Preface

As many do, this book started from an article. Actually, before that, it started, as many new ideas do, in the classroom, in a course on non-Muslims under Muslim rule in the first centuries of Islam. In the beginning it seemed as if when tackling the question of the status of ahl al-dhimma I would be treading a path that had been trodden by many before me. Using the fruits of former studies, I was therefore quite sure that I was covering ground that was new for students, but not otherwise.

It was while reading and re-reading the sources and bibliography that I discovered that there are still questions that are unasked and unanswered, and there are new avenues of research to follow. I discovered that though there was ample work on the subject of Shurūt ʿUmar and the status of the dhimmı̄s, it still did not provide an answer to one main question: how and why had these ‘Conditions of ʿUmar’ come about? In other words, what was their Sitz im Leben, what was their main purpose, and what were their sources of inspiration? I was especially interested in the question of intercultural exchanges that may have played a part throughout the process of their formation. That is, what were the cultural traditions that stood at the basis of this development? Were they mostly Muslim, as had usually been presumed, or did traditions and institutions of the conquered populations have a meaningful part in this as well?