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Al-Andalus, the Arabic name for the medieval Islamic state in Iberia, endured for over 750 years following the Arab and Berber conquest of Hispania in 711. While the popular perception of al-Andalus is that of a land of religious tolerance and cultural cooperation, the fact is that we know relatively little about how Muslims governed Christians and Jews in al-Andalus and about social relations among Muslims, Christians, and Jews. In Defining Boundaries in al-Andalus, Janina M. Safran takes a close look at the structure and practice of Muslim political and legal-religious authority and offers a rare look at intercommunal life in Iberia during the first three centuries of Islamic rule.Safran makes creative use of a body of evidence that until now has gone largely untapped by historians—the writings and opinions of Andalusi and Maghribi jurists during the Umayyad dynasty. These sources enable her to bring to life a society undergoing dramatic transformation. Obvious differences between conquerors and conquered and Muslims and non-Muslims became blurred over time by transculturation, intermarriage, and conversion. Safran examines ample evidence of intimate contact between individuals of different religious communities and of legal-juridical accommodation to develop an argument about how legal-religious authorities interpreted the social contract between the Muslim regime and the Christian and Jewish populations. Providing a variety of examples of boundary-testing and negotiation and bringing judges, jurists, and their legal opinions and texts into the narrative of Andalusi history, Safran deepens our understanding of the politics of Umayyad rule, makes Islamic law tangibly social, and renders intercommunal relations vividly personal.
Due to the long presence of Muslims in Islamic territories (Al-Andalus and Granada) and of Muslims minorities in the Christians parts, the Iberian Peninsula provides a fertile soil for the study of the Qur’an and Qur’an translations made by both Muslims and Christians. From the mid-twelfth century to at least the end of the seventeenth, the efforts undertaken by Christian scholars and churchmen, by converts, by Muslims (both Mudejars and Moriscos) to transmit, interpret and translate the Holy Book are of the utmost importance for the understanding of Islam in Europe. This book reflects on a context where Arabic books and Arabic speakers who were familiar with the Qur’an and its exegesis coexisted with Christian scholars. The latter not only intended to convert Muslims, and polemize with them but also to adquire solid knowledge about them and about Islam. Qur’ans were seized during battle, bought, copied, translated, transmitted, recited, and studied. The different features and uses of the Qur’an on Iberian soil, its circulation as well as the lives and works of those who wrote about it and the responses of their audiences, are the object of this book.
How did an obscure Islamic visionary found an empire? The Almohad Empire at its zenith in the 12th century was the major power in Mediterranean and North Africa, ruling a huge and disparate region from the Atlas Mountains to Tunisia, Morocco and Andalusia. Allen Fromherz, drawing on medieval Arabic and Berber sources, analyses the history and myths surrounding the rise of the Almohads. He shows how Muhammad Ibn Tumart, the son of an obscure Berber tribal chief, founded his mission to reform Islam - then at a low point in its history, battered by the crusades, having lost Jerusalem and been undermined by weak spiritual and political leadership. Ibn Tumart was proclaimed Mahdi by the Berber tribes, as one who heralded the golden age of Islam. He provided charismatic leadership, and a message of unswerving adherence to absolute monotheism and fundamental Islam, to be enforced by jihad - holy war. He died in 1130, before his dream could be accomplished but his successors quickly built on his foundation, conquering Marrakech - the door to the Sahara gold trade and the greatest city of commerce and trade in North Africa. Ibn Tumart and his legacy were to prove the launch-pad for empire, leading to Almohad domination of the Western Mediterranean from Tunisia to Morocco and Andalusia. It became the seat of a brilliant civilisation, the seed-bed of a 12th-century renaissance and flowering of scholarship which reached far into the Middle East and Europe. Fromherz shows how Tumart formed the sinews of empire - by charismatic leadership, a reformed and powerful Islam, unity based on the closely-knit traditions of the Berber tribes, military power and sound administration. This is the first account of the Almohads in English and will be essential for all who are interested in Islam, the Almohad Empire, North Africa and Middle East, and the lasting cultural effect on the region and on Europe.
The Iberian Peninsula has always been an integral part of the Mediterranean world, from the age of Tartessos and the Phoenicians to our own era and the Union for the Mediterranean. The cutting-edge essays in this volume examine what it means for medieval and early modern Iberia and its people to be considered as part of the Mediterranean.
The volume contains highly original articles on Islamic history, law, and thought, each either proposing new hypotheses or readjusting existing ones. The contributions range from studies in the formulation of the pre-Islamic Arabian calendar to notes on the "blood-money group" in Islamic law, and to transformations in Arabic logic in the post-Avicennan period. Prepared by former students of Michael A. Cook, to whom this volume is dedicated, these studies not only shed new light on the development of the Islamic scholarly tradition from various perspectives, but together they also represent the honoree's vast, profound, and continuing impact on the field. This collection of highly empirical articles is intended for scholars and students specializing in various subfields within Islamic Studies.
This book is a valuable contribution to the study of messianism and millenarianism in the history of Muslim Spain and pre-Modern Morocco presented in a broader framework of research on Muslim eschatological beliefs and Islamic ideas on legitimate power.
The thirteenth century marks a turning point in the history of the western Mediterranean. The armies of Castile and Aragon won significant and decisive victories over Muslims in Iberia and took over a number of important cities including Cordoba, Seville, Jaen, and Murcia. Chased out of their native cities, a large number of Andalusis migrated to Ifrīqiyā in northern Africa. There, a newly founded Hafsid dynasty (1229-1574) welcomed members of the Andalusi elite and showered them with honors and high positions at court. While historians have tended to conceive of Ifrīqiyā as a region ruled by the Hafsids, Ramzi Rouighi argues in The Making of a Mediterranean Emirate that the Andalusis who joined the Hafsid court supported economic arrangements and political relationships that effectively prevented regional integration from taking place during this period. Rouighi examines an array of documentary, literary, and legal sources to argue that Ifrīqiyā was integrated neither politically nor economically and that, consequently, it was not a region in a meaningful sense. Through a close reading of narrative sources, especially historical chronicles, Rouighi further argues that the emergence in the late fourteenth century of the political ideology of Emirism accounts for the representation of the rule of the Hafsid dynasty over cities as its rule over the whole of Ifrīqiyā. Setting the activities of Andalusis such as the celebrated historian Ibn Khaldūn (1332-1406) in relation to specific political, economic, and intellectual developments in Ifrīqiyā, The Making of a Mediterranean Emirate proposes a counter to the dynastic-centric view of the period that pervades medieval sources and continues to inform most modern generalizations about the Maghrib and the Mediterranean.
Contributions by: Moshe Gil, Joel L. Kraemer, P.Sj. van Koningsveld, Gideon Goldenberg, R.J. Hayward, Geoffrey Khan, Anson F. Rainey, Shlomo Raz, Daniel Sivan, and J. Sadan.
One of the main cultural consequences of the contacts between Islam and the West has been the borrowing of hundreds of words, mostly of Arabic but also of other important languages of the Islamic world, such as Persian, Turkish, Berber, etc. by Western languages. Such loanwords are particularly abundant and relevant in the case of the Iberian Peninsula because of the presence of Islamic states in it for many centuries; their study is very revealing when it comes to assess the impact of those states in the emergence and shaping of Western civilization. Some famous Arabic scholars, above all R. Dozy, have tackled this task in the past, followed by other attempts at increasing and improving his pioneering work; however, the progresses achieved during the last quarter of the 20th c., in such fields as Andalusi and Andalusi Romance dialectology and lexicology made it necessary to update all the available information on this topic and to offer it in English.
Freedom of expression and its direct counterpart, censorship and silencing, are increasingly gaining attention in the world of art and culture. Through the growth of social media and its worldwide distribution, arts and cultural products are shared, and the increased visibility and audibility of culture is highlighted through iconic and pivotal clashes, such as the fatwa on The Satanic Verses in 1989, the recurring bans on the music of Wagner, the alleged censorship of playlists following 9/11, and the cartoon crisis in 2006. This volume takes the discussion directly to the field of music studies in a broad frame and insists on examining music censorship in a global perspective. The book addresses the important and increasingly relevant issue of scholarship on music censorship and thus contributes to a detailed understanding of the phenomenon. Often, words and semantic meaning are held to be determining to the restrictions on musicians and singers, but as this collection documents, the reasons for censorship might not always be found in verbal messages. Rather, the positioning of a more broad understanding of why and how music can convey meaning and accordingly trigger censorship and bans is at the heart of this work. The complexity of music censorship includes historical, structural as well as emotional ‘listenings’ and interpretations of sound. The topic, accordingly, is political, as well as scholarly urgent.