Lev Weitz is a historian of the Islamic Middle East. His scholarly interests lie in the encounters among Muslims, Christians, and Jews that have shaped the Middle East’s history from the coming of Islam to the present. He is the author of Between Christ and Caliph: Law, Marriage, and Christian Community in Early Islam (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018), which examines the multiconfessional society of early Islam through the lens of shifting marital practices of Syriac Christians.
Lev is currently working on three projects: an English translation of the History of the Patriarchs of the East, a medieval Arabic chronicle of the East Syrian Church (with Salam Rassi and Luke Yarbrough); an edition and study of the medieval Arabic documents of Dayr al-Naqlun, a monastery in Fayyum, Egypt (with Naïm Vanthieghem); and a monograph entitled On the Edge: Global Transformations in the Medieval Egyptian Countryside, which explores how Muslim and Christian communities in provincial Egypt experienced hemispheric trends—the expansion of Islam, the rise of Arabic, trade and slavery across the Nile and Sahara—that transformed Afro-Eurasia on either side of the year 1000. The latter two projects are products of Lev’s interest in Arabic documentary sources and their potential to expand our conceptions of medieval Islamic history.
In 2022-23, Lev is a Fellow in Byzantine Studies at the Dumbarton Oaks Research Library in Washington, D.C., where he is working on the Dayr al-Naqlun monastery and documents. He is associate professor of history and director of the Islamic World Studies program at the Catholic University of America.