Christians and Others in the Umayyad State

Book excerpt: The papers in this first volume of the new Oriental Institute series LAMINE are derived from a conference entitled "Christians, Jews, and Zoroastrians in the Umayyad State," held at the University of Chicago on June 17-18, 2011. The goal of the conference was to address a simple question: Just what role did non-Muslims play in the operations of the Umayyad state? It has always been clear that the Umayyad family (r. 41-132/661-750) governed populations in the rapidly expanding empire that were overwhelmingly composed of non-Muslims - mainly Christians, Jews, and Zoroastrians - and the status of those non-Muslim communities under Umayyad rule, and more broadly in early Islam, has been discussed continuously for more than a century. The role of non-Muslims within the Umayyad state has been, however, largely neglected. The eight papers in this volume thus focus on non-Muslims who participated actively in the workings of the Umayyad government." This new Oriental Institute series - Late Antique and Medieval Islamic Near East (LAMINE) - aims to publish a variety of scholarly works, including monographs, edited volumes, critical text editions, translations, studies of corpora of documents - in short, any work that offers a significant contribution to understanding the Near East between roughly 200 and 1000 CE. "