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Luke Yarbrough

Associate Professor

Office: 394 Kaplan Hall

Luke Yarbrough is a scholar of early and medieval Islamic history and thought. His research interests include inter-religious relations, hadith studies, Arabic historiography, premodern state administration, and manuscript studies. His monograph, Friends of the Emir: Non-Muslim State Officials in Islamic Thought (Cambridge University Press, 2019) documents, contextualizes, and attempts to explain what premodern Muslims wrote about the many influential non-Muslims who helped run their governments. The book was a runner-up for the 2020 British-Kuwait Friendship Society Book Prize.

He has also published a critical edition and translation of a polemical treatise by a disgruntled Egyptian bureaucrat, entitled The Sword of Ambition (New York University Press, 2016), and has co-edited two volumes: Minorities in Contact in the Medieval Mediterranean (Brepols, 2020) and Conversion to Islam in the Premodern Age (University of California Press, 2020). He teaches the undergraduate courses “Islam and Other Religions,” “Making and Studying the Modern Middle East,” and “Islamic Thought,” as well as graduate seminars on research methods in Islamic Studies, Islamic advice literature, and Islamic manuscripts.

He earned his PhD in the Department of Near Eastern Studies at Princeton University, working under Michael Cook and Mark R. Cohen. Before coming to UCLA, he was Assistant Professor in the Department of History at Saint Louis University (St. Louis, MO), where he taught courses on the Middle East, the medieval Mediterranean, and world history. In 2012, he was a research fellow at the Herbert D. Katz Center for Judaic Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. In 2016–17, he was a Humanities Research Fellow at New York University, Abu Dhabi. In 2020–21, he co-organized the research group Cultural Brokerage in Premodern Islam at the Israel Institute for Advanced Studies, Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

Education

PhD, Near Eastern Studies, Princeton University (2012)
MA, Near Eastern Studies, Princeton University (2008)
Center for Arabic Study Abroad (CASA) (2004–5)
AB, History, Princeton University (2004) (certificates in Near Eastern Studies and Medieval Studies)

Research

Luke Yarbrough’s current research projects deal with the role that rulers and bureaucracies played in premodern Islamic legal systems. He is also working on editions and translations of several previously unpublished Arabic works that deal, in one way or another, with inter-religious relations in the context of premodern states.

Publications

Books

Friends of the Emir: Non-Muslim State Officials in Islamic Thought

Cambridge University Press, 2019
The Sword of Ambition

New York University Press, 2016
Minorities in Contact in the Medieval Mediterranean

Brepols, 2020
Conversion to Islam in the Premodern Age

University of California Press, 2020

Articles

“Inter-Confessional Church History: East Syrian Christian Identity and Islam in the Ecclesiastical History of Kitāb al-Maǧdal,” Quaderni di Study Arabi 16 (2021), pp. 125–170.
“Muslim rulers, Christian subjects,” in Pratt, Douglas, ed. Christian Muslim Relations: A Thematic History. Leiden: Brill, 2020
“Symbolic Conflict and Cooperation in the Neglected Chronicle of a Syrian Prince,” in Hillenbrand, Carole, ed. Syria in Crusader Times. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2020.
“Medieval Sunni historians on Fatimid policy and non-Muslim influence,” Journal of Medieval History 45: 3 (2019), pp. 331–46
“A Christian Shīʿī, and Other Curious Confreres: Ibn ʿAbd al-Barr on Getting Along with Unbelievers,” al-Masāq 30:3 (2018), pp. 284–303 (winner of the 2019 al-Masāq Prize)
“I’ll not accept aid from a mushrik,” in Delattre, Alain Marie Legendre, and Petra Sijpesteijn, eds. The Late Roman and Early Islamic Mediterranean and Near East: Authority and Control in the Countryside. Leiden: Brill, 2018, pp. 44–93.
“Did ʿUmar b. ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz enact a religious criterion for state employment?” in Borrut, Antoine and Fred Donner, eds. Christians and Others in the Umayyad State. Chicago: The Oriental Institute, 2016, pp. 163–96
“The Madrasa and the non-Muslims of thirteenth-century Egypt: A reassessment,” in Baumgarten, Elisheva, Ruth Karras, and Kaitlin Mesler, eds. Entangled Histories: Knowledge, Authority, and Jewish Culture in the Thirteenth Century. Philadelphia: The University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016, pp. 93–112.
“A rather small genre”: Arabic Works Against Non-Muslim State Officials,” Der Islam 93:1 (2016), pp. 139–69
“Origins of the ghiyār,” Journal of the American Oriental Society 134: 1 (2014), pp. 113-121
“Upholding God’s Rule: Early Muslim juristic opposition to the state employment of non-Muslims,” Islamic Law and Society 19:1 (2012), pp. 11-85.

Courses

Undergraduate

Islam and Other Religions (Islamic Studies M115)
Islamic Thought (Islamic Studies 151)
Making and Studying the Modern Middle East (Middle East Studies M50C/Anthropology M50C)

Graduate

The Arabo-Islamic Tradition (Islamic Studies 201)
Encountering Arabic Manuscripts (Arabic 275)