The Sultan and the Defiant Prince in Hunting Competition: Questions of Legitimacy in Hunting Episodes of Tabaristān

2015 ◽  
pp. 141-152
Author(s):  
Miklós Sárközy
Keyword(s):  
Caspian Sea ◽  
Eighth Century ◽  
Seventh Century ◽  
The Caspian Sea ◽  
Northern Iran ◽  
Islamic Period ◽  
Mountainous Regions ◽  
Early Islamic Period ◽  
Early Islamic

The provinces of Northern Iran, the region south of the Caspian Sea, had a particular role in the Arab conquest of Iran. Their geographical isolation, mountainous regions, steamy and often intolerable sub-Mediterranean climate and thick forests caused many difficulties for the early Muslim conquerors in the seventh century ad. The ʿAbbāsid empire could only penetrate into the mountains of Ṭabaristān and the valleys of Māzandarān in the second half of the eighth century. In this chapter, I analyse some legends concerning the early Islamic period of the central provinces of the Caspian regions Ṭabaristān and Māzandarān. On the basis of some of the evidence, it seems that these stories could be linked with the myths of the last pre-Islamic Iranian empire – that of the Sāsānians.

scholarly journals Imagining the Arabs

2017 ◽  
Vol 34 (1) ◽  
pp. 116-119
Author(s):  
Aaron W. Hughes
Keyword(s):  
First Nations ◽  
Arabian Peninsula ◽  
Seventh Century ◽  
Dual Processes ◽  
Subsequent Work ◽  
Islamic History ◽  
Islamic Period ◽  
Early Islamic Period ◽  
Paradigm Shifting ◽  
Early Islamic

I often tell graduate students that there are three constituent parts to cuttingedgescholarship: (1) the requisite linguistic and historical training, (2) creativityand imagination, and (3) a bold vision that desires to take inheritedideas and subject them to new and rigorous analyses. Very few can do this,but those who can end up radically transforming our understanding of a topic.I am happy to say that Peter Webb has met all three of these criteria in hiswonderful and thought-provoking Imagining the Arabs. He has presented uswith a paradigm-shifting study, and all subsequent work on the topic will haveto wrestle with his monograph.Webb’s goal is sufficiently bold: to rethink the Arabs – who they were,what they believed, where they came from, and how they were imagined byvarious elites in the early Islamic period. Received opinion has, like so muchin early Islamic history, simply repeated what the earliest sources (paradoxicallyfrom later periods) tell us. The assumption is that such sources must betrue because there is no reason why they should not be. Why, for example,should they cultivate untruths or spread ideological rumors? Instead of adopting,as so many do, a posture of gullibility, Webb prefers to see such texts asengaged in the dual processes of ethnogenesis and mythopoesis.Tradition assumes that the Arabs were a homogenous group of of Bedouinsthat have inhabited the Arabian Peninsula since Antiquity. This would be akin,as Webb informs us, of assuming that all of the first nations in North Americawere essentially the same with respect to religion, culture, and ethnicity, andsomething that ignores that the aforementioned terms have distinct lineages inmodern political and nationalist thought. Then in the seventh century CE, sothe story continues, these Arabs adopted a new faith, to wit, Islam, and rapidlyconquered the Middle East and beyond. Study after study has simply assumedthat these “Arabs,” while sensitive to poetry, represented a form of militarized ...

Jordan

2019 ◽  
pp. 389-409
Author(s):  
Robert Schick
Keyword(s):  
Fourth Century ◽  
Eighth Century ◽  
Fifth Century ◽  
Occupational History ◽  
Archaeological Investigation ◽  
Scientific Methods ◽  
Islamic Period ◽  
The Past ◽  
Early Islamic Period ◽  
Early Islamic

Well over three hundred sites, including over 150 well-preserved churches, provide abundant archaeological information on Christianity in Jordan. Archaeological investigation over the past hundred years has often focused on revealing architecture and mosaic floors, while careful, improved excavation techniques and use of scientific methods of analysis of finds in recent decades provide insights into anthropological topics, such as occupational history; standards of post-excavation conservation have improved as well. From their origins in the fourth century, material forms of Christianity spread in the fifth century and reached their high point in the sixth and seventh centuries, continuing into the early Islamic period, only to decline in the eighth century and beyond.

scholarly journals Abu Muslim in Cultural Memory of the Dagestan Muslims

2019 ◽  
Vol 15 (3) ◽  
pp. 81-110
Author(s):  
V. O. Bobrovnikov
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Cultural Memory ◽  
Eighth Century ◽  
Oral Traditions ◽  
Religious Leader ◽  
The Caucasus ◽  
Islamic Period ◽  
Islamic Studies ◽  
Early Islamic Period ◽  
Early Islamic

The article investigates cultural memory of a very long islamization happened in the Caucasus from the 7th through the beginning of the 19th centuries as it was reflected in the cult of Muslim saints, namely in the case of sheikh Abu Muslim who is believed to have converted Caucasus highlanders into Islam in the early Islamic period. His name appears in countless chronicles and memorials. The sheikh, his relatives and companions are credited with dozens of shrines. The study is based on the texts of Arabiclanguage chronicles and commemorative notes (tawarikh), compared with the data of epigraphy and field materials of the author he collected mainly inDagestan. After the works of Russian classics in Islamic studies from Kazembek to Bartold and M.-S. Saidov nobody confuses this hero of Caucasus Islamization with the famous religious leader from Khurasan who helped the ‘Abbasids to seize power in the Caliphate in the middle of the eighth century and was never to theCaucasus. However, as the author argues, one should not deny his existence and therefore reject his cult as an odd historical mistake. A comparative analysis of the chronicles, memorials, and oral traditions devoted to his deeds suggests that different Islamic missionaries of foreign and local origin fused in the figure of Abu Muslim. A study of his cult in terms of cultural memory allows answering a number of important research questions concerning main stages and actors of Islamization in the Caucasusho operated in the region under study from the Middle Ages through the modern times, its social and cultural background as well as changing directions and networks.

Scribal Repertoires in Egypt from the New Kingdom to the Early Islamic Period

2018 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Late Antique ◽  
Historical Sociolinguistics ◽  
Islamic Period ◽  
The People ◽  
Modern Egypt ◽  
Early Islamic Period ◽  
Early Islamic ◽  
Point Of Departure

This volume deals with the possibility of glimpsing pre-modern and early modern Egyptian scribes, the people who actually produced ancient documents, through the ways in which they organized and wrote those documents. Breaking with the traditional conception of variation in scribal texts as ‘free’ or indicative of ‘corruption’, this volume reconceptualizes scribal variation in pre-modern Egypt from the point of view of contemporary historical sociolinguistics, seeing scribes as agents embedded in particular geographical, temporal, and sociocultural environments. This volume comprises a set of studies of scribal variation, beginning from the well-established domain of scribal variation in pre-modern English as a methodological point of departure, and proceeding to studies of scribal variation spanning thousands of years, from Pharaonic to Late Antique and Islamic Egypt. This volume introduces to Egyptology concepts such as scribal communities, networks, and repertoires, and applies them to a variety of phenomena, including features of lexicon, grammar, orthography, palaeography, layout, and format.

Maritime trade in early Islamic-period glass: New evidence from the Maʻagan Mikhael B shipwreck

2021 ◽  
Vol 37 ◽  
pp. 102903
Author(s):  
Eyal Natan ◽  
Yael Gorin-Rosen ◽  
Agnese Benzonelli ◽  
Deborah Cvikel
Keyword(s):  
Maritime Trade ◽  
Islamic Period ◽  
Early Islamic Period ◽  
New Evidence ◽  
Early Islamic

USE OF THE GALAXY AS A TOOL FOR SPATIAL AND TEMPORAL ORIENTATION DURING THE EARLY ISLAMIC PERIOD AND UP TO THE 15TH CENTURY

2021 ◽  
Vol 31 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-44
Author(s):  
Andreas Eckart
Keyword(s):  
Milky Way ◽  
The Other ◽  
Temporal Orientation ◽  
Islamic Period ◽  
Space And Time ◽  
15Th Century ◽  
Other Hand ◽  
The Galaxy ◽  
Early Islamic Period ◽  
Early Islamic

AbstractWe study to what extent the Milky Way was used as an orientation tool at the beginning of the Islamic period covering the 8th to the 15th century, with a focus on the first half of that era. We compare the texts of three authors from three different periods and give detailed comments on their astronomical and traditional content. The text of al-Marzūqī summarises the information on the Milky Way put forward by the astronomer and geographer ʾAbū Ḥanīfa al-Dīnawarī. The text makes it clear that in some areas the Milky Way could be used as a geographical guide to determine the approximate direction toward a region on Earth or the direction of prayer. In the 15th century, the famous navigator Aḥmad b. Māǧid describes the Milky Way in his nautical instructions. He frequently demonstrates that the Milky Way serves as a guidance aid to find constellations and stars that are useful for precise navigation on land and at sea. On the other hand, Ibn Qutayba quotes in his description of the Milky Way a saying from the famous Bedouin poet Ḏū al-Rumma, which is also mentioned by al-Marzūqī. In this saying the Milky Way is used to indicate the hot summer times in which travelling the desert was particularly difficult. Hence, the Milky Way was useful for orientation in space and time and was used for agricultural and navigational purposes.

Islamic Glass in the Making

2022 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nadine Schibille
Keyword(s):  
Glass Industry ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Interdisciplinary Approach ◽  
Islamic Period ◽  
Holistic Understanding ◽  
History Of ◽  
Early Islamic Period ◽  
Early Islamic ◽  
Plant Ash ◽  
Islamic Glass

The ancient glass industry changed dramatically towards the end of the first millennium. The Roman glassmaking tradition of mineral soda glass was increasingly supplanted by the use of plant ash as the main fluxing agent at the turn of the ninth century CE. Defining primary production groups of plant ash glass has been a challenge due to the high variability of raw materials and the smaller scale of production. Islamic Glass in the Making advocates a large-scale archaeometric approach to the history of Islamic glassmaking to trace the developments in the production, trade and consumption of vitreous materials between the eighth and twelfth centuries and to separate the norm from the exception. It proposes compositional discriminants to distinguish regional production groups, and provides insights into the organisation of the glass industry and commerce during the early Islamic period. The interdisciplinary approach leads to a holistic understanding of the development of Islamic glass; assemblages from the early Islamic period in Mesopotamia, Central Asia, Egypt, Greater Syria and Iberia are evaluated, and placed in the larger geopolitical context. In doing so, this book fills a gap in the present literature and advances a large-scale approach to the history of Islamic glass.

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