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 ...

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.

Classes of Ladies of Cloistered Spaces

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marilyn Booth
Keyword(s):  
Book History ◽  
Women's History ◽  
Arabic Language ◽  
Islamic History ◽  
Islamic Period ◽  
Feminist History ◽  
The World ◽  
Columbian Exposition ◽  
Early Islamic Period ◽  
Early Islamic

This book history scrutinizes the production, advertising, contents, compilation and circulation – locally and globally – of an Arabic-language volume of biographies of world women, al-Durr al-manthur fi tabaqat rabbat al-khudur. The analysis of this volume of over 500 folio-size pages views it as an early work of Arab feminist history within the prolific career of Zaynab Fawwaz (c1850-1914), a Lebanese immigrant to Egypt and early feminist writer there. The study considers how Fawwaz drew on the venerable tradition of biography writing in Arabic but also turned to contemporary sources (magazines, an encyclopedia, world histories); how she centred Arab subjects and Islamic history but included women from across the world and from ancient eras right up to the fin-de-siècle; how she incorporated a quiet celebration of Shi‘i women (of which she was one), especially from the early Islamic period; how the work suggests a collective and cooperative female intellectual presence in the 1890s Arab capitals, and also responds to works on women’s history by her male contemporaries; and how Fawwaz’s writing became implicated in the project for a Women’s Library at the 1893 Columbian Exposition in Chicago.

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.

A New Architectural Survey of Qaṣr Burquʽ, Eastern Jordan

1991 ◽  
Vol 71 ◽  
pp. 191-215 ◽  
Author(s):  
Svend Helms
Keyword(s):  
Economic History ◽  
Time Range ◽  
Islamic Period ◽  
The Third ◽  
North East ◽  
The North ◽  
Dry Steppe ◽  
Architectural Survey ◽  
Early Islamic Period ◽  
Early Islamic

Qaṣr Burqu⃓ is one of the most remote of the Jordanian so-called ‘desert castles’ (quṣūr) of the early Islamic period: it lies some 200km east of⃓Ammān (figs. 1–4). However, it is neither a castle, nor is it in the desert, rather it represents a variety of building types and lies in the dry steppe (areas receiving less than 100mm of rainfall per annum) of the bādiyat al-šām (literally, the steppe lands of Damascus). Furthermore, most of the architectural elements are not necessarily attributable to the early Islamic period, namely the Umayyad Caliphate of the seventh and eighth centuries, despite a ‘building’ inscription (E4: see below, pp. 206–7) of Walīd b. ‘Abd’l-Malik (Caliph AD 705–15), dated AD 700 (H. 81). Rather, the various architectural entities at the site, and their use, span the time from about the third-fourth (probably a little later) to the eighth centuries AD. This time range and the Qaṣr's remote location are significant in relation to the political and economic history of the Near East, particularly in regard of nomad-state relations across the verdant-steppic interface. The time range of the various constructions includes the period following the dissolution of the limes arabicus which had been extensively refurbished and augmented under Diocletian and later under Justinian in the third and sixth centuries AD. Many of the more remote erstwhile fortlets, forts and legionary fortresses were colonized by villagers and nomads, as well as monks and pious hermits. Between the fourth and sixth centuries (particularly in the sixth century under the Ghassānids), purpose-built monasteries and ‘residences’ for hermits were established throughout greater Syria, some of them far out in the steppe. The military station at Nemāras about 80km to the north-east of Qaṣr Burqu⃓, for example, may have become one of several centres, functioning as a παƍεμβολή νομάδον of the Lakhmids in the region, under the leadership of Imru'l-Qays who was called ‘king of the Arabs’ and who was buried there in AD 328. Places like Qaṣr Burqu⃓ and Deir al-Kinn, on the other hand, may have been founded or re-established as monasteries.

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