Now that North Africa is viewed less as the exclusive hunting ground of French scholars, those from elsewhere are seeing the region in its relation to the larger world rather than merely to its former colonists. Here American, British, and Tunisian scholars explore the Maghrib as a space where worlds have met through history, emphasizing its central role in shaping those encounters. The nine essays are from a 1998 conference in Tunisia, and were published as The Journal of North African Studies 6/1 (spring 2001). Distributed in the US by ISBS. c. Book News Inc.
Long regarded as the preserve of French scholars and Francophone audiences due to its significance to France's colonial empire, North Africa is increasingly recognized for its own singular importance as a crossover region. Situated where Islamic, Mediterranean, African, and European histories intersect, the Maghrib has long acted as a cultural conduit, mediator and broker. From the medieval era, when the oasis of Sijilmasa in the Moroccan wilderness funnelled caravan loads of gold into international networks, through the 16th century when two superpowers, the Ottomans and the Spanish Hapsburgs, battled for mastery of the Mediterranean along the North African frontier, and well into the 20th century which witnessed one of Africa's cruellest wars unfold in "French Algeria", the Maghrib has retained its uniqueness as a place where worlds meet.
Essays in North Africa under Byzantium and Early Islam include the legacy of Vandal rule in Africa, art and architectural history, archaeology, economics, theology, Berbers, and the Islamic conquest. They examine the ways in which the imperial legacy was re-interpreted, re-imagined, and put to new uses in Byzantine and early Islamic Africa.
This volume proposes a new approach to the Arab conquests and the spread of Islam in North Africa. In recent years, those studying the Islamic world have shown that the coming of Islam was not marked by devastation or decline, but rather by considerable cultural and economic continuity. In North Africa, with continuity came significant change. Corisande Fenwick argues that the establishment of Muslim rule also coincided with a phase of intense urbanization, the appearance of new architectural forms (mosques, housing, hammams), the spread of Muslim social and cultural practices, the introduction of new crops and manufacturing techniques and the establishment of new trading links with sub-Saharan Africa, Europe and the Middle East. This concise and accessible book offers the first assessment of the archaeology of early Islamic North Africa (7th–9th centuries), drawing on a wide range of new evidence from Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia and Libya. It lays out current debates about its interpretation and suggests new ways of thinking about this crucial period in world history. Essential reading for those interested in understanding the impact of the Arab conquests and the spread of Islam on daily life, it will also challenge students of archaeology and history to think in new ways about North Africa, the earliest Islamic empires and states and the transition from the Roman to the medieval Mediterranean.
The Islamic world's artistic traditions experienced profound transformation in the 19th century as rapidly developing technologies and globalizing markets ushered in drastic changes in technique, style, and content. Despite the importance and ingenuity of these developments, the 19th century remains a gap in the history of Islamic art. To fill this opening in art historical scholarship, Making Modernity in the Islamic Mediterranean charts transformations in image-making, architecture, and craft production in the Islamic world from Fez to Istanbul. Contributors focus on the shifting methods of production, reproduction, circulation, and exchange artists faced as they worked in fields such as photography, weaving, design, metalwork, ceramics, and even transportation. Covering a range of media and a wide geographical spread, Making Modernity in the Islamic Mediterranean reveals how 19th-century artists in the Middle East and North Africa reckoned with new tools, materials, and tastes from local perspectives.
Christophe Picard recounts the adventures of Muslim sailors who competed with Greek and Latin seamen for control of the 7th-century Mediterranean. By the time Christian powers took over trade routes in the 13th century, a Muslim identity that operated within, and in opposition to, Europe had been shaped by encounters across the sea of the caliphs.
While globalization undermines ideas of the nation-state in the Mediterranean, conversions reveal how religion can unsettle existing political and social relations. Through studies of conversions across the region this book examines the challenges that conversions represent for national, legal and policy ways of dealing with religious minorities.
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. Contributors: Lotfi Abdeljaouad, Glaire D. Anderson, Lucia Arcifa, Fabiola Ardizzone, Alessandra Bagnera, Jonathan M. Bloom, Lorenzo Bondioli, Chloé Capel, Patrice Cressier, Mounira Chapoutot-Remadi, Abdelaziz Daoulatli, Claire Déléry, Ahmed El Bahi, Kaoutar Elbaljan, Ahmed Ettahiri, Abdelhamid Fenina, Elizabeth Fentress, Abdallah Fili, Mohamed Ghodhbane, Caroline Goodson, Soundes Gragueb Chatti, Khadija Hamdi, Renata Holod, Jeremy Johns, Tarek Kahlaoui, Hugh Kennedy, Sihem Lamine, Faouzi Mahfoudh, David Mattingly, Irene Montilla, Annliese Nef, Elena Pezzini, Nadège Picotin, Cheryl Porter, Dwight Reynolds, Viva Sacco, Elena Salinas, Martin Sterry.
