Reshaping Marketplaces

2020 ◽  
pp. 149-174
Author(s):  
Fanny Bessard
Keyword(s):  
Near East ◽  
Power Dynamics ◽  
Late Antique ◽  
Early Medieval ◽  
Agrarian Society ◽  
Early Islam ◽  
Early Islamic

Early Islamic marketplaces have been studied almost exclusively for their art historical and architectural values, by Maxime Rodinson in the preface of El señor del zoco en España, while their functioning and process of development have not yet been fully elucidated. It is also believed that marketplaces in early Islam functioned as their late antique predecessors, with apparently nothing bequeathed from pre-Islamic Arabia, where dedicated spaces for trade were extremely rare. This chapter considers what happened to urban marketplaces in the Near East after the Muslim conquests, to look at the fate of the late antique legacy under the new Arab masters—a people with contrasting indigenous commercial traditions—in the context of new power dynamics from 700 to 950. It explores the ways in which early medieval marketplaces differed from the late antique past, and the role they played in the agrarian society of early Islam.

scholarly journals Fluid Boundaries: Christian Sacred Space and Islamic Relics in an Early Ḥadīth

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-33
Author(s):  
Adam C. Bursi
Keyword(s):  
Sacred Space ◽  
Near East ◽  
Early Period ◽  
Late Antique ◽  
Religious Texts ◽  
Sacred Spaces ◽  
Early Islamic ◽  
Ritual Practices

Abstract This article examines a ḥadīth text that illustrates the complicated interactions between Christian and Islamic sacred spaces in the early period of Islamic rule in the Near East. In this narrative, the Prophet Muḥammad gives a group of Arabs instructions for how to convert a church into a mosque, telling them to use his ablution water for cleansing and repurposing the Christian space for Muslim worship. Contextualizing this narrative in terms of early Muslim-Christian relations, as well as late antique Christian religious texts and practices, my analysis compares this story with Christian traditions regarding the collection and usage of contact relics from holy persons and places. I argue that this story offers an example of early Islamic texts’ engagement with, and adaptation of, Christian literary themes and ritual practices in order to validate early Islamic religious claims.

Self-Revision and the Arabic Historical Tradition: Identifying Textual Reuse and Reorganization in the Works Of Al-Balā Dhurāi

2020 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 9-30
Author(s):  
Ryan J. Lynch
Keyword(s):  
Late Antique ◽  
Textual Reuse ◽  
Early Medieval ◽  
Historical Material ◽  
Historical Tradition ◽  
The Creation ◽  
Textual Traditions ◽  
Early Islamic ◽  
Islamic Institutions

While there is growing historiographical analysis of the reuse of circulating narrative materials in medieval books from various textual traditions, there have been fewer studies of the late antique and early medieval periods that have considered the process of authorial self-revision. This is especially the case with early Arabic/Islamicate texts. This study is a discussion of the historical material that is reused in the two surviving Arabic works of the Muslim author al-Balādhurī (d. ca. 892 CE/279 AH), material which appears in his Kitāb Futūḥ al-buldān (The Book of the Conquest of Lands) and that was apparently reused in his Ansāb al-Ashrāf (The Lineage of Nobles). In discussing how al-Balādhurī recycled this information and emplotted it in verbatim and near-verbatim forms, it shows how shifting the location of these shared traditions demonstrates the different goals of his two books and also showcases his work as an author: in the former, he places an emphasis on the creation of early Islamic institutions; in the later, he eulogizes the character and qualities of Islam's earliest leaders. Additionally, all of the reused material discussed here was identified through computer meditated analysis, so this study also highlights how the tools of the digital and computational humanities demonstrate immense promise in enhancing and expediting the research of scholars across the medieval globe.

Conclusion to Part II

2020 ◽  
pp. 175-176
Author(s):  
Fanny Bessard
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Near East ◽  
Late Antique ◽  
Early Middle Ages ◽  
Rural Markets ◽  
Early Islamic

From 700, the early Islamic economy remained strongly aligned with its late antique heritage, which brought a definite rupture between the Near East and Europe. Robin Fleming shows that Britain’s towns fell into total decay after the departure of the Roman legions.1 The prominence of the urban marketplace in the Near East in the early Middle Ages certainly contrasted with Carolingian Europe in that the European systems of exchange mostly took place in the form of weekly rural markets....

scholarly journals The elusive early medieval glass

2018 ◽  
Vol 35 ◽  
pp. 239-250
Author(s):  
Tina Milavec
Keyword(s):  
Glass Production ◽  
Late Antique ◽  
Early Medieval ◽  
The North ◽  
Early Islamic ◽  
Different Origin ◽  
Medieval Glass

In graves 322 and 310 of the early medieval Nin – Ždrijac cemetery three glass vessels, two stemmed goblets and one bottle were found. They have been interpreted as remains of Late Antique glass production, but a closer look brings further information. The best comparisons for the goblets come from the North Adriatic area while the bottle is most probably of early Islamic production. Interesting possibilities of interpretation arise with the graves being furnished with glass products of such different origin at a time when local secondary glass production seems to have been absent.

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