In the eastern Islamicate lands of the fifth/eleventh century, New Persian was accruing political, cultural, and epistemic power even as the centuries-old imprimatur of Arabic remained strong. Composing poetry in Arabic, Persian, or indeed both became viable and meaningful options. Beyond translations between the Arabic and Persian, however, what has attracted less attention is the remarkable translation of poetic forms, which implies a more complex connection between the Arabic and Persian literary traditions than previously understood. On the one hand, Persian poetry’s debt to the Arabic tradition is well known: themes, motifs, and formal characteristics like quantitative metre and monorhyme were adapted into the Persian qaṣīda. On the other, as the old Arabocentric hegemony was challenged by a nascent Persianate prestige, Arabic poems began experimentally to take on distinctly Persian forms too. Dumyat al-qaṣr, a poetry anthology compiled by al-Bākharzī (d. 467/1075), includes several quatrains (rubāʿī) originally composed in Arabic. The rubāʿī being a quintessential Persian poetic form with its own non-Arabic metre, these poems are possibly the first attested instances of such a combination of form and language. Another instance is the qaṣīda composed by al-Ṭanṭarānī (fl. ca. 480/1087), significant for its use of the tarkīb-band form, which has a stanzaic rhyme scheme alien to the traditional monorhyme of Arabic poetry. Such experimental forms, fleeting as they may have been in the broader swathe of literary history, illustrate medieval Islamicate cosmopolitanisms in flux, when the boundaries between languages and traditions were unsettled and individuals could inhabit, benefit from, and reshape their multiple affiliations. I take the disciplinary boundary between classical Arabic and Persian literary studies as an invitation to theorise their contact zones and approach their texts from the multilingual, multiracial perspectives of their medieval producers.

A question that has preoccupied the historiography of race and anti-Blackness is the validity of “race” and “racism” to describe the construction of difference and its deployment to create and enforce social hierarchies before the rise of the Atlantic slave trade. While medieval predecessors of modern racial hierarchy both gave less importance to heritability and allowed greater social mobility to freedmen and their descendants, many of the tropes and stereotypes common to premodern Islamicate depictions of Black people are similar enough to modern racial stereotypes, and the social hierarchy they informed was strong enough, that to describe this social phenomenon as other than racism does more to obfuscate than to nuance. Cecilio Cooper’s concept of the “Black chthonic,” which describes the connection between phenotypic difference and cosmic hierarchy, describes how anti-Blackness can function independently of biological theories of race. In the Kushnameh and Nezami’s Alexander epic, two twelfth-century epics with a strong speculative dimension, Black Africans play small but pivotal roles in the narrative and the development of core themes. In both epics, an episode in which the title character drives Black invaders out of Egypt is positioned as the opening frame for a career of conquest and exploration across a vast region of the world—for Alexander, the world as a whole, for Kush, the Maghreb which includes Africa and Western Europe. In Nezami’s epic, this encounter defines Alexander atop a hierarchy of human and sub-human types. In the Kushnameh, the development of themes of heritability and dynastic lineage complicates notions of genealogical superiority and inferiority, and the significance of Black invaders within the epic’s Neoplatonic and Manichean or Zoroastrian conceptual framework, is more complex. These texts together offer a window into the interaction between phenotypic difference and lineage in medieval Islamicate culture.

Instability in the environment of late antique Iraq led to the formation of the marsh regions, or baṭāʾiḥ, right before the Islamic conquests. These lands, some of the earliest to inspire debate about land ownership in new Islamic state, are important in the history of agricultural hinterlands, environmental change, and regional revolt. The baṭāʾiḥ (as per the work of anthropologist and historian James Scott) function as an environmental locus of non-state religious, cultural, and political development, as seen in the pattern of small-scale revolts and independence movements in the region. No group better represents this interplay between religious creativity, identification with the land, and the violent expression of political power than the enslaved “Zanj” people who revolted against their overlords in the Abbasid period. While they failed to establish a permanent state, they changed the course of Islamic political and economic history; and they fell when they tried to instate more stringent controls, which the Islamic state was able to undermine and counteract. However, this revolt has far too often been understudied, seen as one of simply an outpouring of violence headed by a charismatic religious opportunist. Little study has been made on the way that the people who sparked this revolt were also claiming a connection to an identity—one that was based on their knowledge of, and ability to navigate, the baṭāʾiḥ. Drawing on the theoretical work of historians of the environment and non-state societies, this paper restructures the ongoing discourse of the Zanj revolt from a rebellion of overworked plantation slaves to one of a nascent form of growing communal self-identity, not of religion or race, but of class and connection to the environment. From the early Umayyad period onward, there are at least three revolts recorded, which speaks to the intergenerational efforts of the slaves to gain their freedom. The Zanj reacted to the state’s need for control of unstable land by sabotaging the state’s means to regulate it while disrupting the agricultural and irrigation infrastructure necessary for its development. Their established state is an attempt to create a land outside of state control, which failed essentially due to the way it replicated the prevailing political and economic structures from which they tried to escape. Their history nuances our understanding of captive labor and identity in the medieval Islamicate world.

In 1518, al-Wazzan, a North African ambassador, became Leo Africanus, captive of Pope Leo X. His knowledge of Arabic, Latin, and Italian earned him the favor of his master, who commissioned a description of Africa as well as a Latin translation of the Quran. Since the discovery of these texts, historians have tried to establish the religious identity of its author. Those driven by Islamophobic discourses such as A. Épaulard claimed that Leo Africanus embraced Christianity while M. al-Hajwi and M. Hajji contended that al-Wazzan never left Islam behind. More recently, O. Zhiri and N. Z. Davis pointed out that the question of Leo Africanus/al-Wazzan’s religious identity strengthened preconceived notions of culture and identity as monolithic and static. Instead, they understand Leo Africanus/al-Wazzan as a man who embodied multiple identities. My paper contributes to this debate by reading Leo Africanus/al-Wazzan through the lenses of Bhabha’s theory of the third space in the context of translation. Such a theory affirms that translation results in a third code which allows for the resignification of terms and modification of the languages involved. Following Zhiri and Davis, I argue that Leo Africanus/al-Wazzan performed in-betweenness through his Description of Africa and Latin Quran. Indeed, by attributing a new signification to Italian terms, transliterating Arabic and North African words, and introducing his audience to a new conception of Africa, the translator created a third space with which to carefully activate and deactivate his multiple identities, ultimately cultivating his authority, proving his value, and accumulating trust capital. This ensured his survival and even success during captivity. Considering the linguistic and religious diversity of the Medieval Mediterranean, Bhabha’s third space proves crucial in understanding complex figures such as Leo Africanus/al-Wazzan.