Narrating Muslim Sicily - War and Peace in the Medieval Mediterranean World

About the author

William Granara is professor of Arabic language and literature at Harvard University, USA in the departments of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations and Comparative Literature, and is currently the director of its Center for Middle Eastern Studies.

Summary

In 902 the last Byzantine stronghold in Sicily fell, and the island would remain under Muslim control until the arrival of the Normans in the eleventh century. Drawing on a lifetime of translating and linguistic experience, William Granara here focuses on the various ways in which medieval Arab historians, geographers, jurists and philologists imagined and articulated their ever-changing identities in this turbulent period. All of these authors sought to make sense of the island's dramatic twists, including conquest and struggles over political sovereignty, and the painful decline of social and cultural life. Writing about Siqilliya involved drawing from memory, conjecture and then-current theories of why nations and people rose and fell. In so doing, Granara considers and translates, often for the first time, a vast range of primary sources - from the master chronicles of Ibn al-Athir and Ibn Khadun to biographical dictionaries, geographical works, legal treatises and poetry - and modern scholarship not available in English. He charts the shift from Sicily as 'warrior outpost' to vital and productive hub that would transform the medieval Islamic world, and indeed the entire Mediterranean.

Foreword

Uses a vast range of primary sources to document the ways in which medieval Arab writers, historians, geographers and philosophers articulated their changing identities in a turbulent era of the island's political life.

Additional text

an invaluable resource for specialists in medieval Sicily, and invites more general readers into this rich literary world

Product details

• Authors: William Granara
• Assisted by: Roy Mottahedeh (Editor)
• Publisher: Tauris, I.B.
• Languages: English
• Product format: Paperback / Softback
• Released: 31.12.2020
• EAN: 9780755638543
• ISBN: 978-0-7556-3854-3
• No. of pages: 240
• Series: Early and Medieval Islamic World; Early and Medieval Islamic Wor
• Subjects: Humanities, art, music > History > Cultural history; Non-fiction book > History > Miscellaneous; HISTORY / Middle East / General, Social & cultural history, RELIGION / Islam / History, HISTORY / Military / Medieval, Middle East, Islamic Studies, CE period up to c 1500, Medieval History, Social and cultural history, Mediterranean countries, Relating to Islamic / Muslim people and groups, Social groups: religious groups and communities