Zoroastrian Studies Seminar Series: Disputing Titles and Delineating Identities

The Elahé Omidyar Mir-Djalali Institute of Iranian Studies in collaboration with the Federation of Zoroastrian Associations of North America, the Ontario Zoroastrian Community Foundation, the Zoroastrian Society of Ontario, and the Encyclopaedia Iranica Foundation jointly present "Disputing Titles and Delineating Identities: Conflicts over Land and Landownership between Zoroastrians and Christians in the Sasanian Legal Milieu" on Friday, February 14, 2025, 1 p.m. (Eastern Time: Canada & US)

Abstract:
Legal sources from the Sasanian Empire rarely provide abstract definitions for legal concepts, institutions, or practices. Consequently, one of the primary challenges for legal historians in this field is the meticulous reconstruction of key characteristics from fragmented information scattered across cases, anecdotes, debates, and narratives found in both legal and non-legal sources. The concept of land ownership is no exception: the sources lack explicit or formal definitions of land, ownership, or possession. Significantly, legal ambiguities often surface most sharply during instances of contestation, conflict, and controversy. This study, therefore, centers on land ownership disputes, examining how litigants articulated their claims and sought to legitimize their titles within the framework of Sasanian jurisprudence. Moreover, these disputes provide an additional lens into the complexities of land ownership, as some sources document intrafaith conflicts over property, particularly among religious institutions, most prominently between Zoroastrians and Syriac Christians. This paper aims to illuminate these elusive concepts of land and landownership by analyzing key texts from the diverse legal traditions within the Sasanian legal milieu. These include Ishō‘bokht’s Corpus Juris, the Mādayān ī Hazār Dādestān, the Babylonian Talmud, and accounts from acts of martyrs. By exploring these sources, the study sheds light on the nature of land ownership, its intersections with religious identity, and its role in delineating group boundaries within the pluralistic society of the Sasanian Empire.

Bio:
Nima Jamali is a FRQSC (B3Z) postdoctoral research fellow in the Department of Middle Eastern Studies, University of Chicago, and in the Department of Classics and Religious Studies, University of Ottawa. He earned his Ph.D. in 2021 from the Department of Near and Middle Eastern Civilizations (NMC) at the University of Toronto. His dissertation was an edition, commentary, analysis and English translation of an eighth century Syriac legal text, Ishō‛-bokht’s Corpus Juris. His primary focus is on the legal history of the Middle East and the Mediterranean world in late antiquity.  His work has appeared in academic journals, including Iran Namag, Hugoye, and the Journal of the Canadian Society for Syriac Studies. In his current position, he is working on a monograph titled “Statute of Limitations: A History of Legal Thought and Tradition in the Church of The East (480–850 CE).”

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