Books by Lev Weitz
In the conventional historical narrative, the medieval Middle East was composed of autonomous rel... more 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 priests to bless Christian marriages, 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.
Articles by Lev Weitz
Chronique d’Égypte, 2023
The villages of the southernmost reaches of the Fayyum Oasis are well known to Arabic papyrologis... more The villages of the southernmost reaches of the Fayyum Oasis are well known to Arabic papyrologists, and the sizeable number of documents they have produced enable ongoing study of the social and economic history of the region in the Tulunid, Ikhshidid, and Fatimid periods (third-sixth/ninth-twelfth centuries). Certain of the southern Fayyum's settlements and social groups remain much better documented than others, which makes the document presented here especially noteworthy. Housed in the Michaelides collection of Arabic documents at Cambridge University Library, ( 1 ) this 5th/11th-century parchment contract is the first known deed of sale related directly to the village of Ṭalīt, an important locale still only scantily attested in the documentary record. We find two further unique features in the identity of the parties involved in the document and its late date. Four of the individuals named in the document bear the entirely unexpected nisba al-Šāfi῾ī-an Arabic onomastic element that usually denotes belonging to the Šāfi῾ī school of Islamic law, and is otherwise unattested in documents from the rural Fayyum before the spread of the madrasa under the Ayyubids and Mamluks. These surprising Šāfi῾īs appear in a contract, moreover, that was drafted during a great fifth/eleventh-century political, social, and environmental crisis, after which we have exceedingly little documentation from the previously vibrant villages of the Fayyum's southern tier. The following presents an edition and translation of this unique contract and a study of its most notable features. I review first the available information on ancient and medieval Ṭalīt and consider whether the present document might have been discovered there or elsewhere. I then take up what the document can tell us of the village's social history. The original description of the object of sale is lost to a lacuna, but comparative study allows us to affirm that the contract concerned a conveyance of guardianship rights-that is, of the right to collect payment from residents or owners of some portion of Ṭalīt's territory in return for guaranteeing security. The institution of guardianship is well known from contemporary Fayyum documents, but in this case the identities of the individuals involved, all of whom are identified either as Šāfi῾īs or as members of the Arab tribe of Banū ῾Āmir, are noteworthy. The ῾Āmirīs are familiar from other documents; the Šāfi῾īs are not. ( * ) I would like to thank Naïm Vanthieghem for introducing me to the present document and for his comments on the article; the two reviewers for their extremely useful guidance and comments; and the administrators and staff of Dumbarton Oaks Research Library, where I was a Fellow in Byzantine Studies during the 2022-23 academic year and first drafted this article. (1) See S. CLACKSON, "The Michaelides Manuscript Collection," Zeitschrift für Papyrologie und Epigraphik 100 (1994), pp. 223-226.
Al-ʿUsur al-Wusta, 2022
This article presents an edition, translation, and study of a short Arabic petition to a qāḍī and... more This article presents an edition, translation, and study of a short Arabic petition to a qāḍī and the rescript issued in response. The two texts, originating from Egypt’s Fayyūm oasis and dateable to the fourth/tenth or fifth/ eleventh century, are preserved incompletely on both sides of a single leaf of paper now in the holdings of the Near East Section of the Library of Congress, Washington, DC. This document’s genre plus its place of origin make it noteworthy. Although scholars have devoted a good deal of attention to medieval Arabic petitions, especially those addressed to high-ranking figures of the Fatimid, Ayyubid, and Mamluk states, the low-register provincial sort that the document at hand exemplifies remains understudied. By comparing this petition to other such documents, I flesh out the features of this common documentary tool used to seek aid and patronage in medieval Arabic-speaking societies. Furthermore, the people and places this document concerns are attested in other documents, which allows us to draw connections between this petition and the wider social world of the medieval Fayyūm and to sketch a basic outline of the workings of a provincial qāḍī court. Through the petition, I sketch two kinds of interconnected stories: the human stories of a father trying to care for his daughter and of a provincial family of legal functionaries in the Egyptian countryside, and the historical story of the role played by legal documents and institutions in structuring medieval social life.
A Companion of Muhammad in the Oldest Bilingual Egyptian Entagion
Bulletin of the American Society of Papyrologists, 2021
MESSAGE ME FOR COPY. Edition of a bilingual Arabic-Greek entagion in the collection of the Librar... more MESSAGE ME FOR COPY. Edition of a bilingual Arabic-Greek entagion in the collection of the Library of Congress in Washington, DC, issued, in either 50/670 or 60/680, by Maslama b. Muḫallad, one of Muḥammad’s Companions and governor of Egypt from 47/667 to 62/682. The entagion is addressed to the people of Tebtynis and is one of few pieces of evidence for this important village in the earliest Islamic period. It is also the oldest known dated bilin- gual entagion from Egypt, antedating by a decade or more the Marwānid period, when Arabic literary sources suggest that the caliphal government formally adopted Arabic as its administrative language. It thus attests to the joint operation of Greek and Arabic scribal traditions at the highest offices of the Egyptian administration at an earlier date than has sometimes been supposed and urges us to reconsider the standard chronology of administra- tive Arabization in the caliphate.
Monks, Monasteries, and Muslim Scribes: Three Parchment House Sales from the 4th/10th-Century Fayyūm
Arabica, 2020
MESSAGE ME FOR PDF. This article presents editions of three Arabic parchment deeds of sale from t... more MESSAGE ME FOR PDF. This article presents editions of three Arabic parchment deeds of sale from the 4th/10th-century Fayyūm Oasis belonging to two monks, Babā Banīla and Babā Buṭrus, of the Dayr al-Qalamūn monastery. The transactions recorded in our documents are mundane in and of themselves. But put together they offer bits of insight into Christian society in rural medieval Egypt, the notarial practice of provincial Muslim scribes, the relationship between monastic and Islamic legal institutions, and the important but little-attested Dayr al-Qalamūn.
Islamic Law and Society, 2020
This article examines the interaction of Coptic Christians with Islamic legal institutions in pro... more This article examines the interaction of Coptic Christians with Islamic legal institutions in provincial Egypt on the basis of a corpus of 193 Arabic legal documents, as well as relevant Coptic ones, dating to the 2nd-5th/8th-11th centuries. I argue that around the 3rd/9th century Islamic Egypt’s Christian subjects began to make routine use of Islamic legal institutions to organize their economic affairs, including especially inheritance and related matters internal to Christian families. They did so in preference to the Christian authorities and Coptic deeds that had been their standard resource in the first two centuries of Muslim rule. The changing character of the Egyptian judiciary encouraged this shift in practice, as qāḍīs who adhered to fiqh procedural rules increasingly filled judicial roles formerly held by administrative officials. By eschewing and nudging into disuse a previously vital Coptic legal tradition, Christian provincials participated in the Islamization of ʿAbbāsid and Fāṭimid Egypt.
International Journal of Middle East Studies, 2017
The study of non-Muslims in Islamic societies has long been a robust subfield in the historiograp... more The study of non-Muslims in Islamic societies has long been a robust subfield in the historiography of the medieval Middle East. But its literature has blind spots, a significant example of which concerns slavery as a constitutive institution of non-Muslim communities. Much recent scholarship on medieval non-Muslims has tended to privilege religious affiliation as an explanatory category of social experience, leaving other legal statuses and modes of identification-especially slavery-underanalyzed. This piece will survey this historiographical hole. It will then offer a brief analysis of some Abbasid-era Syriac Christian material in which slavery figures prominently, concubines and concubinage in particular. My goal is to provide an example of how attending to the place of slavery in non-Muslim communities facilitates a much-needed historiographical shift of focus from reified religious identities to the social practices, institutions, and hierarchies upon which those communities were built.
Le Muséon, 2016
The Syriac law books of the East Syrian patriarchs Timothy I (r. 780-823) and Išōʿ bar Nūn (r. 82... more The Syriac law books of the East Syrian patriarchs Timothy I (r. 780-823) and Išōʿ bar Nūn (r. 823-828), published by Eduard Sachau in 1908, are rich but underutilized sources for the intellectual and social history of the late antique and early Islamic Near East. This article offers a survey of these texts with a view to introducing them as promising source material to scholars outside the subfield of Eastern Christian legal studies. The article’s goal is to examine text-critical and structural matters, as well as the question of the law books’ sources, in order to arrive at an understanding of the texts’ nature as historical documents – in other words, an understanding of how and to what purpose they were composed. From this perspective, the article argues that both works are essentially redacted collections of individual rulings; in the unified form of law books, they were intended to represent an authoritative communal law for East Syrian Christians. In issuing these rulings the patriarchs drew from a range of earlier Syriac legal texts to address matters of ecclesiastical law, but to create a confessional civil law they adopted and adapted a variety of common Near Eastern legal institutions and practices.
Journal of the American Oriental Society, 2014
Book Chapters by Lev Weitz
Canon Law and Qadi Court Documents in Medieval Egypt
Canon Law and Christian Societies between Christianity and Islam, 2024
Christianity, Islam, and the Syriac Renaissance: The Impact of Abdisho bar Brikha, 2024
This article examines 'Abdíshô''s treatment of marriage law in his two legal works, with particul... more This article examines 'Abdíshô''s treatment of marriage law in his two legal works, with particular attention to the sources he relied on and the ultimate goal of evaluating 'Abdíshô''s engagement with his multi-religious environment. An overview of 'Abdíshô''s writings on marriage law establishes that his own East Syrian legal tradition provided the bulk of his source materials -in contrast to Bar 'Ebroyo, with whom 'Abdíshô' is often compared and who made liberal use of the Islamic legal works of Abû Üâmid al-Øazâlí in his writings on Christian marriage. In a few instances, however, 'Abdíshô' did reach beyond his own tradition to incorporate materials from other churches, including the Copto-Arabic legal writings of Ibn al-'Assâl and the Syriac ones of Bar 'Ebroyo; while scholars have noted 'Abdíshô''s reliance on the former, his dependence on the latter has yet to be investigated. The influence of Islamic law, by contrast, appears only faintly in 'Abdíshô''s writings on marriage law; but at one significant point he exhibits an awareness of Islamic doctrine, which he explicitly rejects. In this respect, a subtle tension in 'Abdísho''s writings on marriage law bears witness to the multi-religious environment of his time: That environment provided materials that 'Abdíshô' both appropriated and actively rejected, materials he could use both as productive elements to add to his East Syrian tradition and as foils against which to define that tradition.
Le droit en syriaque, 2023
iv e siècle dans les premiers synodes syro-orientaux (410-424
Giwargis I, Synodal Canons
The Bloomsbury Reader in Christian-Muslim Relations, 600-1500, 2022
Translation of 7th-century East Syrian canons on Christian-Muslim interactions.
The Late Antique World of Early Islam: Muslims among Christians and Jews in the East Mediterranean, 2015
This chapter examines discourses on polygyny among East Syrian Christians in late antique and ear... more This chapter examines discourses on polygyny among East Syrian Christians in late antique and early Islamic Iraq and Iran. Through such discourses, articulated principally in legal texts but also in chronicles and biographical dictionaries, ecclesiastical elites sought to assert religious distinctiveness in the regulation of particular marital practices while lay parties variously accepted and contested the ecclesiastical vision. The chapter outlines the various forms of polygynous household organization that were customary in certain sections of Near Eastern societies, especially elite ones, and contends that many lay Christians engaged in them just as their non-Christian neighbors did. From an early date, however, East Syrian bishops set a standard defining polygyny as outside the bounds of the practices that denoted membership in their vision of Christian community. Furthermore, the ecclesiastical hierarchy’s increased efforts to formalize a comprehensive communal legal tradition after the Muslim conquests resulted in new strategies to combat lay polygyny; chiefly, the bishops sought to regulate the inheritance practices of Christians so as to exclude the progeny of polygynous unions. In articulating this new Christian inheritance law, East Syrian ecclesiastics promoted a notion of the Christian household radically different from household patterns at elite levels of Islamic society, where polygyny and concubinage were standard techniques for the perpetuation of lineages.
Reviews by Lev Weitz
American Historical Review, 2022
Speculum, 2020
Battle of Brunanburh," "Judith," and "The Battle of Maldon" dispute evaluative narratives of Old ... more Battle of Brunanburh," "Judith," and "The Battle of Maldon" dispute evaluative narratives of Old English metrical decline and, instead, give evidence of a "reorganization of the metrical system to create new kinds of metrical coherence" (130). Because each system aspires to homeostasis, metrical constituents work to preserve a "constant" or structural feature common to all verse types (69), and what appears to modern readers as discontinuity represents a matrix of structures continuous with, and derived from, earlier equilibria. It would be difficult to overstate the significance of this study. Its scope, meticulousness, and synthesis of philological, statistical, and literary-historical arguments immediately command attention and offer a fresh solution to the long-standing problem of how to think about transitional literatures that fit comfortably into no particular category because they exceed the taxonomies of analytic convenience.
American Historical Review, 2019
Catholic Historical Review, 2016
Review of Quranic Research, 2015
In The Qurʾān's Legal Culture, Holger Michael Zellentin takes up an old but live question in qura... more In The Qurʾān's Legal Culture, Holger Michael Zellentin takes up an old but live question in quranic studies: what role did the religious traditions of late antiquity play in shaping the quranic text and dispensation? While the question is familiar, Zellentin's approach and answers are new. Many scholars will be acquainted with analyses that consider the Qurʾan in light of rabbinic law or Christian theology. Zellentin's innovative, well-argued, and very readable work, however, suggests that these established scholarly foci overlook one of the principal traditions to which the Qurʾan responds and against which it shapes itself: a specific strand of Christian law current in the late antique Syriac churches. In Zellentin's view, this is not the high ecclesiastical law of bishops' synods and canonical legislation. Rather, the Qurʾan is conversant with a tradition of ritual and purity observances that were based on the prescriptions of the Torah, modified for Gentile Christians, and practiced by believers within the Christian communities of the late antique Near East. This "Judaeo-Christian lawcode" is best exemplified in the discourses on pious practice found in the Syriac version of the Didascalia Apostolorum, a church order attributed to the apostles that took shape between the third and seventh centuries CE. Through a comparative analysis of the Didascalia and the Qurʾan, Zellentin concludes that the legal tradition evident in the former was a key element of the "legal culture" of the Qurʾan's seventh-century milieu. Most significantly, the Qurʾan's own conception of a prophetically delivered, divine law for Gentiles emerged both in conversation with and against that precedent. Zellentin lays out his arguments in a foreword, an introduction, four core chapters, a conclusion, and an epilogue. The foreword and introduction set out the author's methodology and central claims. Needless to say, Zellentin's approach to the Qurʾan is a late antique historicizing one: he is interested in understanding the text as it took shape in its milieu, not as later Muslim interpreters received it. Key to that milieu was late antique "legal culture." In Zellentin's definition, legal culture is a discursive field or a widely held conception of the nature and function of law. That conception is constituted of both common legal norms and the accepted narratives that justify them. One of the main
Uploads
Books by Lev Weitz
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 priests to bless Christian marriages, 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.
Articles by Lev Weitz
Book Chapters by Lev Weitz
Reviews by Lev Weitz