12/12/07 - History professor receives fellowship to fund research on Islamic law and international trade

Leor Halevi

The National Endowment for the Humanities has awarded Leor Halevi, assistant professor of history, with a Fellowship for 2008-2009. Halevi plans to use this fellowship to assist him with research for his book on Islam and cross-cultural trade.

“These fellowships are extremely competitive and it is a significant honor to win one,” said Walter Buenger, professor and head of the Department of History. “This fellowship indicates that Leor’s research will be well received.”

Halevi sees this project, a book manuscript tentatively titled “Forbidden Goods: Cross-Cultural Trade in Islamic Law,” as an opportunity to bridge a gap between two areas of study in the history of Islam. Scholars who study Islamic doctrine pay little attention to commercial ethics while economic historians tend to focus on standard economic topics to the exclusion of the potential economic impact of religious doctrines.

“The aim of my research is to examine rulings and legal opinions…in order to shed light on the intersection of religion and economy in Islamic law,” said Halevi. “My project concerns the ethos of economic exchanges across religious boundaries, in the Mediterranean world and Indian Ocean basin, from the rise of Islam to the present day.”

Throughout the history of Islam, the legal scholars of the day had to interpret how the influx of trade from other nations and religions would affect the Islamic faith and impact its culture. There were competing desires, Halevi suggests: a tendency toward tolerance for others against a drive to preserve the community from foreign intrusion.

Halevi hints it is a conflict that still exists:

“In today’s world, how do Muslim thinkers resolve the tension between an economic interest in free trade and a cultural backlash against global commerce?”

Halevi received his Ph.D. in history from Harvard University and joined Texas A&M as an assistant professor in 2002. His research focuses on the history of Islam and he teaches courses on Islamic, Middle Eastern, and World History.

The honor of winning an NEH fellowship follows other distinctions in Halevi’s career. His first book, Muhammad’s Grave: Death Rites and the Making of Islamic Society (Columbia University Press, 2007), recently won an award given to the best book in Middle East studies. And he has, over the years, received prestigious, highly competitive fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies, from the Library of Congress, from Germany’s Institute for Advanced Study, and from the American Philosophical Society.

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Erin Wood

12/06/07