Christians and Others in the Umayyad State

The papers in this first volume of the new Oriental Institute series LAMINE are derived from a conference entitled “Christians, Jews, and Zoroastrians in the Umayyad State,” held at the University of Chicago on June 17–18, 2011. The goal of the conference was to address a simple question: Just what role did non-Muslims play in the operations of the Umayyad state? It has always been clear that the Umayyad family (r. 41–132/661–750) governed populations in the rapidly expanding empire that were overwhelmingly composed of non-Muslims — mainly Christians, Jews, and Zoroastrians — and the status of those non-Muslim communities under Umayyad rule, and more broadly in early Islam, has been discussed continuously for more than a century. Eight papers address various aspects of the interactions among Muslims and non-Muslims in the Umayyad state.

This new Oriental Institute series — Late Antique and Medieval Islamic Near East (LAMINE) — aims to publish a variety of scholarly works, including monographs, edited volumes, critical text editions, translations, studies of corpora of documents — in short, any work that offers a significant contribution to understanding the Near East between roughly 200 and 1000 CE.