Routes & Realms: The Power of Place in the Early Islamic World

ISBN-13: 9780190227159 / Angielski / Miękka / 2015 / 234 str.

Zayde Antrim

Opis

Routes and Realms explores the ways in which Muslims expressed attachment to land from the ninth through the eleventh centuries, the earliest period of intensive written production in Arabic. In this groundbreaking first book, Zayde Antrim develops a "discourse of place," a framework for approaching formal texts devoted to the representation of territory across genres. The discourse of place included such varied works as topographical histories, literary anthologies, religious treatises, world geographies, poetry, travel literature, and maps.

By closely reading and analyzing these works, Antrim argues that their authors imagined plots of land primarily as homes, cities, and regions and associated them with a range of claims to religious and political authority. She contends that these are evidence of the powerful ways in which the geographical imagination was tapped to declare loyalty and invoke belonging in the early Islamic world, reinforcing the importance of the earliest regional mapping tradition in the Islamic world.

Routes and Realms challenges a widespread tendency to underestimate the importance of territory and to over-emphasize the importance of religion and family to notions of community and belonging among Muslims and Arabs, both in the past and today.

Recenzje

Zayde Antrim's most significant contribution is that she challenges the dominant view that explains the rise of nationalism in the Middle East as a byproduct of the nineteenth century encounter with Europe. By critiquing this widely disseminated position, Antrim allows scholars of medieval and modern Middle East to realize that the concept of homeland represents at the same time continuity and change with the classical period, and therefore nationalism has invoked in the mind of medieval and modern Middle Easterners a complex web of legacies. She reminds us that good scholarship should be meticulous research and not speculation.

O autorze

Zayde Antrim is Charles A. Dana Associate Professor of History and International Studies at Trinity College.