2004: The Prize Committee announced that Tamar el-Leithy (Ph.D., Princeton University) had been named the inaugural recipient of the Bruce D. Craig Prize for Mamluk Studies for his dissertation, "Coptic Culture and Conversion in Medieval Cairo: 1293-1524"

The Committee based its decision on el-Leithy's insightful and original interpretations of the topic, based upon his close and careful use of previously neglected sources from the medieval Coptic community of Egypt. His critical approach to previous scholars' work on conversion results in important questions regarding their conclusions. The Committee commends el-Leithy for his valuable contribution to the field of Mamluk Studies. An abstract of the dissertation follows.

The Prize Committee for 2004 consisted of Donald P. Little (McGill University); Marlis Saleh (University of Chicago); and Warren C. Schultz (DePaul University).

Abstract: "Coptic Culture and Conversion in Medieval Cairo, 1293-1524"
When Islam was half as old as it is today, Egypt was swept by mass conversions that irrevocably altered its religious history and demographic composition. In the early 8th/14th century, various pressures on the Coptic Christian community triggered a pivotal wave of conversion to Islam. While conversion protected lives and jobs, it did not guarantee immunity: converts often fell prey to the suspicions of their new coreligionists, provoking further regulation and Muslim anxieties of influence. Conversion rendered Copts socially marginal, but concomitantly culturally central.
Supplementing traditional Muslim accounts with unpublished legal documents and Coptic sources, this dissertation investigates how conversion was experienced, negotiated, and represented. The first section discusses hitherto unknown responses to the conversion wave, including the legal ruse of single-generation conversion, by which converts maintained their progeny as non-Muslims; a wave of Coptic martyrs in the late 8th/14th century; and a Coptic rite of quasi-rebaptism through which converts reverted to Christianity. The second part examines representations of converts in Muslim biographical dictionaries, including the epithets applied to converts and the tropes of religious suspicion. The third section investigates everyday social practices of converts like residence and patronage patterns and compares these to the suspicious charges of Muslim authors. The final section uses an unpublished collection of the correspondence of Patriarch Yuhanna XIII (1484-1524 A.D.) as a prism onto the long-term effects of the conversion wave on Coptic Christianity and culture.