My research focuses on the social history of Middle Eastern Muslim, Christian, and Jewish communities during the early and middle Islamic periods (i.e. 7^th to 13^th centuries). I am particularly interested in the circumstances under which inter-confessional relations and encounters took place, confessional boundaries were crossed, and a multi-confessional and multi-cultural social setting was made possible under Islamic rule. I have explored these questions in different contexts, including legal pluralism, conversion to Islam, religiously-mixed families, Eastern Christian historiography, and female agency.

In my work I consider textual and material evidence that originated in Iran, Iraq, the Fertile Crescent, Egypt, and North Africa. My approach rests on the identification of norms, patterns, and social customs that were common to different communities, despite their confessional separateness. In most cases, I find that religious classifications, specifically Jewish, Muslims, and Christian were the product of an elite discourse. And while these categories occupied an important place in the conceptions of the non-elite masses, they often had limited application.

The sources I use include legal sources, such as Islamic legal regulations, rabbinic responsa, and ecclesiastical canon laws; narrative sources – historiographic, hagiographic, and biographic; and documentary sources, such as private letters found in the Cairo Geniza and in Arabic papyri. These were written in classical Arabic, Judaeo-Arabic, rabbinic Aramaic, and Syriac.

At present I am working on a book about the role of women in the promotion, or prevention, of religious change among their family members during the first centuries of Islam. The subject has failed to receive adequate attention in modern scholarship thus far. Its treatment will allow to cast light not only on the social context of Islamic expansion, but also on the history of the family and of women in the pre-modern Middle East.

Since I have joined the department in 2013, I have taught on various topics, including an introductory class on the Classical Islamic period, academic writing, holy figures in Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages, Muslim – non-Muslims relations in the Middle Ages, conversion to Islam, and recently also on gender and religion in the early Islamic period.

Outside the university, I take pride in being involved in activities designed to promote the multi-cultural nature of the city of Haifa, a city that belongs to both its Palestinian and Jewish inhabitants. I do so mainly through involvement in the Haifa Social Development Committee (الجمعية لتطوير اجتمعي). Finally, I am married to Noa and a father to David and Ella. We live on Mount Carmel and enjoy waking up every morning to the view of the Mediterranean and its adjacent forests.