The terms 'minority' and 'majority' in their contemporary senses are modern inventions. Nevertheless, they are commonly applied to pre-modern societies, even by professional historians. This new collection of essays by distinguished scholars explores the applicability and limits of the term in one historical setting, albeit a broad one: the lands around the Mediterranean Sea in the medieval period.

The editors argue that the term 'minority' retains utility, despite its drawbacks. For example, it is useful as a term to describe the mutual dependency of various pre-modern people groups—many of them defined by their religious affiliation—upon one another. Those who wielded power around pre-modern Mediterranean often belonged to ethnic or religious demographic minorities. Conversely, subject populations were often fractured into a kaleidoscope of shifting and overlapping identity-groups, none of which was a demographic majority. 'Minority' thus helpfully denotes a condition of dependency and subordination in which any group might participate, in different ways and in different degrees. It is less accurately used, however, as a static, permanent descriptor for a particular group. The essays in the volume offer case studies that shed light on these questions in relation to two major themes. The first theme is interactions among subordinate, dependent, and marginal groups, rather than between them and the dominant, central groups in a given society. The second theme is the seeming paradox of 'minority' group members who rose to political power and influence. The authors of the essays in the volume contribute ground-breaking studies of notions of 'minority' in relation to these two themes in a variety of localities, from early Islamic Syria to late-medieval Portugal, among many of the region's myriad religious and ethnic sub-groups.

Many of the selections in the sourcebook illustrate the kind of cultural change—namely, cultural brokerage—that Simonsohn, Yarbrough, and their Research Group are examining this year. “Cultural brokerage” has been invested with subtly different meanings in different academic disciplines. It involves the mediation of cultural change by agents who are deeply embedded in particular historical settings. This mechanism is amply attested in cases of conversion. For example, contributor Daphna Ephrat (Open University of Israel) translates excerpts from a hagiography about the thirteenth-century Sufi master ʿAbdallāh al-Yūnīnī, known as the “Lion of Syria.” Al-Yūnīnī was said to have led several Christians to convert by performing “miracles” that reflect his deep acquaintance with the local culture. In one instance, he reads a greedy Christian peasant’s mind, generously giving him all of his own possessions, which the peasant had been secretly coveting. The peasant converts to Islam in response. This account presents al-Yūnīnī as a cultural intermediary in the sense proposed by the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu: a figure who assigns value to particular aspects of culture, such as religious values, and convinces others to follow her or him. Tales like this one would have affected the way that contemporary Muslims and non-Muslims imagined the roles of gift-giving and performances of supernatural intuition in catalyzing religious change.

Cultural change is not, of course, always welcomed, particularly when it involves change as potentially profound as religious conversion. Another selection, provided by Ulrich Rebstock (University of Freiburg), highlights another side of conversion: its gradual and uncertain progress in particular regions, here the Songhay Empire on the Niger River. The author of the text is a Muslim firebrand of the fifteenth and sixteenth century named al-Maghīlī. In the text, al-Maghīlī attacks the allegedly insincere and backsliding converts that he observed in this region. In terms of “cultural brokerage,” the North African al-Maghīlī is imposing a new level of severity within what had clearly been a more fluid West African Islam. The people he criticized, meanwhile, were, by their practices, gently adjusting what it meant to practice Islam in their own West African setting.

The Research Group “Cultural Brokerage in Pre-modern Islam” brings together experts on pre-modern Islamic thought, administrative practice, advice literature, gender, trade, empire, and more in order to fine-tune a theory of “cultural brokerage” that is sensitive to the specific dynamics of Islamic history.