Category Archives: Islamic History

Medieval Muslim Women’s Travel

Gender and Sexuality, Islamic History, Travel


Two woman observing a conversation, Baghdad, Maqamat al-Hariri, Late Eleventh to early Twelfth Centuries, Bibliotheque Nationale, Paris. MS arabe 3929 fol 134, Maqamat 40, detail

Medieval Muslim Women’s Travel: Defying Distance and Dangerby Marina Tolmacheva, World History Connected

Women’s rights in Muslim societies became an especially sensitive subject of intercultural discussion in the twenty-first century. The recent Arab awakening has made understanding Islam, explaining Muslim sacred law to non-Muslims, and interpreting the internal dynamics of Islamic countries an increasingly urgent concern for educators. This paper focuses on historical evidence of Muslim women’s spatial mobility since the rise of Islam and until the early modern period, that is from the seventh until the sixteenth centuries. The Muslim accounts of travel and literature about travel created during this long period were written by men, mostly in Arabic. Muslim women did not leave behind records of their own travel, and it is only in the early modern period that some records were created by women, only a very few of which have been discovered. This means that we must rely on men’s accounts of women’s travel or draw on general descriptions of travel conditions that are applicable to women’s travel as well as men’s. Another limitation derives from the Islamic requirements of privacy and Muslim conventions of propriety: it was generally not considered good manners to discuss womenfolk or specific ladies, so medieval, and even early modern, Muslim books rarely describe living women unless it is to praise them. Historical chronicles may glorify queens, discuss important marriages made by princesses, or praise pious or learned Muslim women, but some travel books—for example, “The Book of Travels” (Safar-Nama) by the Persian traveler Nasir-i Khusraw (1004–1088)—do not speak of women at all. Some of the eyewitness evidence below explicitly related to women’s travel is drawn from the author who set the pattern of the travel account focused on pilgrimage to Mecca, Ibn Jubayr (1145–1217) and from “The Travels” (Rihla) of by Ibn Battuta (1304–1368?), who repeatedly married and divorced during his travels and sought advantage from association with prominent women met on his journeys. No such reservation was practiced in the Christian writing tradition, so occasionally observations of Muslim women on the journey may be found in the records left by European pilgrims, merchants or captives in the Near East, especially in works published after 1500. Continue reading Medieval Muslim Women’s Travel →

Muslim Journeys

Film and Video, Folklore and Proverbs, Islam in America, Islam: Introduction, Islamic History, Miniatures, Scholars, Teaching Resources

The National Endowment for the Humanities has a fantastic website on Islam with a variety of resources, especially valuable for teaching about Islam, but also just for browsing. The outreach part of the project is “The Muslim Journeys Bookshelf,” a collection of 25 books and 3 films, noted as “a collection of resources carefully curated to present to the American public new and diverse perspectives on the people, places, histories, beliefs, practices, and cultures of Muslims in the United States and around the world.” American libraries can apply for receipt of this collection. Available on the site are images, samples from texts, audio recordings and short film clips, web links and a bibliography.This website is worth spending a few hours on and coming back to; it is precisely what a virtual museum should be.

Here is a sample text excerpt to whet your appetite. This is from al-Jahiz, who died in 869 CE, on “The Disadvantages of Parchment”
Continue reading Muslim Journeys →

An Ottoman Scribe

Orientalist Art, Ottoman Empire, Turkey


A Seated Scribe, 1479-80, Attributed to Gentile Bellini, Italian, 1429–1507

The painting above is located in the Gardner Art Museum in Boston. Here is the description posted on their website:

Curious visitors who lift the cover from the unassuming Seated Scribe will be richly rewarded by what they see: an intimate painting in miniature of a young member of the Ottoman court bent intently over a writing pad. Dressed in a navy velvet caftan woven with gold, the elegant youth wears bright silks at his arms and neck. The generous folds of his turban hold in place a ribbed, red taj – headgear worn in the court milieu of Ottoman sultan Mehmed II (1432–1481), who nurtured a passionate interest in portraiture and particularly in western traditions of the genre.

Striking for its gleaming tones and stunning delicacy of line, the Seated Scribe is spectacular not only visually, but also in historiographic terms. The painting’s original dimensions have been trimmed, and a later hand has taken care not only to embellish the image, but also to frame, mount, and, ultimately, historicize it. An added inscription in Persian records the image as the “work of Ibn Muezzin who was a famous painter among the Franks.” Scholars have never doubted that a European or “Frankish” artist painted the Seated Scribe. The pressing issue of late has been who, precisely? Whether the Venetian Gentile Bellini, a renowned portraitist sent to Istanbul in 1479, or Costanzo da Ferrara, a court artist at Naples who also sojourned at the Porte, the specificity of detail in the Seated Scribe leaves little doubt that the artist drew from life.

Once the debate over attribution subsides, the more intriguing issue to raise is whether one can call the work a portrait. Might western pictorial realism have been the point of the exercise? A pronounced crease just above the youth’s elbow suggests the image was initially handled as a loose-leaf, autonomous work of art before being mounted (and in this way preserved) in a sixteenth-century album. Like other western-style works Mehmed II commissioned or obtained during his sultanate, the Seated Scribe may have been used as a pedagogic tool for rising artists of the Ottoman royal workshop. A slightly later copy of the miniature (Freer Gallery of Art, Washington) certainly affirms its value for Ottoman and Persian artists as a pictorial model worthy of imitation. If the pictured youth is not a scribe but an artist, shown in the act of drawing while he himself is being drawn according to Western pictorial practices, the Seated Scribe taught by poignant example – it sits indeed at the nexus of Ottoman art and European traditions of representation.

Source: Susan Spinale, “A Seated Scribe,” in Eye of the Beholder, edited by Alan Chong et al. (Boston: ISGM and Beacon Press, 2003): 97.

Bulliet on Religion and the State in Islam

Islam: Introduction, Islamic History, Scholars

The Center for Middle East Studies at the University of Denver has published its second Occasional Paper, “Religion and the State in Islam: From Medieval Caliphate to the Muslim Brotherhood.” Adapted from a lecture given by Richard Bulliet, Columbia University Professor of History, when he visited DU in February, the paper seeks to contextualize ongoing political changes in the Muslim world by providing a more nuanced reading of Islamic history. To read the pdf online, click here.

The Vanishing Christians of Islam

Egypt, Islam and Christianity, Islamic History


Mosaic depiction of Mary holding an Arabic text, Convent of Our Lady, Greek Orthodox Church, Sednaya, Syria.

by Anouar Majid, Tingis Redux, April 14, 2013

Recently, Tawadros II, the Coptic pope of Egypt, said that “even during the darkest ages” of its history, his church was never subjected to the violence it is now suffering at the hands of Sunni Muslims. Maybe. But what is well known is that the fate of Egyptian Christianity and that of all Christians who found themselves under Muslim domination beginning in the 7th century when Islam emerged as a new religion hasn’t been an easy one.

It is true that the Koran periodically adopts a conciliatory attitude toward the “People of the Book,” but Islam is, in the end, categorically clear about who is right and who is wrong. Not only does Allah reject any religion that is not Islam, but the Koran also commands Muslims to “fight those among the ‘People of the Book’ who do not believe in Allah and the Last Day, who do not forbid what Allah and his messengers have forbidden and do not profess the true religion, till they pay the poll-tax (jizyah) out of hand and submissively.” The Christians’ off-and-on persecution has been a constant fact of life under Islamic rule; in fact, the notion of “genocide” was first inspired by the atrocities that befell Iraqi Christians in the 1920s, which came on the heels of the Turkish massacres of Armenians. As I am writing this, the Copts–a corruption of the word Aigyptos, whose original language goes back to the age of pyramids and which helped decipher the hieroglyphics in the 19th century—who make up some 10 percent of Egypt’s population of 90 million, are the only community of Christians left in any meaningful numbers. And, quite frankly, if Egypt doesn’t change, I wouldn’t bet on their long-term survival. Continue reading The Vanishing Christians of Islam →

Islam: The Arab Religion

Books You Should Read, Islam and Christianity, Islam: Introduction, Islamic History, Islamic Texts


By Anouar Majid, Tingis Redux, February 22nd

A few months ago, I immersed myself in a kind of reading that I wish was available to me and my teachers when I was in high school in Tangier (Morocco) studying philosophy and Islamic Studies. It is the kind of slow—very slow—reading that keeps you constantly challenged and fully awake. It is archeological and historical work informed by a knowledge so vast that a reader must struggle to keep track of all sorts of cultures, languages, dates, and names. Only scholarship of this scope, though, can aim at the heart of gigantic myths—myths so powerful and persistent that centuries of generations have taken them for reality and billions continue to believe in their truth.

I decided to devote some time to the work of Professor Patricia Crone because her name kept appearing with increasing frequency in the literature I had been reading in the last few years, whether by scholars who share her general view or not. I thought it was time to have a first-hand experience of what Crone’s thesis is about. So, in no particular order, and rather quickly, I read God’s Rule: Government and Islam (2004), co-written with Martin Hinds; Meccan Trade and the Rise of Islam (first published in 1987); Slaves on Horses (1980) and Hagarism: The Making of the Islamic World, the book she co-authored with Michael Cook in 1977 and which caused a storm in the rarified circles of scholars. Even though she may have changed her mind since she published the book in 1977, Hagarism and Meccan Trade totally upset the foundations of what we have grown to believe is Muslim history. They show, as do other writers in different ways, like Arthur Jeffery, John Wansborough, and, more recently, Fred Donner, Tom Holland and Robert Spencer, that what Muslims and non-Muslims learn in school about Islam is not facts that happened but literary compositions whose aim was to create a new religion with its own legitimizing mythology.

A Religion is Born

Muslims believe that their Prophet Mohammed, who was born in 570 AD and died in 632 AD, is the best human ever born in the world, chosen by God to spread his final and everlasting message, preserved in a heavenly tablet, the Koran. Starting out from humble origins in Mecca—a bustling crossroads in the caravan trade—and reputed for his honesty and wisdom, Mohammed married his older boss Khadija, received God’s message through the archangel Gabriel at a local cave when he was 40, fled his native city and migrated to Yathrib (thereafter known as Medina) when his persecution grew more intense, and later returned to Mecca as a triumphant Muslim conqueror. By the time he died, he had married several times and most of Arabia had converted to Islam. Soon his followers, known as Muslims, fanned out in a series of conquests (downplayed as futuhat in Islamic apologetics) that, within a century, had reached France and turned the Fertile Crescent, North Africa and the Iberian Peninsula into Muslim nations. Continue reading Islam: The Arab Religion →

Central Asian and Middle Eastern Numismatics Seminar

Archaeology and Antiquities, Central Asia, Conferences and Talks, Iran, Islamic Economics, Islamic History, Languages


‘Great Ruler of Sogdiana, of the Tchao-ou Race’/Alram’s ‘Imitationsgruppe V’
Yueh Chih Principality of Sogdiana AR Tetradrachm, 130 BCE – 80 CE

The Fifth Seminar in Central Asian and Middle Eastern Numismatics in Memoriam Boris Kochnev will be held at Hofstra University on Saturday, March 16, 2013.

This seminar is free and open to the public. Hofstra is located in Hempstead, NY, easily accessible from NYC by the Long Island Railroad. For directions click here or here. The seminar will be held in Breslin Hall, room 112. For more information, contact Aleksandr Naymark or Daniel Martin Varisco.

Seminar Program:

10:00 am
Daniel Varisco (Hofstra University)
Opening Remarks

10:15
Vadimir Belyaev (Zeno.ru, Moscow) and Aleksandr Naymark (Hofstra University)
Archer Coins from South Sogdiana (1st – 3rd centuries C.E.)

10:45 pm
Pankaj Tandon (Boston University)
Notes on Alchon Coins

11:15 pm
Waleed Ziad (Yale University)
The Nezak – Turk Shahi Transition:
Evidence from the Kashmir Smast (mid 7th c. C.E.) Continue reading Central Asian and Middle Eastern Numismatics Seminar →