Thread by @ccsahner

1/ If you're a Christian in medieval #Egypt, and the church won't grant you a divorce, what do you do? Head to the Muslim court!

This fascinating papyrus from the Fayyūm is dated to 909 AD. It records the divorce proceedings of a Christian named Sawīrah (Severus)

2/ It states that Sawīrah divorced his wife, Qasīdaq (the daughter of a monk named George) "three times [and] irrevocably." The divorce was witnessed by a series of Muslim men, who are named in the papyrus (His father-in-law, the monk, could not have been happy!)

3/ The triple divorce refers to the Islamic practice of ṭalāq, whereby a man may repudiate his wife by uttering the phrase "ṭalāq" three times, thereby dissolving the marriage

4/ What's interesting here is how a Christian used the mechanisms of Islamic law to gain a more favorable outcome in his divorce proceedings (this less than 300 years after the Islamic conquest of Egypt)

5/ Traditionally, Christian canon law did not permit divorce, whereas Islamic law took a much more permissive stance towards it (at least for men). Interestingly, there is no hint that Sawīrah converted to Islam in order to gain access to Islamic justice

6/ This is part of a well-known trend in Middle Eastern history, whereby dhimmīs availed themselves of Islamic courts if it turned out they could gain more favorable rulings (on divorce, inheritance, etc.) than they could before their own rabbis or priests

7/ The papyrus comes from Khoury, Chrestomathie de papyrologie arabe, 1993, pp. 42-43.

I learned about it while reading the fabulous new book of Lev Weitz, Between Christ and Caliph, 2018, p. 133 @PennPress (read it!!):

upenn.edu/pennpress/book…

8/ For further reading, also see this book by Uriel Simonsohn, A Common Justice, 2011 (also from @PennPress):

upenn.edu/pennpress/book…

9/ And for a comparison with the Ottoman period, see this famous article by Najwa Al-Qattan, "Dhimmīs in the Muslim Court," IJMES (1999):

jstor.org/stable/176219?…