Expanding the Frontiers of the Islamic World
Panel 020, sponsored byMESA OAO: Middle East Medievalists, 2010 Annual Meeting
On Friday, November 19 at 08:30 am
Panel Description
This panel focuses on frontiers, borders, and borderlands of the medieval Islamic world, examining them as sites of historical change and development, and exploring new insights and approaches into the early history of the Islamic world as a religious, political, and cultural entity.
Frontiers, borders, and borderlands inspire particular images. In the context of the medieval Islamic world, these concepts often conjure stories of military conquest and conversion, including, for example, narratives of religiously motivated warriors conducting jihad against the Dar al-Harb, or merchants introducing Muslim practices to their foreign trade partners, each spreading Islam and Islamic authority beyond the pale. Above all, we encounter an image of the Muslim world against an exterior other.
Narratives such as these neglect the variety of experiences which occurred along the far flung frontiers of the medieval Islamic world. From the Pyrenees to the Tian Shan, the spread of Islamic society and political institutions brought them into contact (and conflict) with diverse peoples, which required equally diverse responses and reactions. At the same time, these narratives also assume a monolithic, heterogeneous Muslim world approaching a different (and perhaps opposed) other, an oversimplification to be certain.
Looking beyond the history of conquest and conversion, it was often the case that more energy was expended along the frontiers on action within the Islamic world, such as settlement, than it was on external action against a foreign other. Processes of settlement and political, economic, and cultural integration were necessary parts of conquest and expansion. Frontiers and borderlands are zones of transition and change and, regardless of military or political successes, it is the transformation of populations living along the frontier which make expansion permanent. The process of frontier is as much an internal phenomena as it is external.
It is the goal of this panel to not only look at the ways the frontiers of the medieval Islamic world developed and expanded, but to also expand our understanding of what we mean by frontier. As frontiers are zones with depth, this panel will be examining those areas within the Muslim side of the frontier that are engaging in processes of political, economic, and cultural transformation, as well as considering the direct expansion of the frontier.
Disciplines
Participants
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Dr. Michael Bonner
-- Presenter
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Dr. Robert Haug
-- Organizer, Presenter, Chair
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Dr. Deborah G. Tor
-- Discussant
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Dr. Asa Eger
-- Presenter
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Dr. Alison Marie Vacca
-- Presenter
Presentations
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Dr. Robert Haug
The borders of medieval Ma wara' al-Nahr (Transoxania) are typically defined as the Amu-Darya or Jayhun River and the point where the political authority of Islam ceased by both medieval and modern writers. To the north and east, these borders are imprecise and entirely dependent on changing political conditions as the authority of different Muslim regimes, most importantly the Samanids for the purposes of this paper, expanded and contracted into the Central Asian steppes. Yet, neither the imprecision nor the impermanence of these borders stopped people from trying to define the physical limits of Muslim Ma wara' al-Nahr.
This paper examines the ways medieval Muslim sources attempted to define the limits of Ma wara' al-Nahr in the 3rd-4th/9th-10th centuries and the role these limits, as defined in our sources, played in medieval conceptualizations of Ma wara' al-Nahr as a frontier.
Through defining the borders of Ma wara' al-Nahr, writers have also, indirectly, defined the borders of neighboring regions, most notably the Bilad al-Turk. In many cases, such definitions have created a false dichotomy between the lands of Islam and its neighbors and obscured the overlapping and intertwined nature of the eastern frontier. By connecting the borders of Ma wara' al-Nahr with the limits of Muslim political authority and then defining these borders at certain fixed points, a complex frontier zone has been reduced to a political and cultural duality which overlooks the presence of non-Muslim political authorities within what is nominally Muslim Ma wara' al-Nahr.
This paper will further examine the way non-Muslim political authorities within Ma wara' al-Nahr are treated by our medieval sources. It will also explore the ways a frontier setting requires local authorities to negotiate complex political and cultural networks while seeking to identify and secure a clearly defined border.
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Dr. Asa Eger
Early Islamic historians, working from a textual perspective, assert that the Islamic-Byzantine frontier (al-thugh?r) only begins to take shape in the 'AbbAsid period, when the frontier features in the writings of jurists and scholars on the subject of jih d. They describe the frontier as a former abandoned zone repopulated with Muslims engaged in yearly holy war, thus showing how the 'Abb sids laid claim to an ideologically perceived empty space. On the other hand, archaeologists have argued that Early Islamic landscapes (including the frontier zone) were marked by strong continuities of both rural and urban settlement and networks of trade carried over from the Byzantine/Sastnian sixth century through the tenth century, thus countering any claims of an empty landscape awaiting reclamation. Neither of these two opposing views is entirely correct, nor are they completely wrong. Recent evidence from survey and excavation in the western thugher shows a nuanced narrative of 6-8th century changes in the landscape with diminishing rural sites occupied followed by a punctuated increase in settlements in the early 'Abbesid period. Settlement consisted of varying categories of sites including reoccupied or de novo urban centers, villages, and a new system of midrange sites that served as waystations on trans-frontier routes. The building-up of the thugh r in the early 'Abbtsid period must not be explained with simple incentives of promoting jih d but with multivariant concerns on the part of the 'Abbasid state to internally control or accommodate its transhumant and settled frontier communities, to encourage exchange of resources, as well as, to protect its frontiers from external threats.
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Dr. Michael Bonner
Muslim Egypt in most periods has sat securely at the center of the Islamic world. However, as it first emerged as a major power, beginning and especially with the amirate of Ahmad ibn Tulun (254-270/868-884), its military elite looked to other, more contested places, including the Arab-Byzantine frontier district (Thughur) of northern Syria and central Anatolia. This paper will deal with two aspects of this shift. First, it will account for Tulunid involvement in the Thughur. To emulate the success of the Aghlabids in North Africa and the Saffarids in Iran, Ibn Tulun needed to operate in a frontier zone where territories were open, at least in theory, for conquest and occupation. In other words, a vigorous dynastic state on the fringes of the crisis-ridden 'Abbasid caliphate had to be an enterprise of frontier and jihad. Second, this paper will trace the question of frontiers in Egyptian historical writing, beginning with Ibn 'Abd al-Hakam's Conquest of Egypt and the Maghrib, where Egypt appears both as a protected garden (as in the story of the wall built around it in Pharaonic times) and as the major participant in the conquest of the West. The arrival of Ibn Tulun and his foreign commanders and bureaucrats presented a challenge to the Arab-Muslim elite that had been expressing itself this way. The resulting tensions found expression in the views of historians including al-Kindi, the two authors of laudatory biographies of Ibn Tulun (Ibn al-Daya and al-Balawi), and lesser-known authors including Ibn Yunus al-Sadafi and Ibn Zulaq. Among later historians, it was Ibn Khaldun who, more than anyone else, viewed Tulunid history as a drama of the Thughur: here, as elsewhere, Ibn Khaldun saw the frontier as the crucible for the dawla, or dynastic state. The paper concludes with the views of other historians including al-Maqrizi and our hero's namesake, Shams al-Din Ibn Tulun.
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Dr. Alison Marie Vacca
Arab incursions and raids into Armenia began in approximately 640, but neither concerted effort at conquest nor prolonged Arab presence followed immediately. Arabic and Armenian sources are confusing and present contradictory material for much of the seventh century. With the rise of the local Arab emirates in the late eighth century and the Armenian kingdoms in the ninth, the defining lines between the Islamic world and Armenian controlled land were not always clearly established. As a result, the relationship between Armenia and the Realm of Islam is occasionally unclear in modern scholarship. It has sometimes been assumed that Armenia was a 'thaghr' specifically because it was a borderland that is ethnically, linguistically and religiously different from the caliphate and as such represents a zone between two worlds. This theory cannot possibly withstand closer examination, as it assumes that the caliphate itself was ethnically, linguistically and religiously uniform.
This paper considers how Arab geographers in the Abbasid period conceived of Armenia and argues that Armenia, from their perspective, was part of the Realm of Islam. This conclusion is based on specific passages from geographical texts, including discussions on religion, tax reports and use of specific vocabulary (specifically the terms 'hadd' and 'thaghr'). Additionally, this paper draws attention to both internal and external borders of the Islamic world, with particular consideration given to A. Ter Ghewondyan's argument that Ibn Hawqal's division of Armenia reflected the border between Bagratid and Arab lands. The main sources include al-Islakhr?, Ibn Hawqal, al-Muqaddasq, Ibn al-Faq h, Ibn Khurrad dhbih and al-Idrns , while recognizing the discrepancies in how each of these geographers defines the province of Armenia.
The goal of this paper is to add Armenian data to the discussion of the frontiers of Islam with the hope of formulating a clearer conception of (1) how Arab geographers understood Armenia and (2) how the example of Armenia can add to a comparative discussion of the frontiers of Islam.
