Faculty

Leor Halevi
Associate Professor of History

PhD, Harvard University, 2002

History of Islam; medieval social, cultural and intellectual history; Islamic law; ritual practices; global commerce between Muslims and non-Muslims.

Telephone: will be assigned August 2008
Email: will be available August 2008
Office Hours: On leave 2008-2009
Office: to be assigned

Curriculum Vitae: Leor Halevi

 

Leor Halevi is a historian of Islam interested in the relationship between religious laws and social practices. He is the author of Muhammad’s Grave: Death Rites and the Making of Islamic Society (Columbia University Press: New York, 2007), for which he won the Albert Hourani Award given by the Middle East Studies Association. The book examines the role that funerary rituals and beliefs about the afterlife played in shaping the earliest Islamic societies. Thus it makes contributions to the history of death, of everyday rituals, and of Islamic law and society. The book’s central argument is that the pietists who produced the codes of funerary law sought not merely to define the right way to handle the bodies of dead Muslims, but more ambitiously to transform everyday urban manners and modes of social interaction. During the formative period of Islamic history, in the late seventh, eighth, and early ninth centuries, they struggled to form a new social pattern in the cities of Arabia, Mesopotamia, and the eastern Mediterranean world. While promoting idealized memories of the age of Muhammad, they were invested in distinguishing Islamic from Christian, Jewish, and Zoroastrian funerals. Furthermore, they were eager to change, both in private and in public, the very character of gender relationships. In fact they directed their most innovative laws to those dangerous zones where the male and female spheres of action risked overlapping.

Currently Leor Halevi is at work on a new book project, tentatively entitled Commerce with Infidels: Forbidden Goods and Cross-Cultural Trade in the History of Islam. This book will examine Muslim attitudes to foreign goods and cross-cultural commerce, focusing on the tension in Islamic law between an economic interest in trade and a religious interest in social exclusivity. In connection with this project he researched a fatwa on a new European product, watermarked paper, on which he has written an article to be published by Speculum. He began researching this new project in 2005-2006, funded by a John. W. Kluge fellowship at Library of Congress and by an American Philosophical Society grant. An NEH fellowship, to be held in 2008-2009, and the ACLS Charles Ryskamp fellowship, to be held in 2010-2011, will further support his research and writing.

Halevi comes to Vanderbilt from Texas A&M University, where he taught from 2002 to 2007 courses on Early Islamic, Modern Middle Eastern, and World History.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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