Creating Christian Marriage in Early Islamic Arabia

Do Christians have to marry in churches? Historically, many Christian theologians have said "yes." But they haven't always. It wasn't until the tenth century, for example, that the Byzantine emperor made a church ceremony a required element of marriage for Orthodox Christians. Nor was Constantinople at the forefront of the matter. A much earlier example, perhaps the earliest, of a churchman saying definitively that marriage isn't marriage without a specific Christian ritual comes from an unexpected corner of the late antique world: the Persian Gulf island of Dayrin (modern Tarut in Saudi Arabia) under the rule of the early Muslim caliphate. On this island in 676, Patriarch George I—chief bishop of the Church of the East, one of the two main churches of the Syriac Christian tradition—issued a canon that only unions that received a priestly blessing would be recognized as legitimate, lawful marriage. George, a monk-turned-bishop from provincial Iraq, preceded the decision in New Rome by three hundred years.