Malissa Taylor

Professor Taylor specializes in the history of the Middle East in the early modern period (1400-1800). Professor Taylor’s research interests include configurations of religious and political authority in the Muslim world during the early modern period, the political and social relations of agrarian empires, and the evolution of the Arab world in the Ottoman era. As Director of Middle Eastern Studies, her goal is to promote student interest in the study of Middle Eastern languages and to facilitate student pursuit of the major and the minor in Middle Eastern Studies.

Her current research project examines works on proper conduct and the practice of virtue in the sixteenth- to eighteenth-century Ottoman Empire. Historians often consider Muslims to be a community defined by common beliefs, common worship practices, or adherence to shari‘a (Islamic law). But what if one of the most important ways that Muslims tended to define their community in this period was by their adherence to a set of shared virtues and a set of methods for embodying these virtues? Professor Taylor’s study will argue that this way of defining what it is to be Muslim—distinguishing the essential virtues (such as patience, courage, contentment) and striving to resemble those who practice them—was widespread across the Arabic-speaking world and the region now known as the Balkans-to-Bengal complex. Historians have largely overlooked this mode of defining what it is to be a Muslim; yet it was crucial for understanding how Muslims would grapple with what it meant to be Muslim in the modern world.

Professor Taylor’s first book, Land and Legal Texts in the Early Modern Ottoman Empire: Harmonization, Property Rights and Sovereignty argued that the issuing of property rights to the Ottoman peasantry in the sixteenth century birthed an indigenous form of property that over time became increasingly widespread and integral to Ottoman economic, political and social life. Over the following centuries, this property formation was extended to a wider variety of social groups, was adopted in a broader geographic range of imperial provinces and ultimately remained intact in the 1858 Land Code, when it was bestowed upon all Ottoman subjects. Moreover, the legal institutionalization of this property formation over three hundred years helped to pave the way for the wider legislative authority that the Ottoman state would increasingly assert in the Tanzimat period of reform.

Many of her published articles have also challenged conventional wisdom about property law in the history of the Middle East. Her most recent critiques social theory positing that security of property and its legal institutionalization depends on the relationship between an elite class and a ruler rather than the relationship between the peasant cultivator class and a ruler (2025). Other articles have investigated the authority vested in villagers to collect agricultural taxes and their difficulty in collecting from elites resident in their villages (2018); the changing position of Damascene Muslim jurists on the question of women inheriting the treasury-owned land of their deceased male relatives (2012); the growth of population in the oasis areas of rural Damascus that challenges the reigning perception of a demographic decline in the Syrian countryside (2010); and the similarities and differences in the anxieties expressed by scholars and political authorities in the Middle East and Christian Europe about the adoption of the printing press (2010). An article currently under review demonstrates that Ottoman law does not treat treasury-owned land as something closer to private property over the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (‘When he is grown…’). An article in process revisits the question of women’s inheritance in Damascus and examines how the jurists’ evolving thought on this question helps us understand how the muftis configured cosmopolitan and local authority in Islamic jurisprudence.

Professor Taylor has received fellowships from the Fulbright-Hays Commission, the Council of American Overseas Research Centers and the Woodrow Wilson foundation. In 2020-21, she was a Lilly Fellow.