Robert Gleave is the holder of the Averroes: Mediterranean Islam – A*Midex/Iméra Chair. His research project at Iméra, the Institute for Advanced Study of Aix-Marseille University, focuses on the religious jurisprudence developed by scholars from communities living as religious minorities in the Mediterranean area. The research concerns communities living in areas where Islam is perceived as the religio-cultural norm and minorities – be they Muslims or members of other religions – are often given space to operate their own religious legal systems developed from that community’s own tradition of legal thinking. His work will address the question of how this minority status impacted the construction of religious law by the scholars of the minority community.
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Video transcript
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0:09 My name is Robert Gleave and I'm Professor of Arabic Studies at the University of Exeter in the UK. My area of research is the history of Islamic thought. My particular specialism is in the history of the Shiite branch of Islam, which is a minority, which has lived in Muslim lands for many centuries, and I study their legal thought and in particular how they interpret texts. I am the Averroes Chair at Imara and as part of that research project, I'll be looking at three religious minority communities in the Mediterranean. The Shiites of Lebanon, the Coptic Christians in Egypt, and the Ibadi Muslims in Algeria.
0:52 I'm going to be looking at the dynamics of the way in which they think about law. How have their ideas of law changed? And is there something which these three minorities share in the way in which they argue and the way in which they present the law? So it's a comparative study, as well as having three case studies of these three communities. I began life as a textual scholar, learning Arabic and Persian in order to read texts. And what I found was that there is a wealth of tradition within the Muslim world of texts which have not been read and which have not been studied.
1:27 And as part of my PhD at the University of Manchester, I looked at some original texts, some manuscripts which had never been looked at before. And I became a specialist in the texts and traditions of the Shiite community. looking at their manuscripts as well as the texts which are published in order to try and understand what they thought about the law and how the law expressed itself in Shiite community life. So I'm going to take all of that information that I gathered over the years studying the Shiite tradition to try and apply it to two other communities that I've not studied
2:04 before, the Copts in Egypt and the Ibadi's in Algeria, to see what commonalities and what modes of argumentation they share to see if we can come to some sort of comparative conclusions about minority jurisprudence. I'm really excited about being part of the Imara community here. We have such a huge wealth of experience and specialisms and disciplines represented in the staff body. And when I've been doing interdisciplinary work like this in the past, I found it one of the most enriching things that you can do as an academic.
2:37 To explain your work to others and have them explain to you and then look for commonalities between us. So I'm really looking forward to being part of this intellectual community to share our research. But also I know that the wider Aix-Marseille University community has many people who are working in areas linked with mine and I'm looking forward to sharing my ideas with them.
