Tamer el Leithy
Coptic Families and Their Strategies of Social Reproduction in Late-Medieval Cairo
was born and raised in Cairo, Egypt. After studying economics (BA., American University in Cairo), and a brief stint as an economist in the oil industry, he turned to studying medieval history at AUC, Cambridge University (MPhil.) and Princeton University (PhD). He was a Junior Fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows (2003–06); currently, he teaches medieval social and cultural history at New York University (2007–). El-Leithy just completed a book manuscript, based on his dissertation, which examines a pivotal wave of Coptic Christian conversion to Islam in the 14th century, most likely when Egypt became majority Muslim. Based on unpublished Coptic manuscripts and documents, the study traces the ways in which conversion—and the attendant suspicion, and eventual assimilation, of converts—had profound effects not only on Coptic Christianity, but also on Islam. It also discusses the relationship between religious change and long-term processes of acculturation and ethnic conversion.
Coptic Families and Their Strategies of Social Reproduction in Late-Medieval Cairo
During the EUME fellowship year 2010/ 2011, he will begin his research on a hitherto unknown collection of documents that he recently discovered in Cairo. He plans to use these documents to reconstruct two Christian neighborhoods in late-medieval Cairo, and to examine their resident Coptic families and their strategies of social reproduction. This study of the relationship between family, property, and legal practice is especially significant given that these Christian litigants conducted all of their communal and familial strategies of reproduction—from marriage/divorce to inheritance and endowment [waqf] practices—in Muslim courts (i.e. through Islamic law).
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