Qahwa & Kalam: Cultural Efflorescence and Entanglement: The Pivotal 13th-century Coptic Renaissance

Tamer el-Leithy is an assistant professor in the History Department at Johns Hopkins University. In a former life, he studied Economics at AUC and then worked as an economist for an oil company. Drudgery ensued. So when he read a historical novel set in 15th-century Cairo, he quickly saw the light and discovered a passion for medieval history. That conversion led him to graduate school in Cairo, Cambridge (MPhil), and Princeton (Ph.D.), where he studied medieval Middle Eastern history. El-Leithy was a Junior Research Fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows, then taught at NYU’s Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies department before moving to Johns Hopkins University.

His forthcoming book, The Last New Muslims. Mass Conversion and Religious Difference in late-medieval Egypt examines the 14th-century wave of Coptic Christian conversions to Islam—including the pivotal conversions of Coptic lay elites, who had played a critical role in the community’s cultural patronage and economic support; the process thus had significant ripples extending throughout the wider community. He is currently working on a second monograph, The Deep Grammar of Religious Transformation: Arabization and Coptic Christianity in medieval Egypt, a longue-durée history of the cultural consequences of Arabization for the Coptic Christian community and religious tradition in Egypt (ca. 11th-13th centuries). The language change (Coptic to Arabic, ca 10th-11th c.) was not only comparatively late; it also ushered in remarkably generative cultural changes, marked by the emergence of new Coptic genres and disciplines and a closer entanglement with wider Arabic-speaking and Islamic contexts.

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