The Formation of Islam Religion and Society in the Near East, 600–1800

From the perspective of the non-Muslim communities of the Near East, the three centuries which followed the cAbbasid revolution were decisive in two respects. In the first place, it was in this period that the non-Muslims were reduced to minority status in most areas. In the second, with the fuller articulation of Islamic law, the conventions and procedures which would govern relations between the non-Muslim communities and the Islamic state, and which would institutionalize the political and social inferiority of the former, took on a normative shape. Viewed from such a perspective, it is difficult to characterize the period as anything other than one of overall decline. That perspective and that characterization, however, can obscure a more complex reality. In the first place, non-Muslims experienced life under Muslim regimes in different ways: the Jewish experience, for example, was not exactly the same as the Zoroastrian, despite certain common patterns. Moreover, the dhimmi communities were hardly moribund, and in many instances responded vigorously to the challenges posed to them by the new dominant Muslim culture.

The Islamic societies of the Near East in this period were deeply multicultural, and so there were plenty of opportunities for significant contact and exchange across the sectarian divide. The Islamic world-view, in which Islam was simply one (albeit the final and most perfect) of many distinct faith traditions, perhaps inherently raised the question of what a conversation with those other traditions would produce.