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Uriel I. SIMONSOHN, A Common Justice: The Legal Allegiances of Christians and Jews Under Early Islam . Divinations: Rereading Late Ancient Religion. x + 310 pp. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011. ISBN: 978-0-8122-4349-9 (hbk.). $79.95 / £52.00.

Uriel I. SIMONSOHN, A Common Justice: The Legal Allegiances of Christians and Jews Under Early... Uriel Simonsohn’s monograph is a study on the social history of early Muslim society. The work analyzes the interaction between the Jewish and Christian communities and their relations to Muslim legal institutions in the region of today’s territory of Iraq. Simonsohn challenges the traditional image of this society as consisting of autonomous and rigidly segregated religious communities. Rather, he argues for communal fluidity, overlapping identities, and overarching cultures as everyday factors of the early Muslim world. Apart from chronicles, letters, and legal material of various kinds, he analyzes in particular the edited and translated legal sources from the Church of the East and the Syriac Orthodox Church as well as responses by the Rabbinic authorities of Babylonia, the Geonim. The study is presented in two main parts. In the first part, Simonsohn demonstrates that the legal plurality of the Muslim period was in many ways rooted in the Late Antique world. By that time already the religious elites—both bishops and rabbis—strove to discourage their members from taking recourse with the non-religious institutions. They also already started to enforce community boundaries as well as the legitimacy of their own political position through legal competency, a thread Simonsohn is to http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient Brill

Uriel I. SIMONSOHN, A Common Justice: The Legal Allegiances of Christians and Jews Under Early Islam . Divinations: Rereading Late Ancient Religion. x + 310 pp. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011. ISBN: 978-0-8122-4349-9 (hbk.). $79.95 / £52.00.

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Publisher
Brill
Copyright
© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands
Subject
Book Reviews
ISSN
0022-4995
eISSN
1568-5209
DOI
10.1163/15685209-12341331
Publisher site
See Article on Publisher Site

Abstract

Uriel Simonsohn’s monograph is a study on the social history of early Muslim society. The work analyzes the interaction between the Jewish and Christian communities and their relations to Muslim legal institutions in the region of today’s territory of Iraq. Simonsohn challenges the traditional image of this society as consisting of autonomous and rigidly segregated religious communities. Rather, he argues for communal fluidity, overlapping identities, and overarching cultures as everyday factors of the early Muslim world. Apart from chronicles, letters, and legal material of various kinds, he analyzes in particular the edited and translated legal sources from the Church of the East and the Syriac Orthodox Church as well as responses by the Rabbinic authorities of Babylonia, the Geonim. The study is presented in two main parts. In the first part, Simonsohn demonstrates that the legal plurality of the Muslim period was in many ways rooted in the Late Antique world. By that time already the religious elites—both bishops and rabbis—strove to discourage their members from taking recourse with the non-religious institutions. They also already started to enforce community boundaries as well as the legitimacy of their own political position through legal competency, a thread Simonsohn is to

Journal

Journal of the Economic and Social History of the OrientBrill

Published: Jan 1, 2013

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