the complex nature of Christianity’s canonical sunna.74 By this period, the East Syrian church had undertaken a robust formulation of what has been labeled a “Christian confessional civil law,” vastly expanding the civil jurisdiction of church authorities through local synodal legislation.75 When asked whether the regulation of worldly matters such as marriage, divorce, debts, and inheritance derive from “the Book of Divine Law (al-šarī‘a), that is, the Pure Gospels”76 or from the leaders of the Church, Ibn al-Ṭayyib replies that Christian Law (al-šarī‘a al-masīhiyya) was above imposing any obligation (farīḍ) on worldly matters (al-umūr al-‘ālamiyya). Instead, biblical exhortations such as rendering unto Caesar what’s Caesar’s (mā li-qayṣar li-qayṣar) and leaving behind father, mother, home, and wealth to follow Christ had put in place an “honorable custom” (al-sunna al-šarīfa) detached from worldly obligations. In his systematic canon collection, the Fiqh al-Naṣrāniyya, he refers to this ancient tradition not as a sunna but as the “canon of the kingdom of heaven” (qānūn malakūt al-samā’).77

As examined by Lev Weitz, Ibn al-Ṭayyib pinpoints the infiltration of civil rulings into the spiritual realm of ecclesiastical law—a notable disruption to “the traditional Christian distinction between true Law and ‘worldly matters’”—to the reign of patriarch Timothy I (d. 823).78 Subsequently, he narrates in his treatise that prior to Timothy the divine precepts dealt solely with the clergy, the commandments of the Gospels (al-awāmir al-injīliyyah), and doctrine. In the land of the Greeks, he writes, mundane concerns “had rested on royal laws (al-qawānīn al-mulūkiyya) that kings, not priests, decreed.”79 In turn, following Weitz’s translation,

In this way, the canons of Timothy I had established both a new šarī‘a and a new sunna distinct from the revealed Law of Christianity (al-šarī‘a al-masīḥiyya). Notably, then, Ibn al-Ṭayyib, too, had grouped the qawānīn of patriarchs into a unitary sunna; his use of the term qānūn, however, alternated between secular and religious meanings: as worldly “laws” and as a heavenly “Law.”

When inspecting the laws of the Fiqh al-Naṣrāniyya, it is rather difficult to ascertain whether the canons themselves connect the sacred notions of sunna and qānūn. Unlike Elias ibn ‘Ubaid, Ibn al-Ṭayyib references the canons strictly as qānūn, such as the twenty canons (‘ašrīn qānūn) brought forth by the Council of Gangra (340).81 A selection of the punitive Pseudo-Nicene canons conclude with the phrase “this canon is forbidden” (hāḏā al-qānūn yuḥarrim).82 The first canon of the Council of Laodicea (c. 363), which alludes to the ecclesiastical canon (ecclesiasticum canonem), contains neither sunna nor šarī‘a but the notably Christian phrase qānūn al-nāmūs (“the canon of the Law”).83 In turn, lawful marriages are nāmūsiyya (“according to the nāmūs”), which the CCAEA conversely renders as sunniyya (“according to the sunna”).84 Ibn al- al-Ṭayyib occasionally opts for the term sunna, however, in relation to scripture and the apostles, as when he refers to “what was ordered by the holy books and the tradition of the apostles (sunnat al-rusul).”85 He applies the term to non-Christian traditions as well: “if any man among us did something from the habits (‘ādāt) of the pagans or professed the sunna of the Jews and acted by it, then may he cease or be expelled.”86 Though the terms qawānīn, aḥkām, and nawāmīs recur in the Fiqh al-Naṣrāniyya, the secular laws of Byzantine Emperor Leo are interestingly called “the farā’iḍ of king Leo” (farā’iḍ lāūn al-malik).87 Lacking a preference for Islamic terminology (as in the CCAEA), Ibn al-Ṭayyib’s canon collection reveals an equally vast Arabic vocabulary with a distinct internal discourse mediating between Christian and Islamic notions of law.

The discursive effect of the adoption of the term sunna and related Islamic connotations is perhaps best evidenced within the context of Christian-Muslim polemics. A salient invective lodged against Christianity is that its confessional laws, simply put, were man-made, forged by priests, “and not a God-ordained law given by a prophet, that is, Jesus.”88 Griffith has analyzed this inter-religious polemic in relation to the conciliar theory presented by the prominent Melkite theologian Theodore Abū Qurra (c. 750-c. 825) in his tract “On the Councils.”89 To defend the authority of the canons as divine revelation, Abū Qurra deploys apostolic teachings taken chiefly from the Gospel to ground the legitimacy of the ecumenical councils in scripture; he defines the tradition of the Church as a nāmūs, a divinely revealed ‘Law’; and he presents the Christian nāmūs as the fulfillment of the Torah.90 As Griffith notes, this apologetic directly responds to widespread Islamic allegations against Christianity most emphatically expressed in the Taṯbīt dalā’il nubuwwat of ‘Abd al-Jabbār (d. 1025), qāḍī of Rayy in modern Iran. ‘Abd al-Jabbār’s critiques rest squarely on the charge that Christians had departed from the sunna of the Torah, introduced Gentile customs, and subsequently corrupted Christ’s true religion. Hence, he determines that ecclesiastical councils beginning with Nicaea (325) were the means through which a misguided clergy had crafted the tenets of Christianity at their whim with no divine support for their decisions—and had continued to do so.91 In this way, conciliar legislation had gradually become a particularly charged point of Muslim-Christian disputation, with Arabic canon collections serving as the evidence furnished by its interlocutors.

The writings of the Copt Abū Ṣulḥ—who produced the earliest known Coptic nomocanon in Arabic at some point in the eleventh century—illustrate how Christian-Muslim polemic infiltrated into Christian canonical discourse. Indeed, the bulk of the work’s preface is an apologetic defense of the canons written to refute “an ignorant one (jāhil) who says that we, the Christian community, are not required to accept these canons because they are not transmitted in the Holy Gospels.”92 In turn, he resolves to remove any doubt and make known that their adherence is an obligatory duty (farḍ wājib) and an indissoluble command (āmr lāzm bi-hā). The clergy have the obligation to learn them, so that they can properly lead the congregation and “instruct the people of their rules” (li-yajlūn al-ša‘b ‘alā aḥkām-ha). Furthermore, every believer “is compelled to read and hear [the canons] in order to learn from them what is incumbent upon them and what should be avoided.”93 Accordingly, he “undertook to organize their meanings in condensed words, so as to facilitate their understanding and observance by those who concern themselves with that [matter] and are preoccupied by it from among our faithful brothers.”94 For Reidel, Abū Ṣulḥ’s preface “expresses in a classic way the significance and value of the canons for the Coptic church, and because it originates from one of the first collectors to translate the canons into Arabic.”95

Crucially, much that Abū Ṣulḥ states in his introductory treatise is in line with contemporary Eastern Christian attitudes toward the canons in the Islamic setting, and it is conceivable that the Christians of al-Andalus held similar notions regarding the CCAEA. Yet, while each had translated the canons so that church members might abide by their rule, Abū Ṣulḥ (like Abū Qurra) goes to great lengths to base the authority of the canons in an ancient Christian tradition begun by the apostles and rooted in scripture, contrary to the opinions of his detractors. Conversely, the CCAEA reflects a more conservative approach to the Latin Church’s traditional sources of authority. Abū Ṣulḥ instead openly labels the Christian tradition “the new law contained in [Christ’s] Gospel” (al-nāmūs al-jadīda fī injīli-hi), fashioning canonical legislation in the Islamic (Near Eastern) mold of a divinely revealed law with scriptural originals. Although he alludes to Christianity itself as a šarī‘a, his favored term for designating the divine laws of religious communities is nāmūs, which he further employs to distinguish between Mosaic law (al-nāmūs li-mūsā) and apostolic laws (al-nuwāmis al-rasūliyya al-injīliyya). Sunna, on the other hand, appears only negatively in the proscription against the “customs of the people of Egypt, the Canaanites, and all other nations” (sunan ahl miṣr wa-l-kana’āniyyin wa jamī‘ al-šu‘ūb).96 However, he employs sunna’s verbal root sanna—meaning to set “a mode of conduct as an example that others would follow”97—to explain the origins of apostolic tradition: “there is for us,” he writes, “a new law (šarī‘a) contained in [Christ’s] Holy Gospel; it is not for us to cling to the ancient law (al-nāmūs al-‘atīq) but rather to redeem ourselves by what the apostles established (sanna-hu) for us.”98 Though the statement abounds with Islamic resonances, he meticulously ties the Christian nāmūs/šarī‘a to an apostolic tradition sourced from scripture and preserved precisely in his translated collection of canons.

It is impossible to ascertain whether the instigator of Abū Ṣulḥ’s apologetic was a Christian, a Jew, or a Muslim but his words nonetheless highlight one key function of Arabic canon collections: to serve as demonstrable sources of Christian confessional law under Islam. Their legal content, translated to Arabic, was disseminated to both Christian and Muslim intellectuals who inspected these texts with and without polemical intent. The renowned Baghdadi historian al-Mas‘ūdī (d. 956), for example, wrote in his condensed history of the world, the Kitāb al-tanbīh wa-l-išrāf, that Christians possessed “forty books that contain their customs (al-sunan) and religious laws (al-šarā’ī‘).”99 The late Koningsveld had found references to the CCAEA in the writings of Andalusi jurists Ibn Ḥazm (d. 1064) and al-Qurṭubī (d. 1258), the latter going so far as to excerpt canons from the text in order to lodge the same critique that so incensed Abū Ṣulḥ:

For al-Qurṭubī, the al-Qānūn al-Muqaddas was proof that bishops and priests—rather than God or the prophets—had crafted the laws of Christianity, in stark contrast to Islamic notions of revealed legislation. Similar charges abound in Muslim descriptions of Christian laws, where royal lawmakers also came under critique: the Andalusi historian al-Bakrī (c. 1040-1094), writing on European Christians in his Kitāb al-masālik wa-l-mamālik, states that “their law (sunna) is neither derived from revelation nor narrated from a prophet. Rather, it derives from the decrees of their kings.”101 As Abū Ṣulḥ’s preface demonstrates, Christian authors utilized Arabic canon collections as forums for responding to such charges, with clear implications for how we might interpret their chosen terminology to present their legal traditions.

The valence of the term sunna as employed in Arabic Christian legal writings must partly be considered with the resonances of such interreligious polemic in mind. Indeed, although Abū Qurra and Abū Ṣulḥ described Christianity as a nāmūs, Christian and Muslim writers gradually adopted the term sunna to contest the alleged break of contemporary Christian practices with scriptural traditions. Beyond ‘Abd al-Jabbār’s accusations that Christians had abandoned the sunna of the Torah, Al-Qurṭubī provides another pointed example: “For [the Christians],” he writes, “contradicted the books of God, they abandoned the sunna of God’s messengers, they passed judgement according to their whims and they have [thus] departed from the sunan of their prophets.” Concurrently, however, Muslim polemicists and Christian canonists conceived of Christianity’s civil and ecclesiastical laws as the religion’s sunna, comprising distinct sunan. This shared vocabulary—at times weaponized, at times not—influenced the legal rhetoric of ecclesiasts who translated their canonical traditions. One important way in which this process played out was precisely the reconceptualization of Christianity’s legal traditions, first, in the frameworks provided by Arabic legal terminology—whether that be nāmūs, sunna, or šarī‘a—and, second, in Islamic legal models focused on the scriptural and apostolic/prophetic origins of these traditions. The legal vocabulary of the CCAEA suggests that Andalusi Christians experienced the first, but not the second, stage of this process: instead, the translators adhered closely to the Hispana’s authoritative models despite their creative uses of Arab-Islamic terminology.

A final example of the apologetic use of sunna—resonating closely with the rhetoric of all authors considered thus far—appears in the Arabic translation of the Syro-Roman Law Code. Its preface repeatedly declares that its wrongly-attributed authors (Emperors Constantine, Theodosius, and Leo) had “established rightful customs and praiseworthy statutes” (sannū al-sunan al-ḥasanan wa-l-ḥudūd al-maḥmūda). More importantly, the translators labored to connect these imperial laws to God’s primordial laws, practiced at the time of the twelve tribes of Israel and defined as “the first of the sunan—a good, praiseworthy sunna that God gave to his creation” and preserved in the Torah.102 In turn, this sunna, defined as the sunna of the “Book of Moses” (kitāb Mūsa), continued in place until the coming of Christ, who established new sunan for the Church, bestowed knowledge of the faith to Christian kings, and subjugated the nations to them, all so that “they might conduct their affairs by the regulation of the sunna of the Church (sunnat al-kanīsa).”103 Consequently, though “the Greeks, Romans, and others” (al-yunāniyyin wa-l-rūm wa-gayr-hum) had established separate sunan, Christ’s arrival has brought together the sunna of all nations into one sunna (sunna wāḥida). The preface to this Arabic source of civil law, which entered the corpus of Eastern canon collections, thus concludes with an affirmation that, beginning with Constantine, Christian kings had in fact promulgated this singular, prophetic sunnat al-kanīsa.

The preceding study has drawn attention to the variegated connotations that can be deduced from Arabic Christian uses of the term sunna, chiefly within the canonical literature of the Arabic-speaking Churches of the Islamic Mediterranean. Perhaps inevitably, a diversity of meanings overshadows any singular, straightforward interpretation—the canonical traditions of the distinct Churches derived from a shared repertoire of ancient texts filtered through separate local languages and fairly distinct cultural orientations long before their translations to Arabic. Though it is possible to detect common canonical sources, as Kaufhold notes, “it is much more difficult to ask the extent to which there were shared legal perceptions, where there were borrowings and where there was parallel development.”104 Through a comparative analysis of the legal vocabulary of Arabic canon collections from the Islamic East and West, made possible by recent advancements in studies of the Arabic translation of the Collectio Hispana, one can begin to posit tentative observations. Importantly, the key Arabic concept of sunna, perhaps more than šarī‘a, was widely embraced by Christian canonists residing throughout the Islamic world. In Arabic collections, the allusion to “the customs of the fathers” (sunan al-ābā’), “the custom of the church” (sunnat al-kanīsa), “the canons and customs” (qawānīn wa-l-sunan), and, especially, the “the customs of the apostles” (sunan al-rusul)—or variant phrasings of each—all conceptually linked canonical sources to distinctly Christian models of sacred authority. Close engagement with Islamic polemics against Christian legislation had an intimate impact on the Arabic technical concepts chosen by canonical translators. Lastly, as the CCAEA exemplifies, the distinct degrees of Islamization and Arabization experienced by the separate churches played defining roles in the lexical, intellectual, and rhetorical composition of Arabic canon collections. Ultimately, this article has attempted to interpret the al-Qānūn al-Muqaddas in light of the rich historiography on closely related legal material available in abundance for scholars of the Eastern Christian communities, so as to bring the former into much-needed conversation with the latter.