Mathieu Tillier was awarded the Sheikh Zayed Book Award

"L’invention du cadi. La justice des musulmans, des juifs et des chrétiens aux premiers siècles de l’Islam", published in 2017, was awarded a prize in the “Arab culture in other languages” category. This work offers a comparative approach of documentary and literary sources concerned with the beginning of the Islamic judicial system. It reconstructs the organisational characteristics of the qadi’s administration under the Umayyads and the first Abbasids, as well as its intrinsic development and processes, in order to shed light on the rationale behind its evolutions. 

The Sheikh Zayed Book Award rewards intellectuals, researchers and authors who have made a significant contribution to modern literature, social sciences, culture and knowledge. This award is an independent cultural initiative supported by the Abu Dhabi Department of Culture and Tourism. 

The prizes of the 17th edition were awarded May 23rd at the Abu Dhabi Book Fair.  

Mathieu Tillier obtained the agrégation (teacher trainign degree) in Arab studies in 1999, and, in 2004, defended a PhD thesis in history dedicated to the judicial reforms that resulted from the 750 Abbasid revolution (Université Lumière-Lyon 2). He became a lecturer at Aix-Marseille Université in 2005, and was granted secondments at Oxford University from 2008 on, thanks to a European Marie Skłodowska-Curie funding, and at the Institut français du Proche-Orient (Damascus, and then Beirut). It was in Oxford that he started a new enquiry about the oldest developments of a plural justice system in the 8th-century Middle-East, which included Islamic, Jewish and Christian courts. This research was the subject of an accreditation to supervise research, which he obtained in 2013, as well as the book "L’invention du cadi", published in 2017. 

Since he became a professor at the Faculty of Arts and Humanities of Sorbonne University in 2014, he has carried on exploring social dynamics in the Medieval Islamic World, in particular through the prism of papyrus texts. His latest work, Supplier Dieu dans l’Égypte toulounide. Le florilège de l’invocation d’après Ḫālid b. Yazīd [IIIe/IXe siècle], written in collaboration with Naïm Vanthieghem, delves into how devotion was expressed during the first centuries of Islam.