Luke Yarbrough (Associate Professor, UCLA) is a scholar of Islamic history and thought, working primarily on inter-religious relations, law, and administrative history. He is the author of Friends of the Emir: Non-Muslim State Officials in Premodern Islamic Thought (Cambridge, 2019); the editor/translator of The Sword of Ambition (New York, 2016), and a co-editor of Minorities in Contact in the Medieval Mediterranean (Brepols, 2020) and Conversion to Islam in the Premodern Age (University of California Press, 2020). He earned his PhD in the Department of Near Eastern Studies in 2012.

In this talk I will share my knowledge of Palestine in the years before the Crusades is spotty at best. This talk presents an unpublished source that sheds light on how the state there was run in the last decade before the Franks invaded. Entitled A Compendium of the Secretary's Craft, it was written by a theologian from the eminent Tustari family and is now being studied by an international team of scholars. We will learn what new information the work provides, as well as some of the issues it raises. For instance, what significance should we attach to the fact that the author both belonged to a minority sect of Judaism and wrote authoritatively in Arabic on how to administer an Islamic state?