Events

For many centuries, a large proportion of the world’s Christians lived in lands ruled by Muslims. What was life like for them? What laws, exactly, did they have to follow, and how strictly were those laws enforced? And how did their situation change in the modern period? This talk will address these questions, focusing on the speaker’s recent research on the so-called “Pact of Umar,” an infamous document that is often said to have governed non-Muslim life under Muslim rule in the pre-modern age.

Join us to hear from Dr. Yarbrough on Friday, October 30, at 7:00pm EST by registering here.

Luke Yarbrough, Ph.D. is Associate Professor of Islamic Studies in the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures at UCLA. He is 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 (paperback) (Cambridge, 2020), editor and translator of The Sword of Ambition (paperback) (New York, 2019), and co-editor of Conversion to Islam in the Premodern Age (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 2020) and Minorities in Contact in the Medieval Mediterranean (Turnhout, 2020). In the 2020–21 academic year, he is a research fellow at the Israel Institute for Advanced Studies in Jerusalem.