Introduction

      The fragmentary remains of Christian and Jewish legal documents composed in the Eastern Mediterranean in the first five hundred years of Islamic rule reveal that Christian and Jewish religious elites were preoccupied with the fact that their coreligionists were taking legal cases outside the community for litigation in what appear to have been primarily Islamic courts. This book examines the legislative response of Christian and Jewish religious elites to the problem posed by the appeal of their coreligionists to extra-confessional judicial institutions. Focusing on the late seventh through the early eleventh century in the region between Mesopotamia in the east and North Africa in the west, the study explores the multiplicity of judicial institutions that coexisted under early Islamic rule as part of the complex array of social obligations that bound individuals across confessional boundaries. Contrary to the notion of a non-Muslim autonomous existence in a rigid social setting, strictly demarcated along confessional lines, a comparative study of Christian and Jewish legal behavior under Islamic rule exposes a considerable degree of fluidity across communal boundaries. Such transcendence of religious affiliation threatened to undermine the position of traditional religious elites. In response, these elites acted vigorously to reinforce communal boundaries, censuring recourse to external judicial authorities and threatening transgressors with excommunication.

      Maintaining judicial power as a means of sustaining social power and religious boundaries was of great importance for Christian and Jewish elites even prior to Islamic rule. The sages of the Mishnah (the