(Source: University of Pennsylvania Press)
University of Pennsylvania Press has just
published a book on Christian family law in Syriac Christian communities during
the period of early Islam.
ABOUT
In the conventional historical narrative,
the medieval Middle East was composed of autonomous religious traditions, each
with distinct doctrines, rituals, and institutions. Outside the world of
theology, however, and beyond the walls of the mosque or the church, the
multireligious social order of the medieval Islamic empire was complex and
dynamic. Peoples of different faiths—Sunnis, Shiites, Christians, Jews, and
others—interacted with each other in city streets, marketplaces, and even
shared households, all under the rule of the Islamic caliphate. Laypeople of
different confessions marked their religious belonging through fluctuating,
sometimes overlapping, social norms and practices.
In Between Christ and Caliph, Lev E. Weitz
examines the multiconfessional society of early Islam through the lens of
shifting marital practices of Syriac Christian communities. In response to the
growth of Islamic law and governance in the seventh through tenth centuries,
Syriac Christian bishops created new laws to regulate marriage, inheritance,
and family life. The bishops banned polygamy, required that Christian marriages
be blessed by priests, and restricted marriage between cousins, seeking
ultimately to distinguish Christian social patterns from those of Muslims and
Jews. Through meticulous research into rarely consulted Syriac and Arabic
sources, Weitz traces the ways in which Syriac Christians strove to identify
themselves as a community apart while still maintaining a place in the Islamic
social order. By binding household life to religious identity, Syriac
Christians developed the social distinctions between religious communities that
came to define the medieval Islamic Middle East. Ultimately, Between Christ and
Caliph argues that interreligious negotiations such as these lie at the heart
of the history of the medieval Islamic empire.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Lev E. Weitz teaches history and directs
the Islamic World Studies program at the Catholic University of America.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Introduction
Part I – Empire, Household and Christian
Community from Late Antiquity to the Abbasid Caliphate
Part II – Christian Family Law in the
Making of Caliphal Society and Intellectual Culture
Part III – Islamic Law and Christian
Jurists after Imperial Fragmentation
Conclusion. Christians and Christian Law in
the Making of the Medieval Islamic Empire
The full TOC can be found
here
More on the publisher’s website
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