Mediterranean Captivity through Arab Eyes, 1517-1798 /
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The post-Lepanto Mediterranean was the scene of "small wars," to use Fernand Braudel's phrase, which resulted in acts of piracy and captivity. Thousands upon thousands of Europeans, Arabs, and Turks were seized into bagnios stretching from Cadiz to Valletta and from Salé to Tripoli. After returning to their homelands, dozens from England and France, Germany and Spain, Malta and Italy wrote about their captivities. Their accounts were printed, distributed, translated, and plagiarized, making captivity a key subject in Europe's Mediterranean history. While Europeans wrote extensively about their ordeals, the Arabs wrote little because their religious culture militated against such writings, which would be construed as expressing disaffection with the will of God. Nor were there detailed records and registers of captives - their names, places of origin, and ransom prices - similar to what was kept in the European archives. Contrary, however, to what some historians have claimed, there was a distinct Arabic narrative of captivity that survives in anecdotes, recollections, reports, miracles, letters, fatawa, exempla and short biographies in both verse and prose. Cumulatively, these sources constitute the Arabic qiṣṣas al-asrā, or stories of the captives, in the native language and idiom of the men and women of the early modern Mediterranean.
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1 online resource. :
Includes bibliographical references and index. :
9789004440258
9789004440241
The Aghlabids and their neighbours : art and material culture in 9th-century North Africa /
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The first dynasty to mint gold dinars outside of the Abbasid heartlands, the Aghlabid (r. 800-909) reign in North Africa has largely been neglected in the scholarship of recent decades, despite the canonical status of its monuments and artworks in early Islamic art history. The Aghlabids and their Neighbors focuses new attention on this key dynasty. The essays in this volume, produced by an international group of specialists in history, art and architectural history, archaeology, and numismatics, illuminate the Aghlabid dynasty's interactions with neighbors in the western Mediterranean and its rivals and allies elsewhere, providing a state of the question on early medieval North Africa and revealing the centrality of the dynasty and the region to global economic and political networks.
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1 online resource (xxxviii, 688 pages) :
Includes bibliographical references and index. :
9789004356047 :
Available to subscribing member institutions only.
La langue berbère au Maghreb médiéval : textes, contextes, analyses /
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La langue berbère au Maghreb médiéval constitue un nouvel apport aux études historiques et linguistiques dans la mesure où de nombreux matériaux sur la langue berbère font l'objet d'une monographie spécifique. Plusieurs faits de langue sont reliés par une trame précise et ils sont réunis afin de mettre en relief les indices textuels puisés dans diverses sources écrites en arabe et en berbère. Dans les quatre parties du livre, il est tour à tour question des apports de la documentation narrative, de la littérature hagiographique et des textes ibadites ainsi que de l'importance des contacts entre le berbère et les langues africaines à travers la littérature narrative et l'épigraphie islamique. Ce livre a été conçu comme un essai documentaire mais également afin d'attirer l'attention des chercheurs sur la présence relativement bien documentée de la langue berbère dans les textes produits en milieu arabo-musulman du Moyen Âge à l'époque moderne. La langue berbère au Maghreb médiéval is a new contribution to the historical and linguistic studies in that many materials on the Berber language are the subject of a specific monograph. Several facts of language are connected by an accurate frame and are gathered to highlight textual clues collected from various sources written in Arabic and Berber. The four parts of the book treat contributions of narrative documentation, hagiographical literature and Ibadi texts and the importance of contacts between Berber and African languages through the narrative literature and Islamic epigraphy. This book was conceived as a documentary essay, but also to attract the attention of researchers on the relatively well-documented presence of the Berber language in the texts produced in Arab-Muslim environment from the Middle Ages to Modern era.
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1 online resource (xvi, 479 pages) :
Includes bibliographical references and index. :
9789004302358 :
Available to subscribing member institutions only.
Governing the empire : provincial administration in the Almohad Caliphate (1224-1269) : critical edition, translation, and study of Manuscript 4752 of the Hasaniyya Library in Raba...
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In this book, Pascal Buresi and Hicham El Aallaoui edit, translate, and study an Arabic manuscript of the Royal Library of Rabat, containing 77 appointments of provincial officials. The Almohad Caliphs were the first Berbers to unite the whole Maghrib and the Iberian Peninsula under an imperial ideology elaborated at the end of the 12th C.E. by the most famous scholars, such as Averroes. This peripheral Islamic dynasty produced a pragmatic documentation that provides exceptional information about the administrative, political, ideological, and religious organisation of the largest medieval European-African Empire. Buresi and El Aallaoui convincingly stress the importance of the literature of the Chancellery in renewing the history of power and authority in medieval Islamic lands.
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1 online resource (xxii, 538 pages) : illustrations (some color), maps. :
Includes bibliographical references and index. :
9789004239715 :
1877-9808 ; :
Available to subscribing member institutions only.
Saladin, the Almohads and the Banū Ghāniya : the contest for North Africa (12th and 13th centuries) /
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In Saladin, the Almohads and the Banū Ghāniya , Amar Baadj gives us the first comprehensive, modern study of a fascinating but little-known episode in the history of the medieval Mediterranean. This is the story of the long struggle between the Almohad caliphs of the Maghrib, the Banū Ghāniya of Majorca, and the Ayyubids for dominance of North Africa. The author makes use of important textual sources that have been ignored as well as new archaeological evidence to challenge some of the basic assumptions about the events in question. He also successfully places these events in their wider temporal and geographical context for the first time.
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Based on the author's thesis (doctoral)--University of Toronto, 2012. :
1 online resource (x, 250 pages) : illustrations, maps. :
Includes bibliographical references (p. 218-229) and index. :
9789004298576 :
Available to subscribing member institutions only.
Dreams, Sufism and Sainthood, The Visionary Career of Muhammad al-Zawâwî.
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Based on Muhammad al-Zawâwî's extraordinary diary of 109 dream conversations with the Prophet Muhammad, this study provides a rare, intimate view of 15th-century North African Muslim life. The study reconstructs Zawâwî's lifestory over a critical ten-year period and examines his career as a sufi in the historical context of North Africa and Mamluk Cairo. Psychological aspects of Zawâwî's religious experience are thoroughly explored. The concluding chapter provides an introduction to the role of dreams and visions in medieval Islam. Particular attention is paid to the way Zawâwî and his successors used their visions to legitimate claims to being awliya' , or living saints.
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1 online resource. :
9789004378926
Staying Roman : conquest and identity in Africa and the Mediterranean, 439-700 /
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"In 416, when preaching a sermon on the psalms in late Roman Carthage, Augustine was able to ask his audience, 'Who now knows which nations in the Roman empire were what, when all have become Romans, and all are called Romans?'1 Yet already by the time Augustine addressed his Carthaginian audience the continued unity of the Roman Mediterranean was being called into question. The defeat and death of the Roman emperor Valens at Adrianople in 378 had set the stage for a new phase of conflict between the empire and its non-Roman neighbours ; and over the course of the fifth century Roman power collapsed in the West, where it was succeeded by a number of sub-Roman kingdoms. Questions that had seemed trivial to Augustine were suddenly and painfully alive : what did it mean to be 'Roman' in the changed circumstances of the fifth and later centuries? And (from a twenty-first-century perspective) what became of the idea of Romanness in the West once Roman power collapsed?"--
"What did it mean to be Roman once the Roman Empire had collapsed in the West? Staying Roman examines Roman identities in the region of modern Tunisia and Algeria between the fifth-century Vandal conquest and the seventh-century Islamic invasions. Using historical, archaeological and epigraphic evidence, this study argues that the fracturing of the empire's political unity also led to a fracturing of Roman identity along political, cultural and religious lines, as individuals who continued to feel 'Roman' but who were no longer living under imperial rule sought to redefine what it was that connected them to their fellow Romans elsewhere. The resulting definitions of Romanness could overlap, but were not always mutually reinforcing. Significantly, in late antiquity Romanness had a practical value, and could be used in remarkably flexible ways to foster a sense of similarity or difference over space, time and ethnicity, in a wide variety of circumstances"--
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Revision of the author's thesis (Ph. D.)--Harvard University, 2004, entitled: Staying Roman : Vandals, Moors, and Byzantines in late antique North Africa, 400-700. :
xviii, 438 pages : illustrations, maps ; 25 cm. :
Includes bibliographical references (pages 379-419) and index. :
9780521196970