Places and Spaces in Pre-Modern Arabic Writing from the Islamic West
Panel 055, 2016 Annual Meeting
On Friday, November 18 at 1:45 pm
Panel Description
Regardless of the specific Islamicate geographies in which they were produced, medieval and early modern Arabic literary, historical, and legal texts often circulated far and wide, and were often in conversation with one another due to their shared consideration of various themes, topics, and tropes. Central to this panel are representations of spatiality in this body of Arabic texts, particularly those that were produced in the Islamic West--namely, Muslim Iberia and North Africa--and circulated throughout the region as well as beyond. Such a focus provides an opportunity to move away from a consideration of Arabic texts as static representations of broad, unrooted phenomena and towards a consideration of them as dynamic and, ultimately, constitutive of local realities. Furthermore, this emphasis on texts produced in and focused on a particular geography, that is, the Islamic West, aims to shed light on some of the locally significant features of such Arabic texts. Finally, by honing in on this particular geography, this panel aims to move extant conversations about the development of pre-modern Arabic writings westward and showcase the significant extent to which this part of the Arabic-speaking world was involved in the development of pre-modern Arabic writing more broadly.
Focusing on the Islamic West and spanning the medieval and early modern periods, the four papers in this panel bring together a range of Arabic texts in order to shed light on the textual making and shaping of the region. The first paper focuses on how the city of Qayrawān was eulogized in medieval Arabic literature, ultimately leading to the crystallization of a particular representation of the city. The second paper explores how Arabic texts showcase the relationship between gender and mobility in the medieval city of Fez. These texts demonstrate how individuals’ movement through the city was tied to gendered experiences. The third paper uses biographical dictionaries as a means to explore representations of the city of Tlemcen as a site of scholarship and intellectual as well as pious activity. Although the city is often overshadowed by Fez, its neighbor to the west, in historical narratives, this body of texts suggests that Tlemcen figures significantly into broader conceptualizations of intellectual life in the Islamicate world. The fourth paper looks at the relationship of a seventeenth-century Moroccan scholar to his literary configuration of space from a position of remove spatially and temporally from the spaces about which he wrote.
Before its catastrophic destruction at the hands of the Banū Hilāl in 1057, Qayrawān was hailed as the unmatched metropolis of the Islamic West. In the eyes of its admirers, if there existed a city that matched theirs, that city was none but Baghdad. Qayrawān was adulated by its residents and extolled by its visitors. Both in poetry and prose, the city was movingly eulogized. Likewise, especially in the corpus of historiography and geographical and travel literature, Qayrawān was effusively praised. Mashriqi historian, geographer and traveler al-Yaʻqūbī (d.897) visited the city and was impressed by what he saw. The effusive praise for Aghlabid Qayrawān was enthusiastically shared by later Maghribi scholars. Famed al-Idrīsī (d.1165), Ibn Khaldūn (d.1406), and al-Saraqūsti (d.1143), and al-Wazzān (d.1554). Commenting on its pre-Hilali glory, al-Idrīsī, hailed Qayrawān as “the greatest city in the Islamic West,” and “the most populated, prosperous and thriving with the most perfect buildings.” As for its people, he extolled their love for virtue, tradition, loyalty, and moderation before commending their mastery (tafannun) of the best of sciences (maḥāsin al-ʻulūm). The effusive comments dramatically turns into elegiac/nostalgic statements as soon as al-Idrīsi discusses the Hilālī invasion of Qayrawān. What was once the most majestic metropolis of the Maghrib, al-Idrīsī deplorably comments, became nothing but “aṭlāl dārisa wa-athār ṭāmisa,” that is ““erased traces and obliterated ruins.”
This paper examines the ways in which women moved through physical and discursive spaces in medieval Fez. Beginning in the late thirteenth century, the built environment of Fez was reshaped as the Marinid dynasty constructed institutions of learning (madrasas) and mosques throughout the city, anchored by the mosques that women had endowed in the ninth century on both sides of the river that ran through Fez. While one chief judge of Fez in the early fourteenth century enforced restrictions on women’s movements in the city streets, by the mid-fifteenth century, women inserted themselves into both the streets and the intellectual world of the jurists, attending study circles and classes on Islamic law at the Qarawiyyin Mosque. This paper explores the shifts in the culture of learning under the Marinid dynasty that opened up a space for elite women to pursue scholarly interests in domains traditionally associated with men.
Research on the Islamic world has increasingly moved away from simplistic dichotomies that understand Muslim women as confined to spaces defined by concepts such as private, secluded, and domestic. Categories that reflect modern sensibilities and anxieties often obscure the complex ways in which space was marked and how women negotiated these spaces, and erase the factors beyond gender that determined mobility such as social status, age, and marital status. An examination of sources that document actual legal practice reveals that it was more often husbands who attempted to restrict women’s access to public spaces, and women engaged in private negotiations to challenge these restrictions, or simply ignored the directives. This paper sifts through fragmented references to women’s relationships with space in theoretical and practical legal texts and biographical and autobiographical writings, and reads these texts together to construct a picture of women’s movements through the streets of the city and outside of it, and within the physical and intellectual spaces of its institutions.
Like the famous fourteenth-century traveler and scholar Ibn Battuta (d. 1368–9 or 1377), many individuals from North Africa and Muslim Spain and Portugal (al-Andalus) left their homes and traveled long distances in the medieval and early modern periods, often motivated by a range of intellectual, cultural, and spiritual profits. Yet journeys that began in the Islamic West did not always end in the cities of the Islamic East. Just as travel to the Islamic East from the Islamic West forged connections among the Muslims of the eastern and western Mediterranean, travel within the Islamic West created local networks and urban hubs made up of ideas and individuals of local as well as regional importance.
This paper will focus on the city of Tlemcen as a lens through which to further our understanding of local sites of intellectual activity and religious pilgrimage in the Islamic West as well as the textual making of such sites. The first part of the paper will explore the development of Tlemcen as a site of intellectual activity and local pilgrimage, given that single sites often served both purposes, from the twelfth through the seventeenth centuries. The second part of the paper will examine the movement of people from Fez and Marrakesh to Tlemcen and seek to understand the place of these three cities as a part of a larger regional intellectual and pilgrimage network. The research for this paper will be undertaken through an examination of several textual works focused on the scholars and saints of the city such as Kitāb al-Bustān fī dhikr al-awliyā’ wa-al-ʿulamā’ bi-Tilimsān by Ibn Maryam (d. 1605), as well as works containing geographical descriptions of these cities. Such texts were central to making and maintaining the city as a hub for intellectual and spiritual activity, as much as the actual presence of scholars and saints therein. While it is recognized that the Islamic East was an important destination for many Muslims who traveled, this paper will ultimately demonstrate that centers of intellectual activity and pilgrimage developed in the Islamic West and fostered local networks of circulation and connectivity, often understudied in scholarly analyses of knowledge production and circulation in the Islamic world.
This paper will address Abu Ali Hasan al-Yusi’s (1631-1691) relationship to place through an analysis of three of his most famous texts written in exile. Al-Yūsī’s al-Risalah al-kubra ila Mawlay Ismāʿīl, al-Muhadarat fi adab wa-l-lughah, and his autobiographical Fahrasah are interpreted as paradigmatic examples of 17th-century Moroccan literature and ideal vehicles to understand al-Yūsī’s various textually constructed spatial identities. Al-Risālah, a dialogue at a remove from its addressee, mixes invective and appeal for aid with subtle shifts in focalization between the misdeeds of the second-person addressee (Ismaʿil) and al-Yusi’s own suffering. In this text, the spaces for which the author longs encompass both his actual place of birth and the larger category of place it represents. Al-Yusi identifies exclusively with an idealized vision of the countryside set in the distant past, complicating the possibility of his return. In al-Muhadarat, al-Yūsī adopts the medium of poetry, creating a poetic persona distinct from the authorial voice of his epistle. Here his spatial identity is more inclusive, extending to cover most of the territories of early modern Morocco. In contrast, his Faharash is read as a rihlah sufiyyah where his space of belonging contracts to that associated with his individual sheikh and brotherhood. Through these texts, I examine the complex relationship al-Yūsī had with the country’s urban centers, rural landscapes, and Sufi orders and how this intersects with the geographies of early modern Morocco and at times begins to reflect something resembling a Moroccan national consciousness.
