“The Daughter of al-Andalus”: Interrelations between Norman Sicily and the Muslim West, Al-Masaq: Islam and the Medieval Mediterranean, 25:1 (2013) (original) (raw)

The Other Al-Andalus - When Muslims and Christians Flourished Side By Side in Sicily

I sometimes think about the glories of “Islamic Spain,” or Al-Andalus. Starting around 711 and ending in 1492, Muslim rulers maintained a spirit of convivencia, a Spanish term meaning “living in togetherness” or “coexistence”, which allowed for an unprecedented level of interfaith engagement on the European continent. While Al-Andalus may represent the pinnacle of cooperation among Muslims, Christians and Jews, there is also a brilliant history – too often ignored and still inadequately assessed – coming out of Sicily, an island belonging to modern-day Italy. The unique society that developed in Sicily is hardly mentioned by historians of Europe, Christianity or Islam. Over the course of several centuries, interfaith exchanges in cultural, religious and scientific fields led to a hybrid culture stemming from Norman,Arab and Byzantine influences. For a time, Sicily was truly the crossroads between East and West, Islam and Christianity. The island was one of the rare bright spots of the Middle Ages.

Longo, Anzelmo - From Creation to Communication Reviewing Art in Norman Sicily PREVIEW

Norman Connections. Normannische Verflechtungen Zwischen Skandinavien und dem Mittelmeer, Reiss-Engelhorn-Museen, Mannheim, October 15-17 2020, Mannheim 2022, pp. 263-291; ISBN: 978-3-7954-3670-4, 2022

In the context of the Normans' expansion in Europe and the medieval Mediterranean, the events in southern Italy represent a peculiar case of the construction of a new cultural identity. Like the new Kingdom of England, the Norman Kingdom of Sicily, founded in 1130 by Roger II of Altavilla, is an accomplished project of establishing a new political entity. In Sicily, the Normans also had to deal with a multicultural and multireligious environment, adopting strategies of cultural mediation that were singular in the Mediterranean and European context. These strategies-having political and propagandistic purposes-are explicitly manifested in the arts and aesthetic languages, characterized by the use of multicultural elements from the Byzantine, Latin, and Islamic worlds. The art and architecture of Norman Sicily, in which it is possible to recognize the most obvious features of Norman-Sicilian cultural syncretism, thus played an identity role in the history of Sicily from the 12th century onward, with an epigone in the 19th century. The enhancement of this cultural heritage culminates recently with the inscription of Arab-Norman Palermo on the UNESCO World Heritage List. Taking into account the most recent research findings, the article analyzes the artistic phenomenon through some exemplary cases to understand the genesis of Norman-Sicilian aesthetic syncretism. Some milestones of local revivalism are also traced, which from time to time reaffirmed the expressive and communicative power of Arab-Norman art.

I nostri saracini, Writing the history of the Arabs of Sicily

During the nineteenth century, Sicilian Orientalists wrote the story of Sicily’s domination by the Arabs and the Arabic-language culture of the Normans – centuries of eventful history that had been lost to the West because European historians could not read Arabic documents. In their histories, Sicilians identified an alternate origin for European modernity: the vibrant Arab culture of the medieval Mediterranean transmitted to the continent through borderland states like the Kingdom of Sicily. This essay examines the lives and scholarship of three nineteenth-century Sicilian Orientalists – Pietro Lanza, Vincenzo Mortillaro, and Michele Amari – who worked to articulate a Mediterranean origin for European modernity.

The Islamic West (North Africa, Iberia and Sicily), 700–1492

Sir Banister Fletcher’s Global History of Architecture, Volume 1, Murray Fraser (ed.) and Catherine Gregg (managing ed.), 2019

The new Banister Fletcher is Winner of the Colvin Prize for 2020 as awarded by the Society of Architectural Historians of Great Britain (https://www.sahgb.org.uk/colvin-prize). The volume, which comprises 88 essays, also received an Honourable Mention in the American Library Association's 2019 Dartmouth Medal Awards. My essay surveys the architecture of the medieval Islamic West (North Africa, Iberia, and Sicily) from the 8th to the 15th centuries.