The Challenge of Islam and the Transformation of Eastern Christian Normative Regimes, ca. 630-1100

Introduction

In the crucial half-millennium between the death of the Prophet Muhammad and the First Crusade, an absolutely essential part in the origins of Christian-Muslim relations has been overlooked, namely how the normative regimes of Eastern Christians – including those of Byzantium, the Islamicate world, and the space in between – grappled with the rise of Islam.

Historical Implications

Exploring this history has important implications for our understanding of the development of Christian-Muslim relations in the premodern period, the genesis of Eastern Christian legal regimes, and the earlier precedents which Eastern Mediterranean states after the year 1100 might have drawn on in dealing with Islam.

Research Methodology

By assembling a corpus of “Saracen law” provisions and utilizing cutting-edge, AI-supported technologies to create new editions of legal texts, NOMOS will examine how, within the realm of normative knowledge, the new religion was interpreted, circumscribed, and defined.

Influence of Islam on Legal Regimes

Moreover, it will explore how the encounter with Islam itself shaped long-term developments within Eastern Christian legal regimes. Despite differences in:

• Literary language (Greek, Syriac, Coptic, and Armenian)
• Levels of statehood (ranging from the Byzantine Empire, the smaller Armenian principalities to the stateless Coptic and Syriac communities)
• Confessional affiliation (Orthodox, Monophysite, or “Nestorian”/Church of the East)

the encounter with Islam constituted the most significant factor in the late antique development of each of these legal normative orders in this period.

Conclusion

This innovative, legal-historical approach to the history of the early medieval Middle East will not only offer a new way of looking at Late Antiquity in the first centuries of Islam, but will also provide a crucial new narrative of Christian-Muslim relations in the Eastern Mediterranean world before the First Crusade – and thereby problematize the traditional “Western”-dominated paradigm for this history.