On October 30, the Jenkins Center hosted Professor Luke Yarbrough for our final virtual lecture event of the fall semester. He is Associate Professor of Islamic Studies in the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures at UCLA. Yarbrough is a historian interested primarily in inter-religious relations, law, state administration, and the transmission of historical information in the pre-modern Islamic Near East. He is author of Friends of the Emir (Cambridge University Press, 2020), editor and translator of The Sword of Ambition (New York University Press, 2019), and co-editor of Conversion to Islam in the Premodern Age (University of California Press, 2020) and Minorities in Contact in the Medieval Mediterranean (Brepols, 2020). In the 2020–21 academic year, he is a research fellow at the Israel Institute for Advanced Studies in Jerusalem.
Yarbrough gave a scholarly presentation of the relationships between differing religious communities in the historical Middle East. He particularly discussed the Pact of Umar, a document which is crucial to the modern understanding of early relations between Christians and Muslims. His lecture was informative and the short time we had to hear from him left us wanting to learn more about early Islamic history.
The recording is available for access below.