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RELIGIOUS COMMUNITIES IN LATE SASANIAN AND EARLY MUSLIM IRAQ1) BY MICHAEL G. MORONY (Houston, Texas, U.S.A.) The emergence of a segmented society composed of separate religious communities is usually associated with Islam and marks a major change in forms of social organization which was part of the general trans- formation taking place in the Middle East from the fourth to the ninth centuries. This change produced a society composed of religious communities which amounted to social corporations with their own legal institutions which gave sanction to matters of personal status such as marriage, divorce, and inheritance. The existence of such communi- ties was fundamental to the formation of Islamic society and serves as the single most important distinction between it and Hellenistic society. The appearance of such communities was a matter of both organization and identity, and from a personal point of view this meant the replace- ment of other means of identification based on language, occupation, or geographical location by a primary identity based on membership in a religious community. It should be said at the outset, however, that such transfers of identity were never as total or precise as they would seem in theory and that
Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient – Brill
Published: Jan 1, 1974
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