As students of Islam, we internalize the idea of the pre-modern Islamic world being a well-connected commonwealth. Generations of scholars have fortified this idea through their close reading of primary sources. However, the latest digital studies in other disciplines (primarily, literary history) show that many academic ideas that became practically axiomatic are based on unsystematic treatment of primary sources and may well be distorted. The paper thus seeks to re-evaluate the notion of the "connectedness" of Islamdom through digital analysis of biographical collections. Biographies often mention places which their subjects visited. Such itineraries provide us with an opportunity to represent each individual on a geographical map as a series of connected dots. Using text-mining techniques and geographical information systems (GIS), one can combine thousands of such itineraries into a map showing connections between Islamic urban centers and province. More importantly, a chronological series of such maps will allow us to look into how these connections changed over time. The paper will discuss major methodological challenges and possible ways of modeling "connectedness" based on data available in biographical collections. The paper will offer a preliminary analysis of al-Dhahabi's "History of Islam" and major biographical collections of legal schools.

Within the intellectual tradition of the Shiites of South Lebanon, the region they have inhabited for centuries has been called “Jabal ‘Amil.” Jabal ‘Amil’s textual existence begins in 1698 with the prosopographic work Amal al-Amil which details the region’s Shiite ‘ulama’. Some scholars have pointed out that the notion of Jabal ‘Amil captured in Amal al-Amil is not entirely accurate since individuals who are not from the region are given the nisba “al-‘Amili.” Such a perspective is teleological and positivistic by taking the correspondence of historical Jabal ‘Amil and modern South Lebanon for granted and assuming the primacy of the nationally-based latter over the former. The implication of such a view is that Jabal ‘Amil’s objective truth is found in its modern, national delineation as South Lebanon. Rather than engage in an anachronistic critique of Amal al-Amil and its content, this paper demonstrates the potential genealogical significance of the book by engaging it along with two other ‘Amili texts - Jabal ‘Amil fi Qarn, a chronicle spanning the late 18th and early 19th centuries, and Khitat Jabal ‘Amil, an early 20th century encyclopedic work on the region’s history – using computational techniques to inform my analysis of each work. Each text is mined for data such as nisbas, place names, and family names, in order to arrive at an understanding of the epistemological basis of Jabal ‘Amil as conceived of by their respective authors. The paper is an attempt at a genealogy of the idea of Jabal ‘Amil as a geographic space and, therefore, the referent for the nisba al-‘Amili and the basis for the forms of community identity that this idea has made possible historically. The paper is, as well, an experiment in the different types of knowledge that one can develop through in-depth analyses of texts by mining their content for, among other things, its epistemological and ontological implications, subtle stylistic devices, and the way information is mapped on social space. My paper is part of a broader research project whose ultimate goal is to understand the differences, transformations, and ruptures in the definition and meaning of Jabal ‘Amil as a basis of identity across time and between different social classes.

This paper explores the usefulness of digital technology for the study of cultural memory in the medieval Middle East through discussion of a case study focused on a particular work and its inter-textual connections. The Thimar al-qulub fi al-mudaf wa-l-mansub (“Fruits of the heart among nouns in construct form”) is a lexicon of memorable two-word phrases and clichés, including on early and pre-Islamic topics, such as the “diwan Kisra,” referring to the ruins, on the Tigris, of a palace of the Sassanian king, Khusraw Anushirvan (r. 531–79), or “Yawm al-Jamal,” referring to a memorable moment in the first fitna, or conflict, within the Muslim community. The eastern Iranian man of letters, Abu Mansur al-Tha'alibi (d. 429/1038), composed it for an elite patron, whose library he says he used. He also cites local, Iranian authorities. Based on the work’s introduction, structure, contents, and subsequent transmission, the Thimar appears to have served as something of a reference work, but also as a tool for teaching. It is also possible to characterize its cultural values, including its ambivalence to Iran’s pre-Islamic past. But how did al-Tha'alibi concretely work, what did he have at his disposal, and what might this suggest about his selection and filtering of the past? To what extent did he rely on a written corpus, and to what extent did his sources represent a live tradition, orally transmitted and remembered? And how might we characterize the inter-textual webs within which his work sits? In other words, within what sort of “circulatory system” did he work, to use a term employed by scholars of early rabbinic literature, and how did he possibly seek to shape his society’s memory of the past? Digital search engines can help for data mining, and numerous questions, relevant to the above inquiries, can be put to them. These will be discussed, as I consider the potential, and problems, of working with such engines. I will then propose a new way of using our digital resources, involving the manipulation of software originally designed to detect student plagiarism to detect relations between Arabic works, including those that go un-cited. This research requires some preparation of texts for analysis, and the development of an entirely new methodology that uses technical advancements to identify new, previously unanswerable questions for our sources.

The Arab genealogical literary tradition of the 8th and 9th centuries has long been suspected of containing a large amount of historically accurate data, but the density and complexity of the information has meant that modern scholarship has only been able to treat it in a piece-meal fashion. The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate that basic techniques and technologies used in the digital humanities allow us to overcome the challenges presented by the source material. It will be shown that by drawing on anthropological and sociological studies related to genealogical memory we can hypothesise that certain elements of the nasab tradition are less susceptible to historiographical distortion than others. These elements are then extracted from the literature and compiled in the form of a database which can then be subjected to different forms of prosopographical analysis. These include analyses of the data on tribal, generational and geographic levels. By correlating this analysis with outside sources we are in a position to confirm that the literature does indeed contain historically useful information. This then enables us to incorporate the findings into our narrative of Islam from its pre-Islamic origins to the end of the Umayyad caliphate. Some elements of the traditional narrative will find concurrence in the statistical findings, but other elements will not fare so well. It will be argued that the pre-Islamic Quraysh were not as pre-eminent amongst the Arab tribes as later authors would make them out to be, and discrimination against the children of non-Arab women was not as widespread as commonly thought. Also discussed in this paper will be two important side-effects of the application of these methodologies. The first is that the prosopographical approach works very well as a means of structuring the narrative of Islamic origins; by focusing less on the individual, we may get a better insight into the way the actors saw themselves operating according to their conflicting familial, tribal and ethnic loyalties. The second side-effect is that by atomising the genealogical literature we are forced to consider the nature of genealogical authorship itself, in particular the politics of structuring and coverage.

In 1976 Elyahu Ashtor set forth the argument that post-Black Death depopulation in the Levant decreased demand for foods like wheat and barley, leading farmers to increase their cultivation of cotton, flax and mulberries: the three textile crops. As a result, the textile industry saw a boom in the late 14th century. But that boom was a short-lived one, Ashtor argued: the volume and value of goods being exported from the Levant declined in the 15th and 16th centuries. The decline of the textile industry was a contributing factor to the economic decline not only of the Mamluk sultanate but of the whole Islamic Middle East. Ashtor’s theory about the boom and bust of the Levantine textile industry is based upon the ship registries of the Venetian merchants transporting raw cotton to Europe for manufacture, but he provides no numbers for increase or decrease in productivity at the levels of agriculture or manufacture within the Levant. Sources documenting the output of farms and factories are few and far between, and problematic at best. I propose that Geographic Information Systems, or GIS, might be a key to expanding our understanding of the agricultural and industrial productivity of the 14th-15th century Levant, and could provide more reliable estimates for the productivity of cotton cultivation from which we could substantiate Ashtor’s proposed late 14th century textile boom and 15th century bust. This research, still in-progress, considers the real-world application of GIS in the agricultural industry of the 21st century and modifies the methodologies in order to analyse the Medieval Levantine landscape in an attempt to recreate the agricultural conditions of 14th century Syria. This will be done by creating layers of data for soil and irrigation types, elevation and land-cover, rainfall and weather patterns in a 3 dimensional map. Using the innovative data analysis properties of GIS it will become apparent how these agricultural conditions were affected by changing weather patterns, erosion and desertification, demographics, wars and conflict, and market fluctuations, and ultimately will address Ashtor’s assumptions about the growth and contraction of cotton cultivation.