Modern scholarship has produced an abundance of works on the history of Jews and Christians in Muslim realms. Quite often these works focus on the status of these communities as religious minorities. 1 With regard to this theme, scholars have been divided as to whether Islam showed tolerance or oppression towards non-Muslims. Yet the question of status, interesting as it is, may in fact be misleading. This is primarily due to its underlying assumptions and the perspectives it compels us to adopt. It assumes a relationship of rulers and subjects based upon communal distinction, i. e. a Muslim is a ruler and a non-Muslim is hence a subject. Furthermore, it assumes a centralist ruling agenda derived from one center that essentially must be enforced upon an entire region in an equal manner. These assumptions do not take into account the possibility of a society that could have been structured under different terms and that adhered to different principles of governance. It does not take into account different sets of relations between different social layers. 2 It
The past few decades have witnessed increasing calls in modern scholarship for revisions of the portrayal of early Islamic rule history. Such calls not only challenge older historiographic paradigms but also encourage historians to seek answers in sources hitherto neglected. Accordingly, in recent years there has been a dramatic proliferation of studies offering new historical conceptions, many of which are indebted to new kinds of source material, including coinage, official documents, inscriptions, and material artifacts, alongside more conventional forms of data like historiographic treatises, biographical dictionaries, apologetic literature, theological essays, and scriptural texts. Assembled together, new and older historical materials were now being processed, synthesized, and analyzed through the lenses of fresh paradigms and often in collaboration with other disciplines, especially the social sciences and comparative literature.The present contribution offers further support of this latter approach by highlighting the utility of legal sources for discussing the process of conversion to Islam in the early Islamic period. Following a brief historical survey, the discussion turns to address one of the central, yet highly elusive, episodes in early Islamic historythe process of conversion to Islam. The goal of this sample analysis of legal sources is twofoldto provide new historiographic insights, but also, from a methodological perspective, to underscore the remarkable utility of these sources for historians.
The phenomenon of individuals converting to Islam and later returning to their former religions is well attested in both narrative and documentary records fi-om the early Islamic period. Such shifts in religious commitments posed social and legal problems for the communities to which their former members sought reentry. Specifically, legal authorities were faced with the challenge of assessing the trustworthiness of returning apostates, whether their return was wholehearted and sincere or, rather, opportunistic and deceitful. The present discussion offers the historical context and a comparative analysis of some of the legal mechanisms by which the Jewish ge'onim of Babylonia and Eastern Christian church leaders attempted to overcome this challenge.
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