Occupation
Graduate Student (Doctoral)
Contact
ABOUT
Tobias is a fourth-year Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations at the University of Chicago and a visiting graduate student at Princeton during the 2021–2022 academic year. His dissertation—a social history of justice and the formation of Islamic law in Egypt—is entitled “Dispensing justice in late antique and early Islamic Egypt (600–750): judges, ordinary people, and the birth of Islamic law in a multi-confessional society.” Tobias is interested in understanding how non-Muslim ideas of justice endured into the Umayyad period and how ordinary Muslims, Christians, and Jews, as well as legal professionals, navigated the pluralistic legal infrastructure of post-conquest Egypt. His dissertation examines how late antique legal ideas and practices were integrated into the growing body of Islamic laws and how the availability of a multi-tiered system of dispute resolution in late antique Egypt informed the individual calculations that people had to make vis-à-vis changing personal circumstances, local conditions, and political structures. Based on a joint reading of narrative sources and documentary papyri, Tobias’s dissertation posits that in the post-conquest period, Egypt’s expansion and consolidation of an Islamic legal infrastructure were contingent on Muslim professionals and administrators’ yielding to the legal expectations of its rural population whose ideas of justice had been largely shaped by Roman and Christian legal practices.
Discipline
History
Sub Areas
Islamic Law
Gender/Women's Studies
Historiography
Iranian Studies
7th-13th Centuries
Geographic Areas of Interest
All Middle East
Iran
Arab States
Islamic World
Africa (Sub-Saharan)
Specialties
Islamic Marriage
Gender In Islamic Law
Legal Systems Of Late Antiquity
Languages
French (fluent)
German (native)
Turkish (advanced)
Arabic (advanced)
Syriac (intermediate)
English (fluent)
Persian (intermediate)
Education
MA
| 2020
| Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations
| University of Chicago
LLM
| 2019
| University of Chicago Law School
| University of Chicago
MA
| 2017
| Center for Arab and Middle Eastern Studies
| American University of Beirut
BA
| 2014
| Oriental Studies
| University of Freiburg
Abstracts
Legal histories of blood: Menstruation, sex, and ritual in Islamic law
Towards a theory of Islamic marriage: dowers, marital bargaining, and value-creation in classical Islamic law
To Sue, or Not to Sue – Muslims and Christians Going to Court in Late Antique Egypt: The Documentary Evidence
