Thomas A. Carlson

Thomas A. Carlson researches the religious and ethnic diversity of medieval Middle Eastern society. The confessionalization of the historical study of the Middle Eastern region, typically framed as "Islamic history," excludes Armenian kingdoms, the Byzantine Empire, and the Crusader States from consideration while including successor states who ruled the same terrain and largely the same society. His first book, Christianity in Fifteenth Century Iraq (Cambridge Studies on Islamic Civilization), highlights the cultural continuities, social contacts and conflicts, and strategies of differentiation among Christians, Muslims, and Jews in fifteenth-century Iraq and al-Jazīra. It challenges the normative Eurocentrism of studies of non-European Christianity, as well as the Islamic exceptionalism which still leads most experts to ignore the non-Muslim presence in much of Middle Eastern history. His articles have argued that Islamization in Syria and Iraq progressed even more slowly, and much more unevenly, than scholars have previously guessed, and analyzed Armenian sources for the Safaviyya Sufi order before its conquest of Iran in 1501, a period for which reliable Persian and Arabic sources are particularly scarce. Dr. Carlson is now the editor of an NEH-supported digital history project, the Historical Index of the Medieval Middle East (HIMME) and co-editor of a primary source reader in Christian-Muslim relations.
His next book project explores the social impact of Middle Eastern religious, ethnic, and linguistc diversity in the Islamic Middle Period (ca. 950-1500). The Turkic influx into the Middle East fostered political, social, and legal experimentation, at precisely the same time as the Byzantine reconquest of eastern Anatolia and northern Syria brought an end to centuries of relatively stable boundaries. Religious diversity, both local variations within Islam and large populations of non-Muslims (Jews, Christians, Yezidis, and Zoroastrians), shaped the dynamics of society and the development of Islam itself into the early modern period.