Hebrew University of Jerusalem

Post-Doc, Martin Buber Society of Fellows

About

My current project concerns one of the principal and longstanding historical preoccupations of modern scholarship, namely, the nature of the process that led to the overwhelming dominance of the Islamic religion in the Near East. Seeking to unfold the story of conversion to Islam in the first few centuries following the Islamic conquest in Mesopotamia and the Fertile Crescent, my study is based primarily on the analysis of Christian canon law, geonic responsa, and Islamic jurisprudence. These sources attest to the shared interest held by jurists of discrete confessional backgrounds in a variety of problems related to the realms of civil, criminal, and religious law. I present the process of Christian and Jewish conversion to Islam as gradual as well as a non-linear – a process in which individuals often changed their mind, converting and then returning their former confessions, households and communities remained intact in the face of conversions, and an exchange of religious practices and ideas took place across religious traditions. In other words, I argue, in many if not most instances, one's departure from one's original confession did not entail a de facto departure, with apostates maintaining an active role among their former co-religionists, at least for a while after the act of conversion. Thus, families remained intact and apostates continued to participate regularly in the lives of their supposedly former communities – so much so that their presence was sometimes even deemed crucial.