Some Reflections about the Use of the Berber Language in the Medieval and Early Modern Maghrib: Data from Hagiographic Sources

The Berber language has historically been a key element in the socio-cultural and ethnic fabric of the Maghrib. Consequently, in recent years there have been several initiatives to recover and interpret the information Arabic sources provide on the Berber language and the role played by Berber peoples in the consolidation of Islam in this area.

Studies of the Berber language and peoples have primarily centred on chronicles and geographical sources, but scholars have devoted less attention to other sources, especially hagiographies. With the exception of some specific work, the role of the Berber language and peoples in hagiographic literature has not been systematically analysed. The analysis presented in this article suggests that some hagiographic sources, especially those written by Berber authors, while avoiding an open defence of Berber identity, in fact hid it behind comments and quotes of a linguistic nature. This study, although it includes some additional references to the Mārinid, Wa??āsid and Sa?did periods, concentrates on the Almohads, and deals with written sources, both Andalusi and Maghribi.     

Muslim women wearing the niqab in Spain: Dialogues around discrimination,identity and freedom

The niqab provokes a heated debate in European societies and generates intolerance towards women who wear it. Some of the explanations used to criticize this Muslim garment refer to the idea that women wear the niqab as a form of patriarchal oppression. Furthermore—especially after the terrorist attacks perpetrated by Islamic extremists—the niqab is seen as a symbol of religious radicalization. We carried out 10 communicative daily life stories with Muslim women wearing the niqab in Spain, to explore the adverse experiences that they face, as well as the ways to transform them. Our analysis, informed by a communicative approach, revealed different forms of discrimination, such as prejudice, personal attacks and social isolation. Furthermore, it revealed some opportunities to transform these experiences, through the equality of differences, the egalitarian dialogue, and the support of faith-based organizations. Ultimately, our findings illustrated participants’ persistent defense of their right to express their religious identity.     

Comfort,Class and Climate Change: The Rise of Glass in Late Medieval and Early Modern Domestic Architecture

ABSTRACT

In the modern world, glass windows are considered an indispensable element of the built environment. Throughout premodern times, however, glass was not universally used in European architecture. This article argues that the rise of glass in Western architecture was neither an inevitable nor a linear process, but rather a response to certain social, cultural and environmental factors that gained increasing relevance from the late medieval period onwards. In other words, glass windows are a cultural convention, reflecting some of the wide-ranging and transformative challenges that Europeans faced in the late medieval and early modern period.     

Longing for Granada in Medieval Arabic and Hebrew Poetry

While a great many studies have dealt with medieval poetry, they have failed to discuss the poetry of longing (?anīn) as a separate genre, independent of other genres, especially elegies (in particular poems that lament the fate of cities) and poems of salvation and lament. Nor has any study so far undertaken a comparison between works of this genre by Muslim and by Jewish poets.

In this article, we shall discuss the growth of the poetry of longing in Muslim Spain and provide a number of examples of verses composed by Muslim and Jewish poets who were born in the cities of Andalusia and shared a common fate: many of them were persecuted for a variety of reasons and forced into a life of wandering and exile, and suffered banishment, imprisonment and torture. The ways they expressed their longing for their native cities possessed similarities but also differences, depending on the way each such poet perceived the land of the west and the scenes of his native city. The differences were particularly marked with respect to the way Jewish poets viewed the cities in which they had been born.     

Communities of the Dead in Umayyad Cordoba

There are frequent references to Cordoba's cemeteries in Arabic, Latin and Romance sources, and archaeologists have uncovered several of them. This provides some evidence for the social aspects of burial. This paper considers two factors that seem to have determined where a citizen of Cordoba might be buried–the individual's social status and religious affiliation–and evaluates their significance.     

Behind the Curve: Bulliet and Conversion to Islam in al-Andalus Revisited

This article seeks primarily to call for a reappraisal of Richard Bulliet's well-known “curve of conversion” and of its interpretation, for it has been largely misinterpreted. It is argued, with particular reference to the Christian experience in al-Andalus, that reading the data as Bulliet intended could have a significant effect on how we view the historical process of conversion in the early Islamic world. Thus, since Bulliet's data do not support the prevailing view regarding Christianity's survival under Muslim rule in the Iberian Peninsula, it is proposed that the evidence available in the particularly weak historical record for this period and place is enough to warrant reconsideration of the nature and length of that survival.     

Nests of Pirates? “Islandness” in the Balearic Islands and La Garde-Freinet

ABSTRACT

The “World of Medieval Islands” project invites the questioning of the category of island from medieval evidence, and coincided with another project of the author’s that was undertaking a similar exercise with medieval frontiers. Combining these two research areas, this article investigates two island, or island-like, zones that were situated at the edges of early medieval polities, primarily (though variably) of Umayyad al-Andalus, and compares their situation so as to elucidate what about their geopolitical situation made them island-like and how steady that likeness was. Working through the historiographies of the Balearic Islands, which shifted from Byzantine to Islamic control through a variably evaluated transition period, and of the Muslim settlement at La Garde-Freinet, Provence, from inception to extermination, the article concludes that what was island-like or indeed frontier-like about both areas was not continuous, and that the category “island” is historically contingent and subjective, despite its apparent geographic concreteness.     

The Tin Trade and Medieval Ceramics: Tracing the Sources of Tin and its Influence on Mediterranean Ceramics Production

This paper examines the role played by the availability of tin in the development of a commercial, glazed ceramics industry in the medieval workshops of Paterna, in eastern Spain. Tin was an essential ingredient that was used by potters since the ninth century in Iraq to make ceramic glazes opaque. However, it is a relatively scarce raw material, which had to be sourced and imported by many potters; in this paper I explore these possible sources of tin, from the Far East to Iberia and south-west England. Although many factors contributed to the development of a ceramics industry in eastern Spain in the medieval period, I argue that one hitherto overlooked and important stimulus was the expansion of the trade in tin from south-west England – Devon and Cornwall – to the Mediterranean.     

Finding the Family in Medieval and Early Modern Scotland. By Elizabeth Ewan and Janay Nugent

ABSTRACT

In response to recent discussions in the UK about the history national curriculum in schools, Cultural and Social History invited several historians to comment on the issues. Their responses to our questions have been interleaved and lightly edited.     

Heirs and Spares: Elite Fathers and Their Sons in the Literary Sources of Umayyad Iberia

ABSTRACT

In the medieval Islamic world, elite men were the benchmark of hegemonic masculinity and social power. A presumption of masculine authority within the household shaped the way early medieval rulers were described by chroniclers, and how medieval fathers related to their sons. The formal and informal ways in which they interacted with lower status men – whether their clients, their courtiers, or their sons – were hedged about with the symbolic language of gender. The article focuses on the ways in which certain Andalusī literary sources talk about relations of fathers and their sons with the ruling Umayyad family, to offer an additional dimension to our picture of how the dynasty conceptualised and legitimised its power.     

Music,Tradition, and Cultural Adaptation among the Maronites of Lebanon: The Reform of the Funeral Liturgy

The Maronite Church is a branch of the Syro-Antiochean Church and one of the oldest among the Eastern churches. Modernisation, globalisation, emigration, civil war and other factors have together influenced many aspects of local religious expression, but the Maronite Church has succeeded in adapting to the social changes and the spiritual needs of its followers without losing its identity. This is reflected in the Maronite funeral liturgy, which is here examined. I aim to show how the role of music and poetry is perpetuating a sense of communal identity among the members of this religious group, and is creating boundaries with other ethnic and religious groups.     

Water Supply in Medieval Middle Eastern Cities: The Case of Cairo

In spite of its location on the Nile bank, medieval Cairo suffered from serious problems of water supply because of its topography and the Nile regime that necessitated water storing. Direct canalization was not adopted to channel the Nile to inhabited quarters, either on the riverside or inland because of the dangers entailed in an uncontrolled water race during the Nile inundation. The Nile water was safely conveyed inland in canals, dammed by dikes at their mouths on the Nile before the inundation, and opened when the water level reached sixteen arms. Aqueducts and conduits carried the water from the canals to inland open reservoirs, or artificial lakes, around all of which grew residential quarters. The lake waters were transferred to cisterns and above ground tanks that were used as closed water reservoirs before distribution in the residential quarters of Cairo. Scattered in central sites within the quarters, there were the big wells and basins that received water from outside the quarter for distribution to the wells located near the houses, baths and mosque courtyards. The quarters' wells and tanks usually had a common water source and the houses' wells were interconnected by a labyrinth of underground conduits. Residences of the elite and bourgeoisie were equipped with water facilities as befitted their status. The upper middle class often rented qā‘as, exclusive residential units located on the ground floor, equipped with water systems. The lower socio-economic classes, which constituted the majority of the population, lived in standard units in residential complexes that were not equipped with running water but only with water jars. The general public regularly visited public baths for both personal hygiene and leisure, consumed commercially prepared food in the market and sent their clothes for laundering and pressing in the market.     

The Island of Aegina: An Example of Modus Vivendi in the Medieval Mediterranean

The medieval Mediterranean has predominantly been considered to be a place of continuous conflict in matters of political and territorial ambitions, and, of course, religious dominance. The constant incursions on the islands of the Mediterranean have been considered by historians, legitimately in many instances, to be destructive of local communities, and to have caused turbulence in the economy, society, and culture. However, there is documentation which proves that such invasions were frequently followed by improvement in administration, and subsequently by production of art and a new type of culture that was an amalgam of Western and Eastern elements.

This article aims to illustrate certain positive side effects of this interaction in the Mediterranean through a specific example: the medieval city of Aegina in the Aegean Sea. During its history, the island passed through the hands of the Franks, the Venetians, the Catalans, and eventually the Ottomans. The architectural forms and artistic patterns that will be discussed support the argument that the medieval Mediterranean became a place for the exchange of ideas, and a canvas for multicultural activities.     

Technological Continuity and Change: The Lateen Sail of the Medieval Mediterranean

Maritime connectivity in the medieval Mediterranean, highlighted by a number of scholars, acknowledges the importance of maritime technology. A detailed understanding of the use and development of watercraft permitting trans-Mediterranean trade, exchange and cultural interaction is still often lacking. The lateen sail provided the main form of propulsion to Mediterranean sail-powered ships for the majority of the medieval period. Yet, its origins, development and potential performance has, until recently remained poorly understood. Clear iconographic depictions outline the basic chronology surrounding the adoption of the lateen sail allowing the main rigging components of the Mediterranean lateen rig to be characterised from the late-antiquity onwards. Comparative investigation into the Mediterranean lateen and square-sail allows an appreciation of the relative performance of the two rigs. This allows new theories to be proposed, which explain the invention and adoption of the lateen sail and provide a developed context for its use in the medieval period.     

Inter-religious feelings of Sunni and Alevi Muslim minorities: The role of religious commitment and host national identification

This paper examines inter-religious attitudes from the perspective of Muslim minorities living in Western Europe. We examine both Sunni and Alevi Muslims of Turkish origin living in Germany and the Netherlands, and focus on their global feelings towards multiple religious out-groups (Christians, Jews, Muslim out-group, and non-believers). We hypothesize that Sunnis would dislike religious out-groups more than Alevis, and that these group differences in religious out-group feelings can be explained by group differences in host national identification and the three B’s of religious commitment: belonging (religious identification), behaviour (religious practices), and belief (liberal values). Sunnis were found to be rather negative towards Alevis, and Alevis were even more negative towards Sunnis. Furthermore, as expected, Alevis had more positive feelings towards Christians, Jews and non-believers, and this was related to their stronger host national identification, lower religious group identification, lower involvement in religious practices, and stronger endorsement of liberal values. We conclude by pointing at the need to distinguish between subgroups of Muslims instead of treating them as a uniform collective.     

电报在近代中国的命运

电报作为近代科技发展的产物，清咸丰初年开始传入中国，但并未引起时人注意。