I will be presenting a paper, provisionally entitled Negotiating Zoroastrian Communal Identity in the Early Islamic Era, at the final workshop of the Abbasid Identities research project: Religious, Ethnic and Professional Groups in the Abbasid Caliphate, 750-1000.
The ways that ethno-religious minorities relate to majorities is a salient feature of twenty-first century politics. However, the challenges and opportunities of states incorporating diverse communities are not new, with both modern and medieval history offering numerous examples where states have managed ethno-religious difference in different ways. Finding innovative approaches to this problem are an urgent and unmet need for contemporary European and Middle Eastern societies. Building on a project funded by the British Academy, Aga Khan University and the Gerda Henkel Foundation, this conference investigates how ethno-religious communities participated in the wider intellectual and social world of the medieval caliphate, and how their leaders drew on the material and intellectual resources of the state and wider society to maintain boundaries and preserve their communal membership from generation to generation. The event focuses on identity discourse and how far this reflected or affected the social praxis of boundary-making in reality.
This conference aims to rethink group identity formation in the Abbasid Caliphate by critically employing and applying models from the social sciences. Focusing on three principal markers of identity—namely, ethnicity, religion, and profession—it attempts to innovate not only in the study of medieval Middle Eastern history, but also in methods and paradigms for the study of identity formation and maintenance. Using the wide range of skills of historians and philologists, it confronts boundary-making mechanisms, paradigms of group formation, the role of classes and guilds in identitarian politics.