Dr Philip Wood, an Associate Professor at the Institute for the Study of Muslim Civilisations, has been awarded a British Academy Mid-Career Fellowship for his project on 'The Islamicate Church and the World of Dionysius of Tel-Mahre, 750-850’.
The project investigates how the experience of Arab Muslim government changed the structures and thought of the Christian elite in the caliphate. In particular, Dr Wood examines how the Abbasid intensification of the tax and judicial systems was mirrored in the levying of extensive church tithes and the development of ‘Christian’ law-making, and how these processes gradually disempowered lay elites in favour of the higher clergy, who came to speak on behalf of Christian communities before the caliph.
Furthermore, the book examines how the higher clergy altered their historical and political thought: by presenting the Arab conquests as a liberation from Byzantine oppression or equating their own authority to that of the caliph as an ‘imamate’, contrasting it to the unjust practice of ‘kingship’. Here he suggests that the need for proximity to Muslim elites prompted a disavowal of the sympathy that Christians in the eastern Mediterranean had once felt for their Roman heritage.
Dr Philip Wood, an Associate Professor at the Institute for the Study of Muslim Civilisations, has been awarded a British Academy Mid-Career Fellowship for his project on 'The Islamicate Church and the World of Dionysius of Tel-Mahre, 750-850’.
The project investigates how the experience of Arab Muslim government changed the structures and thought of the Christian elite in the caliphate. In particular, Dr Wood examines how the Abbasid intensification of the tax and judicial systems was mirrored in the levying of extensive church tithes and the development of ‘Christian’ law-making, and how these processes gradually disempowered lay elites in favour of the higher clergy, who came to speak on behalf of Christian communities before the caliph.
Furthermore, the book examines how the higher clergy altered their historical and political thought: by presenting the Arab conquests as a liberation from Byzantine oppression or equating their own authority to that of the caliph as an ‘imamate’, contrasting it to the unjust practice of ‘kingship’. Here he suggests that the need for proximity to Muslim elites prompted a disavowal of the sympathy that Christians in the eastern Mediterranean had once felt for their Roman heritage.