Cartas y noticias de ambos lados del Estrecho: el universo Jatibiano a través de la 'Nufadat al-yirab' (Letters and news from both sides of the Strait of Gibraltar: the Khatibian universe through 'Nufadat al-yirab') (original) (raw)
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University of Chicago PhD Dissertation, 2019
This dissertation explores the relationship between intellectual networks, royal patronage and developments in political thought in late medieval Islamic Spain and North Africa. It proposes a new reading of the history of the Nasrid Kingdom of Granada (635/1238–897/1492) that examines these broader issues by closely studying the life and works of Lisān al-Dīn Muḥammad b. al-Khaṭīb (713/1313–776/1374), the most prominent Spanish Muslim historian, chancellor and philosopher during the 8th/14th century, situating this figure within a larger network of scholars, statesmen and functionaries in the late medieval Islamic West. This dissertation illustrates the manner in which the crisis and transformation that characterized the territorial fragmentation of Islamic Spain and North Africa contributed to the rise of a distinct class of scholar-officials who reshaped the intellectual and political culture of the Western Mediterranean. It argues that the gradual concentration of executive political authority in the hands of scholar-officials, such as Ibn al-Khaṭīb, was part of the process of the consolidation of royal power at the expense of the nobility during the late Middle Ages. For their part, these scholar-officials composed works across a variety of genres that sought to legitimate and rationalize the centralization of royal authority. To examine this phenomenon, this dissertation draws upon a corpus of Arabic, Castilian and Aragonese manuscripts, as well as coinage and epigraphy. It investigates the lives of those individuals who existed in close proximity to royal power during the late medieval period in order to explore how their own experiences and ideas fashioned discourses about sovereignty, governmentality and the craft of history during the 14th century. The rise of a distinct class of scholar-officials, whose members included Christians, Muslims and Jews working for different (often competing) dynasties, was underpinned by similar networks of patronage, intellectual interests and a shared geography. These highly-educated individuals rose to prominence as chancellors, treasurers, and councilors within the royal courts in Iberia and were responsible for producing a multitude of works, while patronizing pieces of art and architecture that embodied their particular worldview. Lisān al-Dīn b. al-Khaṭīb provides us with an illustrative example of this class of individuals during the 8th/14th century. This figure followed in the footsteps of leading Spanish Muslim scholar-officials such as Abū Bakr b. al-Khaṭṭāb, Ibn ‘Amīra, Ibn Sa‘īd and Ibn al-Abbār, individuals who had exercised significant administrative and political authority while also being deeply involved in various intellectual and literary pursuits during the 7th/13th century. Ibn al-Khaṭīb authored over 50 works, including historical chronicles, epistolography, biographical dictionaries, poetry, medical texts, and political treatises, throughout his career. This dissertation illustrates his role at the intersection of intellectual and political developments and demonstrates how his literary production was closely intertwined with his function as a statesman. It provides the first comprehensive study in English of Ibn al-Khaṭīb’s life, from his birth into a minor family in the small town of Loja in 713/1313 to his rise as a physician and scribe in the Nasrid court, his transformation from a client and servant of the Nasrid dynasty into an itinerant scholar-official who sought to establish his own individual power and influence across the Islamic West, to his controversial assassination in Fez in 776/1374. It looks particularly closely at the letters that he exchanged with his broader network of scholars, nobles, functionaries and kings across the Mediterranean world to think about the question of loyalty, ties of obligation and individual strategies of survival in the Islamic West during this period. https://search-proquest-com.proxy.uchicago.edu/docview/2202894085?accountid=14657
Inhabiting the Strait. Towards a Euro-African Subjectivity in Premodern Arabic Texts
Intus-Legere Historia, 2020
The present work sets the basis of a corpus of Arabic texts in the context of the 14th century crisis over the Strait of Gibraltar, for the study of a Euro-African subjectivity. It has two parts. The first one describes the socio-political and cultural situation in which this transitional crisis towards European modernity took place, with particular emphasis on the resulting division between the two shores of the Islamic West and the intellectual Arab-Muslim elite that inhabited it. The second part approaches the general lines of a project of epistemological innovation carried out by said elite, to define a version of modernity according to their own culture. This work also defends the need for an empirical study of premodern subjectivity through language, understanding this subjectivity in astronomical terms, to outline the conceptualization of the project.
This article presents a newly discovered manuscript containing a version of the story of the Seven Travels of Sindbād the Sailor (Ms Cleveland, Public Library, Q 385.3A P445H) that bears witness to a crucial phase of its transmission from East to West. The manuscript contains the Arabic text of the oldest version hitherto known (written in Aleppo in 1672), along with an interlinear Latin translation, and it is followed by an Arabic-Latin word list. It includes another version of the French translation attributed to François Pétis de la Croix (1653-1713), titled Histoire Arabe de Sindabad le Marin, also given in Ms Munich, Bavarian State Library, cod.gall. 799. The French translation of the story of Sindbād made by Pétis de la Croix and reproduced in these two manuscripts dates to four years earlier (1701) from when Antoine Galland (1646-1715) published his first alleged translation within the Mille et une Nuits (1705). The present article focuses on Ms Cleveland, Public Library, Q 385.3A P445H and examines it in comparison with Ms Munich, Bavarian State Library, cod.gall. 799 as a crucial witness of the earliest phase of the textual history of the Seven Travels of Sindbād the Sailor.
Fixing a Misbegotten Biography: Ziryāb In the Mediterranean World
Al-Masaq, 2009
The generally accepted biography of the famous Cordoban musician and composer, Alī b. Nāfiʿ Ziryāb (d. 242/857), contains evident problems of chronology and content and is based almost entirely upon one source, al-Maqqarī’s Nafḥ al-ṭīb min ghuṣn al-Andalus al-raṭīb, written in the eleventh/seventeenth century. Modern scholarship generally has overlooked the fifth/eleventh-century source for this late version of his biography and has not taken other, earlier sources into account. The result is a misbegotten biography that distorts both its subject and the Mediterranean world in which Ziryāb lived. This article refines the biography of Ziryāb by using the earliest available Arabic sources, including works by Ibn ʿAbd Rabbih (d. 328/940), Ibn al-Qūṭiyya (d. 365/977), Ibn Ḥayyān al-Qurṭubī (d. 469/1076), Ahmad al-Tīfāshī (d. 651/1253) and Ibn Khaldūn (d. 803/1402). By comparing these accounts and attempting to reconcile their inconsistencies, the paper proposes a more logical chronology for Ziryāb’s career that not only resolves obvious problems with the standard biography, but also portrays this important artist in relation to the network of political and economic institutions that united the eastern and western ends of the Islamic Mediterranean world in the early third/ninth century.
NYU Abu Dhabi Critical Humanities, 2019
In the middle of the 13th century, the fall of the Almohad empire meant the end of the Islamic West unity over the Strait of Gibraltar. A century later, an Andalusian family will propitiate, in connection with the Maghreb, the last joint Arab-Islamic cultural splendor between the Iberian Peninsula and North Africa before the advent of European modernity. This presentation highlights the work of an Arab elite who bequeathed an exceptional output in such a context. First, it shows an outbreak of self-expression that will culminate in the memoirs of exile and the autobiography of the two most prominent figures: the Granadian Ibn al-Khatib and the Tunisian Ibn Khaldun. Second, it places both characters within a network of sages who contributed to a wave of innovations in various fields of knowledge, with a clear tendency towards pragmatism and the centrality of human experience. Third, it questions the general idea of a gap between the two sides of the Strait after the fall of Granada. Finally, the presentation will advocate for the necessity of a dialogue between philology and language technologies in this case study, indicating some of the challenges that Arabic poses in this process.
The Preaching of the Almohads: Loyalty and Resistance across the Strait of Gibraltar
Medieval Encounters 19 (2013), 2013
One of the lacunas in Almohad scholarship is the role that preaching played in disseminating Almohad ideology throughout the empire and its contributions to fostering unity between Muslim Iberia and the Maghrib. This article analyzes the distinctive rhetorical, ritual, and juridical features of the Almohad sermon (khuṭba) and explores how the Almohads deployed religious preaching and ceremonial oratory to pursue their religio-political objectives of purifying Islamic institutions and practices. I argue that the ritual and juridical innovations Ibn Tūmart and the Mu’minids introduced into the khuṭba ceremony, such as the obligatory Berberization and the compulsory invocation of the Almohad creed, exemplifijied the revolutionary aspects of Almohad power. Accordingly, the Almohad khuṭba would come to simultaneously focalize allegiance and opposition to the regime on both sides of the Strait. I conclude that the institutionalization of the Almohad khuṭba as well as the resistance to it must be considered among the elements that fostered unity between Arabs and Berbers across the Strait of Gibraltar.