Who are the Romans? The Definition of Bilād al-Rūm (Land of the Romans) in Medieval Islamic Geographies (original) (raw)
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Surat Bahr al Rum"(Picture of the Sea of Byzantium): Possible Meanings Underlying the Forms
RESEARCH NOTEBOOKS, 2009
In this paper, I examine and deconstruct the “classical” medieval Islamic conception of the Mediterranean as seen through colorful, miniature maps found in medieval Arabic and Persian geographical manuscripts from the 11th to 17th centuries. In his classic book “Mohammad and Charlemagne” (1939), the Belgian scholar Henri Pirenne set forth what has since come to be known as the Pirenne thesis, expressing the dominant European view that the sudden advent of Islam on the “other” side of the Mediterranean disrupted the unity of the “Roman Lake” forever. “With Islam a new world was established on those Mediterranean shores, which had formerly known the syncretism of the Roman civilization. A complete break was made, which was to continue even to our own day. Henceforth two different and hostile civilizations existed on the shores of Mare Nostrum. The sea, which had hitherto been the center of Christianity became its frontier”. A similarly antagonistic picture is presented by some scholars of the medieval Islamic approach to the Mediterranean. (See, for instance, André Miquel’s discussion of the subject in “La géographie humaine du monde musulman”). Do the detailed maps of the Mediterranean and its surrounding littorals prepared by medieval Muslim geographers reinforce this traditional, polarized, oppositional view? If not, what kind of a vision of the sea do the maps present? What can the pictorial depictions of the sea be taken to signify? Did they mutate over time? The surprising, counter-intuitive responses to some of these questions form the core of this paper.
La géographie du nouveau roman saoudien selon Yūsuf al-Muḥaymīd
Arabian Humanities [En ligne], 3 | 2014, 2014
The aim of this paper is to analyse the relationship between al‑dākhil, the term Saudis use to define their country, and al‑khārij, the “outside”, in the novels of the Saudi writer Yūsuf al‑Muḥaymīd. In my attempt I will espouse Franco Moretti’s theory on “Literary geography” or “Geocriticism” developed in his essay La letteratura vista da lontano published in 2005. If we locate the characters and events described in a novel on an imaginary geographical atlas we obtain, according to Moretti, a series of “literary maps”, which will eventually reveal “the direct relationship between social conflict and aesthetic form”. By mapping Yūsuf al‑Muḥaymīd’s novels, I will show that the author draws the internal dimension of the country only in its relation to the “outside”, inspiring an in‑depth critical investigation in apparently assumed concepts such as “the limits of a State”, the “territoriality”, the “citizenship”, and the “cultural identity”.
"Mediaeval Europe as seen by the Arab Geographers (10th - 15th c.)"
A number of publications over the past decade, including those of Daniel König, Giuseppe Mandala, Marco di Branco and Nizar Hermes, have shown that it is no longer really possible to maintain that the Arab-Muslim writers of the Middle Ages were not curious about European matters. The relative proximity of Byzantium and the Carolingian shores to Baghdad plus the contact that the city had with Eurasian populations through the Caucasus produced a stream of information from the 9 th Century onwards about these peoples who, although from neighbouring countries, differed from one another in religion, culture and political organisation (at least in the cases where a State was established).
2014 Contested and common ground: Geography and history at the limits of the early Islamic conquests
Ancient Near Eastern Studies 51, 2014
In the historiography of the early Islamic conquests (here, mainly 632-656), mountains, rivers, and places characterised by extremes of nature, such as severe heat or cold, represent straightforward physical barriers against armies but also have two kinds of symbolic significance. First, they were the settings for stories -plausibly crafted to inspire or galvanise audiences -about prevailing over even the toughest opponents. Second, they were contexts within which complex political and ideological issues relating to the conquests were explored by authors. A pattern emerges wherein among the Christian histories more symbolic spaces belong to the first category than the second, whereas in the Arabic texts the reverse applies. This distinction reflects the divergent perspectives of defenders and conquerors, but also reveals the contrasting positions of Christian and Muslim authors relative in time and space to the events they describe. On the other hand, there is also much shared ground in how spaces are depicted across the Arabic and Christian accounts. The outlooks of people on opposing sides had perhaps a surprising amount in common. A unified study of representations of space in the source material for the conquests ultimately provides a more comprehensive understanding of what occurred at this major turning point in world history.*
Arabic-Islamic Views of the Latin West. Tracing the Emergence of Medieval Europe
"Arabic-Islamic Views of the Latin West" (http://ukcatalogue.oup.com/product/9780198737193.do#) provides an insight into how the Arabic-Islamic sphere perceived medieval Western Europe in an age that is often associated with violent Christian-Muslim relations during the rise and expansion of Islam, the so-called Reconquista, and the Crusades. A long and dominant scholarly tradition claims that Muslims of this period held an arrogant and ignorant attitude towards its northern neighbours, merely regarding medieval Christian Europe as an uncivilized and hostile cultural backwater clinging to a superseded religion. The study nuances this view by focussing on the mechanisms of transmission and reception that characterized the flow of information from one sphere to the other. By explaining how Arabic-Islamic scholars acquired and processed data on medieval Western Europe, it traces the two-fold ‘emergence’ of Latin-Christian Europe—a sphere that increasingly encroached upon the Mediterranean and therefore became more and more prominent in Arabic-Islamic scholarly literature. Chapter One questions previous interpretations of related Arabic-Islamic records that reduce a large and differentiated range of Arabic-Islamic perceptions to a single basic pattern subsumed under the keywords ‘ignorance’, ‘indifference’, and ‘arrogance’. Chapter Two lists channels of transmission by means of which information on the Latin-Christian Europe reached the Arabic-Islamic sphere. Chapter Three deals with the general factors that influenced the reception and presentation of this data at the hands of Arabic-Islamic scholars. Chapters Four to Eight analyse how these scholars acquired and dealt with information on themes such as the western dimension of the Roman Empire, the Visigoths, the Franks, the papacy and, finally, Western Europe in the age of Latin-Christian expansionism. Against this background, Chapter Nine provides a concluding re-evaluation.
Mediterranean Historical Review, a special issue in memory of David Jacoby, “Byzantium between East and West”. , 2021
The concept that cultures are neither pure nor immutable but diverse and flexible is not a new one. Cultural hybridity constitutes the effort to retain a sense of balance among traditions, beliefs, practices, institutions, rituals, and imagery within a multicultural venue. The cultural encounter that the conquering Crusaders experienced in the Latin East entailed the process of hybridization of sociocultural constructs, resulting in a new, sophisticated identity that reflected a vital social organism, which resided both within and beyond the margins of country, race, ethnicity, class, and linguistic diversity. Strangers and conquerors in the Land of the Bible, the Latin Crusaders and pilgrims sometimes felt that ‘It would take long to tell’ about that cultural and multi-creed blend. In this paper, I refer to Queen Melisende (1105-61) as the cultural agent that in herself represented hybridity, and in whose patronage the religious and public domain of Jerusalem was designed anew, demonstrating intriguing diversity and intrinsic artistic patterns of the Frankish contextualisation of local eastern and foreign occidental components within the political boundaries of the relocation. I discuss three visual case studies that embody the Frankish new, performative imagery, and in particular that of Queen Melisende, who in all probability commissioned them. The selection of artefacts follows David Jacoby's major research interests.