In the early ninth century, the East Syrian patriarch Timothy I promulgated a communal law prohibiting marriages between cousins. A deacon of ?ira questioned this prohibition (which likely conflicted with social practice in many East Syrian communities) in a letter to Timothy’s successor Isho‘barnun, who was quick to rescind the stricture. Isho‘barnun’s concerns were not the exigencies of local custom, however; from his point of view, Timothy’s new law was irreconcilable with scripture and East Syrian exegetical tradition. Timothy had arrived at his ban on cousin marriage by a method of legal reasoning, basing it analogically on other kinship prohibitions. Isho‘barnun, however, knew an East Syrian exegetical tradition that rendered Abraham and Sarah cousins, rather than uncle and niece as in Jewish exegesis, and thereby absolved the biblical patriarchs of what he saw as an unlawful uncle-niece marriage. For Isho‘barnun, Timothy’s attempt to make East Syrian family law more systematically consistent by banning cousin marriage did no more than implicate the biblical patriarchs in a second incestuous marriage after exegetes had gone to lengths to explain them out of a first. This dispute over cousin marriage in medieval East Syrian legal texts represents a jockeying effort to establish the authoritative sources from which East Syrian law should be drawn, and parallels contemporary developments in Islamic law. Where Timothy based his prohibition of cousin marriage on personal ecclesiastical authority and a method of analogical reasoning, Isho‘barnun maintained that any new laws on Christian marital practice had to be in line with God’s allowances in scripture and exegetical authorities’ understandings thereof. Isho‘barnun and Timothy’s dispute thus brought to the fore different conceptions of the degrees to which received tradition and specialists’ reasoning should shape communal regulations and inform the practices of the faithful. When considered alongside contemporary disputes between ahl al-ra’y and ahl al-?adith among the early Muslim jurisprudents, the East Syrians’ conflict is indicative of a broader shift on the part of communal elites in ‘Abbasid Iraq toward conceptions of religious communities as law-bounded.

Scholars of Islamic legal history have long been attentive to the treatment of non-Muslims in shar?‘a courts. Most standard introductions to Islamic law explain that dhimm?s (protected non-Muslims) are not entirely equal to Muslims before the law. Specifically, the testimony of dhimm?s is unacceptable, except concerning other dhimm?s. For the most part, scholars have taken this restriction at face value. More recently, however, legal historians using Ottoman court records have pointed out that in practice, Jews and Christians in the Ottoman Empire at times did bear witness against their Muslim neighbors in shar?‘a courts. Yet these findings have mostly been understood as an exception to the rule that dhimm?s’ testimony is unacceptable under Islamic law. This paper draws on thousands of legal documents produced by shar?‘a courts in Morocco between 1850 and 1912 in order to determine how dhimm?s were actually treated when they appeared before a q???. I focus on legal cases involving Jews, since Jews were the only indigenous non-Muslim community in nineteenth-century Morocco. In particular, I look at how the restriction on dhimm?s’ testimony played out in reality. I argue that it is important to distinguish between testimony and oaths, for while the testimony of dhimm?s was restricted, their ability to take oaths was not—a distinction some scholars fail to make. The importance of oaths in legal procedure as it was practiced in Morocco meant that in this area, at least, Jews were equal to Muslims before the law. I also show that the way testimony worked in Moroccan shar?‘a courts minimized the restrictions on dhimm?s as witnesses. Because Moroccan courts relied on notarized documents rather than on oral testimony, Jews were for the most part able to present evidence in exactly the same way as Muslims. Ultimately, the findings from Moroccan legal documents show that the limitations on dhimm? testimony had relatively little impact on the experience of Jews in shar?‘a courts. This is significant not only for our understanding of the history of Jews in Morocco, but for the place of non-Muslims in Islamic society more broadly. My conclusions indicate that the received wisdom about the disabilities imposed on dhimm?s by Islamic law can be challenged by a systematic examination of archival material. More broadly, my understanding of Jews’ experience in Moroccan shar?‘a courts suggests important revisions to our view of relations among Muslims and non-Muslims in the Islamic world.

In Yemen, religious and tribal taboos aimed to prevent Muslims and Jews from directing violence towards one another. However, memoirs by Jews from Yemen frequently describe violent altercations between Muslims and Jews. In this presentation I will discuss cases where Jews used (or were thought to have used) violence against Muslims in the light of David Nirenberg’s discussion of inter-communal violence in Spain. I will focus on a particularly complicated case from the late 1930s where a Jew beat a qadi in Rada‘. First, I intend to demonstrate the role that cultural stereotypes of Jews played in the facts of the cases in question. The idea that Jewish men were weak by nature made Muslims who were harmed by them reluctant to press charges. (It also suggested that they were more prone to murder helpless people than were Muslims.) Second, I will show that in cases where an individual Jews’ interest in attacking a given Muslim coincided with the interests of an influential Muslim, Jews could succeed in increasing their own status by means of such attacks. (Thus, violence, I argue, did not serve to reduce tension between groups.) I will discuss the role which judicial procedures like the collection of evidence and incarceration played in these cases, where Muslims and Jews were each treated differently. Lastly, I will explore the manner in which cases of inter-communal violence provided the state opportunities to pursue its policy vis-à-vis the tribes within the shari‘ah courts.