Medieval Minorities: The Example of Muslims in the Kingdom of Hungary

My name is Aomar Boum. I'm an associate

professor of anthropology in N.E.L.C at UCLA.

In my capacity as the director of the Mellon program on

minorities in the Middle East and North Africa,

it is my pleasure to welcome you to our

second event of our fall lecture series on minorities

in the Middle East and North Africa.

After last week's talk, "Rethinking the

Dhimma System: Comparative Perspectives in Legal History"

by Dr. John Tolan from the University of Nantes,

we will be hearing today from Dr. Nora Berend on the subject of

Medieval Minorities:The Example of Muslims in the Kingdom of Hungary.

Before I introduce our speaker– and for those of you who were not here last week,

I would like to begin by saying a few things about the program.

The Mellon Program examines the question of how the concept of minorities,

religious and ethnic, has emerged as a key factor in the cultural, economic, political,

linguistic, religious, and educational lives of modern Middle Eastern and North African nation states.

This is our second year of workshops, lectures, faculty graduate student

research groups meetings. We would plan to organize an international conference to explore

the historical dynamics of inter-communal conflict and contacts later in early 2022.

One of our key objectives is to further curricular development at UCLA and

beyond. As an interdisciplinary project, our programmatic initiatives approach

the issue of minorities from the perspective of the humanities and

humanistic social sciences by considering history's ethnographies,

biographies, works of fiction, and documentaries to help us understand ethnic tensions and relations.

I would like to thank Dr. Ali Behdad, Dr.Lamia Balafrej, Dr. Kevan Harris, Dr. Asma Sayeed,

Dr. Susan Slyomovics, and Dr.Luke Yarbrough for their work and commitment to this program.

I want also to acknowledge our graduate students from different departments for being part of this project.

And huge thanks go to CNES staff Johanna and Christian and the director Dr. Behdad.

Now, I would like to say a few things about our speaker before I give the floor to Dr. Berend.

Educated at ELTE Budapest, L'Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) in

Paris and the University of Columbia, Dr. Nora Berend is professor of European history at the

faculty of history at Cambridge University.

Dr. Berend specializes in medieval European history from the 10th to the 15th century.

She has worked on medieval social and religious history,including minorities and state building.

She has published prolifically. I would like to name

three works here.

First, "At the Gate of Christendom: Jews, Muslims,and 'Pagans' in Medieval Hungary,"

which won the Gladstone Prize, explores the relationships between Christians and

Non-Christians in a kingdom on the frontier of Latin Europe.

The edited volume, "Christianization and the Rise of Christian Monarchy:

Scandinavia, Central Europe and Rus (900-1200)' analyzes the interconnected

processes of christianization and the establishment of political power.

And finally the co-authored "Central Europe in the High Middle Ages" is an overview of the

medieval history of Bohemia, Hungary, and Poland.

Currently, Dr. Berend is working on the formation of identity in medieval

and modern times. Please join me in welcoming Dr.Berend who will be speaking today on

the subject of 'Medieval Minorities: The example of Muslims in the Kingdom of Hungary.'

Thank you Dr.Berend.

Thank you very much. Thank you for inviting me and thank you for this kind

introduction. Um, I hope everybody can hear me all right.

Um, I have been asked to think together with you here about medieval minorities

and so first I'm going to speak a little bit about the concept of minority and contend that it is a useful one

for historical research and then illustrate this contention through the example of the

medieval Muslim minority in the Kingdom of Hungary.

Most of what I will talk about relies on my earlier research although I will

also draw on the reports of archaeological excavations that have been published

since I last wrote about Hungary's medieval Muslim population.

Now, um, first about the concept of of minority. So, should we use this concept because

obviously it's been heavily criticized, um, in recent times?

And I should say up front that I think that as with so many debates about

terminology, in the end, there's not one right answer, one right term that designates an

infallible concept.

As with social revolutions, in general, some young revolutionaries want to abolish

the past completely, think they can do away with terms that have some kind of negative baggage.

Maybe it is with middle age,– one's own, not the historical period– that the

realization comes that terminology cannot really be abolished.

And what's more, if we substitute other terms, they too will acquire unwanted baggage.

Now, I'm not saying this to suggest that we should hang on to all the terms that

have ever been used and all the concepts that have ever been used without questioning

them. But my contention is that no term is perfect.

All we can do is think about what we would like the term and the concept to do for us,

what sort of conceptualization is, is helpful in making us think about our historical source

material, and then decide on the most appropriate concept.

And always, always whatever we choose, define our terms, and think about the implications, of

course, think through the implications of those terms.

Now for me, conceptualization should be a framework

to think with and not a straight jacket.

So perhaps for some of you, 'minority' is actually not the right concept.

I, I don't know but, um, I think 'minority' in itself as a concept

is something that we should not discard.

So, just laying my cards on the table, I then now want to go over some of this criticism and why I

nonetheless think that we should use 'minority' as a concept.

So criticisms are manifold, um, and I think some of them honestly are

actually irrelevant to medievalists looking at past sources. So, to list some

of these criticisms, minority is a value-based discourse.

Its purpose is to demean. The majority are seen as the holders of values.

Minority is not a consistent concept because it can have very different contents, so it can

relate to ethnicity, gender, occupation, sexuality, religion, and so on,

that it misleadingly signals a kind of homogeneous group or even

two homogeneous groups– so a minority and the majority–

that in fact do not exist because there's a great variety within these

supposed groups.

Even going further there are people who say that the concept misleads us into

thinking that there are already two pre-existing given groups with existing identities, so that it

essentializes and um, basically reduces something that is fluid to some kind of fixed uh, entity.

Um, it is also criticized, uh, saying that it's labeling itself that actually creates a minority.

Others point out that it can be a euphemism that depoliticizes and is used to shape policy.

So for example, it's used as a synonym for race in the U.S. and

trivializes oppression.

And it's been pointed out that it, it suggests that the minorities is

numerically a minority so there are fewer people, which of course is not always the case.

Now some scholars actually proposed alternatives to replace 'minority' um, and these terms include

oppressed; inferiorized; economically, politically, or racially hindered population;

fringe group; or special communities, Sondergemeinde, in German.

Now in some specific contexts, um, I think that these terms may be fine

and indeed people should use them if that is you know what they,

they're actually kind of working on, but I think they're all narrow and or redirect the analytic

focus, so I don't think these are actually replacing 'minority.'

These are different kinds of terms that people might want to use so I actually prefer 'minority.'

So why is minority a useful concept for me?

Um, I think the key thing is that it's relational.

So that is really the crux for me. And let's recall some classic sociological

definitions.

Minorities, um, any group of people who because of their physical or cultural

characteristics are singled out from the others in society in which they live

for differential and unequal treatment and who therefore regard themselves as objects of

collective discrimination.

Another refined version consists of five characteristics:

Unequal treatment in society that entails less power over their lives,

physical or cultural traits that distinguish them, involuntary membership

in the minority group, awareness of their subordination, high rate of in-group marriage.

And then there's a kind of bare bones definition as well,a group that has less than, than a

proportionate share of wealth, power, and social status, and thus

has a subordinate role in society.

So also let's not forget that sociologists actually develop concepts based on the historical case

studies that they work on.

In other words, we can modify these concepts based on our case studies.

Now,for me as a historian, I feel that I need a concept for this relational power in society, a

concept that allows us to diagnose essentializing and group making in our sources.

So, it's actually for me, not the historian who's doing this,

wrongly using the concept of minority, but actually the concept of 'minority' enables

one to diagnose these things in ones sources. So for me, 'minority' works because it does do this conceptual work.

It denotes groups with less power and the 'groupness' of this group does not

have to come from within. It can be imposed, um, with characteristics that they

themselves profess to have, including a different religion, for example,

and/or distinguishing, distinguishing characteristics that are attributed to them by others.

Um, and the concept signals the ultimate balance of power that is the minority

group in relation to the majority or dominant group, has less power, which does not mean that

individuals from this minority group cannot have even very great wealth or influence.

But what it means is that their situation is always precarious.

They're kind of at the mercy of the dominant elite.

As scholars, I think we do not mirror but diagnose and analyze essentializing and other features of the

sources that we use.

In other words, we do need to detect if essentializing is happening in the

sources that we're using, but we do not have to fall prey to that

and think that the minority group, in fact, had any kind of prior existence

as one group or had any kind of identity as one group or it was homogeneous.

I mean, these things might happen or might not happen, that I

think doesn't change the kind of minority status of, of these groups.

And the, there's only kind of one homogeneous aspect of these minority

groups and that is the relationality, so that the dominant group can exercise its power over the minority

group.

Now of course, one can immediately object that it's not the whole dominant group,

especially you will see in the case of the Muslims in Hungary. it's the elite of

the dominant group.

However, I think this elite position is really tied to being a member of that dominant

group, so the ultimate elite comes from the

dominant group.

Now we can also analyze whether real or attributed characteristics play a role,

whether people regard themselves or are regarded in the sources as a separate group, look

at why and how they have a relative lack of power,

and what kind of discrimination they suffer and so on.

We need not get entrapped in supposing that a community of interest

either on the side of the minority or on the side of the majority existed.

In fact, as you'll see we can see that both

within the majority and within the minority, there may well

have been conflicts of interest. So, within these so-called groups,

we can track how those in the dominant position conceptualize the minority as dangerous

or inferior and we can analyze the imposition of restrictions but equally grants of

privileges.

So the minority group can also benefit from privileges but that doesn't actually

make them less of a minority group in my eyes.

Okay, so with this kind of ideas about conceptualization, I want to move on to

discussing the Muslims in Hungary. And first, a little bit of background.

So Muslims immigrated into Hungary. I mean, this is relatively rare that you have Muslims in

a Christian kingdom, not because of conquest but because of immigration.

They probably started to immigrate there before Hungary became a Christian

kingdom.

Immigration may have started in the late 9th/10th centuries,

but it continued during the time when Hungary already was a Christian kingdom

in the 11th century. And there was another wave in the middle of the 12th century

when the Hungarian king actively recruited more Muslims to come and

immigrate into Hungary.

He was basically looking for more soldiers and that's why.

Now, various places of origin have been suggested for Hungary's Muslims.

Mostly, it seems they came from the Khazar empire, Khwarez.

It also has been suggested that with the Hungarian incorporation of some formerly Byzantine territories,

and these were between the rivers Danube and Sava, Muslim Turk

mercenaries who had been settled in this area by the Byzantines came to be attached to

the Kingdom of Hungary.

So, Muslims had various places of origin, but they came from Central Asia.

There are other ideas as well of Muslims coming from elsewhere, but

there's absolutely no evidence for that and, and some of it is based on

misunderstandings.

Now, in terms of the size of this group, we don't, of course, have statistics.

Estimates based on toponymic evidence, so there are villages that are named uh, in Hungarian

after the kind of Hungarian version of Muslim, so that kind of calculation which

of course is very hypothetical, would give us something like 2 000 to 15 000 individuals.

So really all we can say for sure is that Muslims really were a

small numerical minority in the kingdom. So in this case, we have a minority that really

numerically is also a minority.

However, they filled key roles in three main areas in the kingdom.

One in trade, especially in the salt trade.

Secondly connected to the royal treasury in money minting.

And finally, as soldiers in the royal army.

At the end of the 11th and the beginning of the 12th century,

there was a very short but very intensive period when royal legislation aimed at

converting Hungary's Muslims to Christianity.

However, by the middle of the 12th century, kings gave up this policy and

returned to favoring and actively recruiting Muslims for their army.

Now, um, by the uh, end of the 13th century, the Muslims disappeared from Hungary.

There was the Mongol invasion in the middle of the 13th century and

presumably a lot of the Muslims who were soldiers may have died in that.

There are also a few references to converts and descendants of converts.

So it seems that a combination of the Mongol um, onslaught and

conversion to Christianity and, and sort of assimilation basically integrated the rest of, of

Muslims.

Okay, now let's look at Hungary's Muslims as a minority.

What do we gain by using this concept of minority when analyzing

Muslims in Hungary. Well first of all, clearly, there there was no one homogeneous group

in reality. In the middle of the 12th century

the traveler Abu Hamid al-Garnati, he was born in Granada and in the middle

of the 12th century he spent three years in Hungary and wrote about

this. So he writes of two groups of Muslims, one

who pretended to be Christians but secretly adhered to the

rituals of Islam and served the king, and the second group,

Muslims who openly practiced Islam, who were soldiers and only served

the Christians in times of war.

Now, not only did he distinguish between these two groups in terms of

their um, status or you know how they were related to serving the king of Hungary, but

also tied them to two different places of origin.

Uh, he said that the first group were children of Khwarezmians

and the second, children of Maghrebites.

And this is a term that's been kind of causing a lot of controversy in

terms of what it means.

It's been identified with all sorts of places: Bulgaria on the Danube,

Pechenegs and and even the actual Maghreb, but um, I, that actually I think is a mistake.

Um, so anyway definitely these Muslims

were not a kind of homogeneous um, group but they were presented as homogeneous from a

Christian perspective. So if we look at Hungarian legislation

the terminology in that legislation completely homogenizes them.

They're all called Ishmaelites, and they're always treated as one group.

The only difference that is made are between those who already converted to

Christianity and those who have not. Yet at the same time, there's a story about

Muslims– Saracens, in this case they're called, from Hungary, studying in Jerusalem

who helped to free a captured crusader nobleman from Hungary.

So this story kind of points to a self-identification of, at least some of these Muslims who are in

Jerusalem, where some kind of common origin from the

Kingdom of Hungary actually superseded the religious divide.

Were these Muslims oppressed?

Well, I don't think we can say that in general because they filled important roles, at

least some of them actually saw themselves as being privileged.

And of course, they were construed as privileged from the outside,

even as too privileged.

Um, I'll mention that, I'll get to that in a minute.

Um, so in terms of their functions, uh, being connected to the royal treasury

and serving the king as soldiers meant that they were in crucial positions of trust.

We also have some notion of their

self-conceptualizations.

So Abu Hamid, who I mentioned, portrayed himself as a confidant of

the Hungarian king who had influence over the king.

So he describes these conversations that he had with the king and whom he convinced that Islamic law

should be upheld among Muslims when it came to prohibitions of drinking

wine and even polygeny and concubinage.

So according to Abu Hamid, the king argued that the precepts of Islam were

not in harmony with common sense because wine strengthened the body while

too many women and concubines weakened it.

And Abu Hamid argued with him saying that the differences between Islam and

Christianity actually had to do with differences between the nature

of Christians and Muslims.

So he said that Christians can drink wine and they're fine.

They don't have any– so it doesn't have a negative effect on

them but wine was harmful to muslims who could not drink it without becoming completely drunk.

And when they did, then they lost their mind, became like fools only wanting to

fornicate, kill and act in a godless manner, as I'm

quoting.

And basically he argued that Muslims as soldiers of the king

obviously would be absolutely no use.

They would even give away, their weapons and horses and all their

wealth and couldn't go fight for the king.

They would just squander everything if they were drinking.

So in order for Muslims to be more efficient as soldiers in the king's service, of course,

it was better if they did not drink wine.

And on the other hand he maintained uh, polygeny also benefited the king

because there would be more numerous children born to these many

wives and they could all serve in the royal army when they grew up.

Abu Hamid asserted that as a consequence of this

conversation the king defended the right of Muslims

to have concubines, even against the opposition of Christian priests.

Another witness in the 1220s, Yaqut, who encountered Muslims from

Hungary in Aleppo.

So these Muslims from Hungary went to Aleppo to study

law according to the school of Abu Hanifa.

And they said that they hoped to get great honor

from their study of Islamic law on their return to Hungary

where their core religionists would put them in charge of religious matters.

So again you see a kind of self-conceptualization recorded at least in this source. um,

and then as I mentioned um, externally there were these ideas of

too much privilege, so quite the opposite of oppression.

Not just not just in the Muslim sources about the Muslims but

in the Christian sources– in this case the papacy.

So there are these papal letters from the 13th century

that claim that local people in Hungary voluntarily converted to Islam

because the Muslims had a better position in the kingdom.

Now I contend that this was actually not a reality. in other words, it's not that

masses and massive people were converting to Islam, this had to do with politics.

So the legal status granted to the Muslims which

obviously allowed them to continue their way of life was combined uh, with the um

discontent of nobles in Hungary um and they basically nobles relied on

local ecclesiastics who also then mobilized the papacy against the king.

I will talk a little bit more about this in a minute,

but basically the Muslims became a pawn in power politics and were blamed and I

think that is also something– 'minority' is a very useful concept to

kind of find these cases.

So they were not oppressed as such. they could even have a very privileged position but underlying that

there was the extreme precariousness of their position.

So at the whim of the king, they could all be demanded to convert to

christianity. so they could have privileges or they could indeed be oppressed.

And this is what happened at the end of the 11th and beginning of the 12th century.

Legislation decreed that all Ishmaelites were to convert.

They were supposed to eat only pork when they had guests, to marry their daughters to Christians,

the villages of Ishmaelites were to be split up, um and half of the people would

have to move.

Uh, they would have to build a church and others– so Christians

in the vicinity– were encouraged to denounce former

Muslims who were still practicing Islamic tenets.

And the three that were named were fasting, ablutions, and not eating pork.

So obviously whoever wrote this legislation actually knew something

about Islamic practices.

Then as I said, by the middle of the 12th century, this is kind of reversed and the need

to recruit light archers to the royal army means that the king is again actively

seeking Muslim immigrants. So there was this underlying precariousness of the Muslim

position and we again have some evidence that the Muslims themselves were conscious of

this precariousness.

Abu Hamid recounts that Hungary's Muslims were extremely fearful when he wanted to travel to

someone who was seen as the Hungarian king's enemy.

So these Hungarian Muslims thought that if he were to do this and travel there,

then that would put them in peril, in danger.

And Yaqut reported that these Muslims told him that they were not allowed to build

walls around their settlements. So they were soldiers, but the king

didn't want them to have fortified settlements because then they

might use their um, armed force against him. so

Muslims could be very privileged, but it is this

relative position in the hierarchy that matters here.

Their dependence on royal goodwill. and that's, I think, where the concept of

minority is useful.

I should also mention that the christian majority so to speak did not necessarily have a uniform

attitude to the Muslims.

Obviously we don't even know what the average Christian hasn't thought about

them, for example.

But we can see, and this is what I sort of mentioned before, that there were

conflicts which show how different parts of the

population of the elite thought differently. So the

king appointed them to offices in his treasury and mint

as toll collectors and obviously of course apart from being in the army and also to

sell salt.

So the salt monopoly was important for the kings of Hungary.

So the king relied on the Muslims in these ways, but

the Hungarian nobles opposed this because they wanted these offices which

were quite lucrative.

And Hungarian nobles and ecclesiastics

therefore first forced the king in 1222 to issue legislation which actually

demanded that the king not appoint Muslims and Jews into these positions.

And then the nobles and ecclesiastics, as I said, kind of mobilize the papacy and

try to get him to intervene.

Now another thing that is interesting about Hungary's Muslims is that we could talk about them as a

double minority if you like in that not only from the kind of

Christian majority but also from the viewpoint of the Islamic community.

In a way, they were seen as a minority or at least this is,

uh, by Abu Hamid and Yaqut– these two Muslim authors. This is their point of

view.

They were somehow, to some extent, the wrong kind of Muslims.

Abu Hamid says that he was teaching

the Muslims of Hungary and interestingly,

he's not actually claiming to be trying to reconvert, if you like, the

crypto-Muslims.

So it's not those who already converted to Christianity, it's the ones who

actually supposedly practice Islam but according to Abu Hamid, they're very ignorant of religious rules,

they know no Arabic.

They did not preach or have public prayer on Fridays. And Abu Hamid equated

the the Friday prayer with the pilgrimage of the poor.

So he said those who cannot go to mecca would receive the reward due for

pilgrimage if they went to Friday prayers.

He had to teach them about inheritance laws and marital rules,

notably that men could have up to four wives and keep slave concubines as well.

And he also taught them not to drink wine.

Now he claimed that before he came to Hungary, they didn't know about these

things.

And because of his teachings, over 10 000 places in Hungary where Muslims lived started

to implement his teachings.

Obviously, one can be quite suspicious of of some of these claims, the 10 000 places definitely.

Yaqut wrote that the Muslims from Hungary he encountered failed to observe Islamic regulations in

their clothing and hair.

Notably they shaved their beard. He questioned them and they said that all the Muslims

who served the king as soldiers conformed to Christian customs in their

appearance, but this was not true of the other Muslims.

So here we are with these texts. Can we tell whether in fact Hungary's

Muslims observed Islamic regulations before Abu Hamid's arrival or

or not? Um in the end. I think we cannot really tell. Abu Hamid

obviously cast himself in the role of a Muslim teacher,

successfully bringing the knowledge of Islamic tenets to

Hungary.

Also, of course, Christian rule over Muslims was problematic from a

Muslim point of view. So later, for example, in Spain, Mudejaras were routinely

kind of accused of falling away from normative Islamic practices, even if that was not actually true. So

Abu Hamid may have been portraying these Muslims in this way for

a reason.

But of course, it's also plausible that they knew no Arabic and they were forgetting things because they

were so isolated.

Um, now there's some archaeological evidence that I will be discussing

um, and I think you know in the end one has to kind of make a

judgment call that we don't have absolute proof.

Um so finally can we actually go beyond um, these sort of statements that we have

in the sources, engage with the kind of daily life of these Muslims? And

unfortunately, not really because we don't have very much

evidence. and what we have, notably, are copper coins and some

archaeological fines. So uh, to finish off I'm going to talk about

these a little bit.

Um, so there are these coins that were

minted uh, during the rule of Bela the third of late 12th

century and they're copper coins.

Um and they are sort of partly kufic and

mostly pseudo-kufic. Um, I can show you both

sides.

And this is kind of a large version. but

of course, we don't know exactly

who minted them. So did the Muslims

design them?

Did they actually mint them? Did Christian mintors maybe

make technical mistakes because they couldn't read the script?

Was it the technical difficulty of producing a kufic script in Hungary

at the time or was it that Muslims didn't really know anymore?

Um, so I mean I'm– maybe some people among you will actually know

the answer better than I do to these questions and if you do I'll be

interested to hear. Um, finally, um, I just want to talk about these

uh, more recent excavations, uh, a place called Orosháza,

which was a settlement between the 11th and 13th centuries.

Um, now what is interesting here is that using the concept of 'minority'

may be useful or may mislead us. In other words, this

settlement was identified as a Muslim settlement

based on various characteristics. But as you will see,

actually almost none of the characteristics are really

absolutely sort of certainly uh, you know signifying a Muslim

settlement. So you know was it a Muslim settlement? I

sort of hope so but again there's no absolute proof.

The houses in the settlement looked very much like normal

houses and villages in Hungary at the time but there was a very

uh, sort of significant number of jars and either the material or the jars

themselves may also have been imported.

The large number of Jars made the archaeologists think that these were

used for ritual ablutions.

There was also a large oven which they think was used for sort of communal

baking. And um, they found a lot of um parts of balances that were used for

weighing. So they think this was linked to trade, the activity a lot of Muslims were

engaged in.

And the settlement was situated on a route that may have been one of these

sold trade routes. About 40 lead weights were also found

and these weights correspond to a unit of account,

which is called the mark of buddha. So they think that again this might be

kind of because the muslims were engaged in these

um, in the treasury in the royal treasury.

Um, there was uh, this find of a silver

ring.

Um this is it from a poster that was used by uh, they are called

one of the archaeologists who found this who excavated

but so it has a kind of animal motif on it um, and

most significantly, over 15 000 animal bones were found and analyzed

and only 24 of these belong to pigs.

Now archaeologists think but again there's no absolute proof

that those 24 may come from an earlier layer of this settlement, so an

Avar period sort of very early medieval settlement. Of course, Hungarian villages,

Christian villages have a lot of pig bones so this is kind of the main reason they

didn't eat pigs.

They were Muslims. The other kind of important pointer is that they

found a lot of young animals that were slaughtered.

Now normally, only either very very wealthy people could afford to do that.

So not wait until the animal kind of

grows. Or – and this is the hypothesis of the archaeologist – this was a ritual,

uh, the the animal sacrificed 7 days after Ramadan.

Finally, a cemetery was also found. Now a lot of graves had been destroyed earlier by mining but

there are about 170 graves, so quite significant.

And these graves differ to some extent from other graves of the period.

There's a kind of side niche, so there's a deeper side cavity

connected um to the the grave. The arms were placed in various positions

and the orientation of the graves are south, south-

east.

Now again, the archaeologists uh, say that they tried, so the Muslim this was a Muslim cemetery

and they tried to orient the graves towards mecca but they

had insufficient geographical knowledge to do so, again i don't know.

So this uh, settlement certainly came to an end with the mongol invasion in the middle

of the 13th century.

So to conclude, I find it useful to rely on the concept of 'minority' to

analyze Muslim life in medieval Hungary, highlighting their relative position in

power relations, the precariousness of their position, and

to the basis of the differentiation which was of course

their religion.

Using the concept, however, does not mean ignoring the many aspects of Muslim life,

the lack of homogeneity, both among the so-called Ishmaelites and

among the dominant Christians, and of course change over time.

And finally, I've found that it's the lack of evidence rather than the concept

of minority that really hinders research. thank you.

Thank you very much Professor Berend for that extremely illuminating talk.

Um, it's going to be very useful for our group's discussion in lots of ways, not

least because I think that you're the first speaker

we've had who has delivered sort of a full-throated defense of the use of the

term 'minority' and its analytical usefulness.

Um so that adds a lot to to our discussions.

Thank you again for inviting me and to all the listeners that

unfortunately I couldn't see but thank you.

Thanks Dr Berend.

Thanks for joining us.