Essay 1 - The Formative Period, AD 650-1050 (original) (raw)
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Historiography and archaeological research have traditionally defined mosques mainly as religious spaces or places to pray, without further specifications. This simplification has usually dominated the analyses of mosques, while other uses or functional aspects of these buildings were put aside. The scarcity of material information available for years to approach these buildings, together with the dominance of the more monumental examples—such as the great mosque of Córdoba—provoked that analyses about other more modest mosques were scarce or almost inexistent. However, in recent decades, the proliferation of real estate building activities has led to the recovery of many new and fresh archaeological data related to other mosques different from the Friday ones. Specifically, in Córdoba, the volume of information recovered has been enormous, and concerns not only mosques as isolated buildings, but also their urban environments, construction processes, and evolution along the centuries. Therefore, in this paper, we offer a summarized overview of the state of the arts about research on mosques in al-Andalus, presenting the main problems and limitations of the topic until now, and also the case of Córdoba and the main results achieved there as a reference for further actions to be undertaken in the rest of the territory.
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The Islamic-Byzantine frontier has become the centre of scholarly attention and, as a result, redefined. Recent archaeological and textual work on the ṯuġūr or Islamic-Byzantine frontier, supports the presence of settlements, communities, and people traversing back and forth and refute the notion of a »no-man’s land«. However, textual evidence, mainly from Abbasid period sources, largely dates these activities from the mid-eighth to tenth centuries 1. Evidence from archaeological surveys and excavations also supports more intensive settlement in the eighth to tenth centuries. Nevertheless, the idea of an unsettled frontier, as a default, should not necessarily include the period from the mid-seventh to mid-eighth centuries, implying an initial century of frontier fighting over a depopulated no-man’s land. Focusing on the initial settlement of the frontier bears important implications for understanding the relationships between locals and between locals and the Umayyad ruling elite. This paper will utilize results from surveys and excavation combined with textual evidence from Greek, Arabic, and Syriac sources to closely examine the nature of settlement and social organization in the newly-acquired Islamic lands of the ṯuġūr in the seventh and eighth centuries. During this century, the Umayyad state and local, predominately Miaphysite Syriac-speaking Christian communities, both autonomously and in cooperation, developed key agricultural settlements alongside irrigation systems on the frontier.