Towards a World History of the Medieval Gulf

The Gulf region during the “Middle Period,” from around 1000 - 1500 CE, faced what seemed to be two insurmountable challenges: the fall of the ‘Abbasids in Baghdad in 1258 CE as well as increased competition from the Red Sea. Despite these two threats to the prosperity of trade in the region, however, Gulf ports remained vibrant and important centers of trade and cosmopolitanism. The Gulf, with its merchant economy and its relatively tolerant port cities, did not march in lockstep with the fate and fortunes of metropolitan cities such as Baghdad. Instead of William McNeill’s webs of history with their orbiting points, medieval Gulf ports were spiders spinning silk in the wind, attaching to whatever space along the shore was most convenient. Gulf port polities were diffuse, detached from imperial centers and, for dogmatists, sometimes dangerous, as they do not fit usual religious paradigms. Marshall Hodgson rightly identified the Middle Period as the crucial period for the Islamicate world. The centuries between 1000–1500 CE were characterized by a remarkable unity that existed across the Medieval Islamic world despite political divisions. However, there was far more to the story of medieval Gulf culture, and possibly the whole medieval Middle East, than Hodgson’s narrative of the consolidation of Islam, which focuses on trade, religious thought, and cultural influences setting out from agrarian, urban centers. The remarkable independence of Gulf ports from agrarian political power mixed with a heavy dependence on international trade fostered a distinctive cosmopolitan ethos directed beyond Hodgson’s Islamicate world.

The Temporality of Desire in Ḥasan Dihlavī’s ʿIshqnāma

This essay traces the conception of love and desire (ʿishq) in a Persian verse romance by the Indo-Persian poet Ḥasan Dihlavī, known as ʿIshqnāma (composed in 1301). ʿIshqnāma narrates a tragic and unconsummated love affair between a young Hindu couple. When the two protagonists immolate themselves in what is at once a reworking of the Indic custom of widow burning (sati) and an allusion to the deaths of the famed lovers Laylī and Majnūn, the poet offers an innovative account of the temporality of desire. In transforming the Persian master narrative of love, Ḥasan anticipates Freud’s account of the death drive in relation to the pleasure principle in Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1921). This article initiates a dialogue between Freud and Ḥasan Dihlavī in order to suggest that desire for another may be the self’s only means of reckoning with its contingency.

The Queen’s Fantastic Body

Ernst H. Kantorowicz, in his seminal work The King’s Two Bodies, argues that a sovereign has two bodies: one mortal, physical body subject to illness and death, and another immortal, dynastic body equivalent to the administrative mechanism. Notably, it is the king who has two bodies, not the queen. The king’s dynastic body is his administrative persona, but the queen’s official body depends on her maternity for the continuation of the dynasty. This essay argues that a queen can have two bodies and explores female rulers’ ways of claiming the rhetorical doubling of a sovereign body independent of maternity. It also proposes a comparative approach. This essay reads the mythological representation of Eleanor of Aquitaine (1122–1204) in Marie de France’s Arthurian tale Lanval against Empress Wu Zetian 武則天 (624–705)’s self-mythologization as the avatar of the Goddess of Pure Radiance in the Commentary on the Great Cloud Sutra. It illustrates how female rulers wielded political symbolism through a reshuffling of symbolic orders, which provides a window into the roles of Celtic myths in a medieval French Christian society and Buddhism in a medieval Chinese Confucian society.