Download PDF | Daniel G. König - Arabic-Islamic views of the Latin West _ tracing the emergence of medieval Europe-Oxford University Press (2015).
451 Pages
Preface
Images of ‘Europe’ and ‘the West’ play a pivotal role in various forms of discourse involving Muslims from all over the world, including from Western Europe. It is against this background that the study at hand questions established interpretations of how ‘the Islamic world’ perceived ‘Europe’ in the foundational period of their shared history. From a historian’s perspective, it calls for the necessity of reflecting upon the large variety of different factors at work in forming a highly differentiated range of ‘Muslim’ perceptions. My choice of topic, however, arose from the wish to combine my training as a historian of the cluster of non-Muslim societies commonly defined as medieval Western or Latin-Christian Europe with my training as an Arabist.
At the beginning of my research, the medievalist’s predilection for the history of Europe was still dominant. Inspired, inter alia, by Norman Cousin’s dictum that the most significant thing about the first lunar voyage ‘was not so much that man set foot on the moon but that he set eye on the earth’,1 I believed in the necessity of explaining European history not only from within, but also ‘from the outside’. To understand how medieval Western Europe was perceived from an Arabic-Islamic perspective I began compiling and organizing many theories and scraps of knowledge recorded by Arabic-Islamic scholars between the seventh and the fifteenth century. Soon engrossed in the intricacies of Arabic-Islamic source material, I realized that my endeavour to write a history of Europe from an extra-European perspective amounted to an effort of describing the interplay of radiation and impact in macrohistorical terms. Thus, I began tracing manifold processes of reception cutting across a millennium and thousands of square kilometres. Seen together, these processes constituted what I termed an ‘information landscape’.
This information landscape is of course much more complex than the initially chosen dichotomy of the observer and the observed would seem to suggest at first sight. The period and area of investigation cannot be described in terms of a cultural bipolarity marked by two antagonistic cultures. Rather, the emergence of this information landscape is grounded in historical processes that helped to bring forth ‘contact zones’, ‘third spaces’, and a great number of people moving in and between multiple and permeable cultural spheres and milieus. However, the study at hand does not pertain to the field of social history and neither focuses on the political, economic, social, or cultural relations between Christians and Muslims nor on transcultural phenomena resulting from their interaction.
The study rather belongs to a field commonly defined as history of historiography: it endeavours to understand how the representatives of an intellectual tradition defined by the use of one language (Arabic) and adherence to a specific interpretation of the divine(Islam) traced the emergence of a neighbouring non-Muslim sphere over the centuries. The ‘protagonists’ of this study, the Arabic-Islamic scholars responsible for the documentation of medieval Europe, constituted a particular but highly differentiated group within a much greater mass of Muslims involved in relations with Latin-Christian Europe.
Their writings do not necessarily reflect the entire range of views held on medieval Western Europe by Muslims in the area and period under investigation. Notwithstanding, they reproduce different kinds of information acquired during various encounters between Muslims and various aspects of the Latin-Christian sphere. As individual records, they are an obvious product of a specific historical constellation marked by the time, place, and social milieu of their production. Their chronological analysis allows to trace if and how the notion of a Latin-Christian sphere emerged in an Arabic-Islamic scholarly tradition that accumulated data over the centuries in reaction to important geopolitical developments and resulting social processes. The Arabic-Islamic expansion, the assimilation of intellectual and human resources drawn from a large variety of subject populations, regional diversification, developing foreign relations between Islamicate and non-Muslim societies as well as the subjection of various Muslim populations in the course of Latin-Christian expansionism had a considerable impact on how Arabic-Islamic scholars perceived and recorded the highly differentiated and ever-changing orbit of medieval Western Europe.
In recording the histories and describing the contemporary societies of non-Muslims, Arabic-Islamic scholars clearly acknowledged that the non-Muslim sphere, including medieval Western Europe, merited attention. In spite of the occasional derogatory or polemic comment, many a scholar regarded non-Muslim societies as alternative manifestations of human existence that could demand respect. As Ibn Khaldūn (d. 808/1406) highlighted, not only Muslims, but all humans, regardless of their origins or allegiance, are capable of sophisticated thought: The intellectual sciences are natural to man given that he is capable of thought. They are not restricted to a certain [religious] group (milla), but to a specific state of mind that can be encountered among all groups.. . .They have existed in humankind since the inhabitedness of the Creation.2 In acknowledging and accepting the multiplicity of human societies, creeds, and forms of existence, Arabic-Islamic scholars were not unfaithful to their creed, for the Qurʾān can be read as advocating the multiplicity of human orientations, stating (5:48) that: had God willed, He would have made you one congregation (umma). However, He wished to put you to a test with regards to what He has given to you. So compete in good works. To God you will all return, and He will inform you about what you used to differ.3 If all this is taken into consideration, it becomes obvious that the Arabic-Islamic world in its entirety was never slave to a rigid, uncompromising, and unchangeable interpretation of Islam. Multiple perspectives, not one single ‘Muslim’ world-view, characterize(d) its approach(es) to the non-Muslim world.
Working on such a large chronological and geographical scale, I was neither able to proffer a critical analysis of every individual source, nor to acknowledge the entire range of scholarship on the innumerable phenomena relevant within this wide framework. It was, for example, not possible to provide background information on every source or to correlate every Arabic-Islamic statement on a particular aspect of Latin Christendom with the latest state of the art on this subject. I consciously paid this price to be able to trace, in the longue durée, how Arabic-Islamic scholars described the non-Muslim societies of medieval Western or Latin-Christian Europe over the centuries. It is under this provision that I would like to hand this study over to the scholarly community and the interested public for criticism.
This is done in the hope that, in spite of its flaws, the study will prove useful to future scholarship and interesting to its readers. However, before introducing the reader to the subject, I would like to express my thanks to all those without whom this book could not have been written. When the main idea of this book was conceived in spring 2007, the birth of our first child was imminent, my contract was nearing its end, a first application had been rejected, and I was desperately looking for employment. I am sincerely indebted to my PhD supervisor Matthias Becher (Bonn) who, in this situation, offered to provide me with a temporary post at his chair should all other options fail. When the possibility arose to apply for a position at the German Historical Institute in Paris, my wife unfailingly encouraged me to propose a research project that suited my interests and skills rather than the anticipated expectations of the academic job market. Thus, I was able to take up a post in the institute’s section for Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages in November 2007.
In her quest to reform the institute’s research structure, the director, Gudrun Gersmann, provided me with the marvellous possibility of coordinating a research group on exchange processes in the medieval Mediterranean. Soon a father of two, always in fear of not being able to secure the next position before the temporary contract ended, I was an industrious but sometimes nettlesome employee to deal with. The directing ‘triumvirate’, headed by Gudrun Gersmann and flanked by Stefan Martens and Stephan Geifes, deserves my warmest thanks for its understanding and support. All of my colleagues at the institute were generous in many ways and made these four years of working routine very enjoyable. However, I would like to single out Karin Förtsch, Dunja Houelleu, Martin Heinzelmann, Torsten Hiltmann, and Anna Karla, all of whom encouraged me in professional and/or personal matters. Supported by Martin Kintzinger and Claudia Zey, my colleagues Rania Abdellatif, Yassir Benhima, and Elisabeth Ruchaud from the research group ‘FranceMed’ opened up the field of Mediterranean studies for me, and, especially Yassir Benhima, generously acquainted me with many an important scholar both in and outside France. This institutional and personal support enabled me to explore the fascinating range of high quality research offered by the French academic system, in and beyond the field of relations between Europe and the Islamic world.
I would like to thank Magali Coumert, Jocelyne Dakhlia, Philippe Depreux, Sylvie Joye, Wolfgang Kaiser, Edouard Méténier, Christian Müller, Philippe Sénac, Michel Sot, Dominique Valérian, and Eric Vallet for their welcoming gestures and assistance. Thanks to my colleagues in the extremely enriching DFG-priority programme ‘Integration and Disintegration of Cultures in the European Middle Ages’, headed by Michael Borgolte and Bernd Schneidmüller, I was able to remain connected to the German medievalist scene. Along with those who invited me to present papers in various locations, they regularly provided me with helpful criticism and inspiration. This also goes for Sāmir Qandīl who, with the help of his generous colleagues headed by ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz Ramaḍān from the history department of ʿAyn Shams-University, made possible a conference on ‘Images of the Other’ in Cairo, and supplied me with a recent Arabic study on the topic of this book.
The summer of 2011 saw my family and I moving to Frankfurt am Main where Bernhard Jussen employed me as researcher and lecturer at his chair for medieval studies, leaving me almost completely free from other obligations. Now father of three, I received much help from my colleagues, in particular from Mi Anh Duong, Tim Geelhaar, Christian Kleinert, Ulla Kypta (who read parts of the manuscript), Falk Müller, Peter Gorzolla, Christina Weitzel, and Dirk Wiegandt. In addition, I was supported in different ways by Frank Bernstein, Moritz Epple, Hartmut Leppin, Jan Rüdiger, and, in particular, Stefan Leder, whom I would like to thank again for coming to Frankfurt as part of the examining board at the occasion of my habilitation. Under these circumstances, I was able to acquire the academic qualifications needed to apply for a full professorship in 2013. I owe great thanks to Antje Flüchter for informing me about a call for applications for a start-up professorship at the cluster ‘Asia and Europe in a Global Context’ at the University of Heidelberg. This ‘last-minute call’ opened up a fascinating research landscape.
I received a warm welcome not only from the cluster’s administrative staff and researchers, but also from the historical department—from Nikolas Jaspert, Jenny Oesterle, Klaus Oschema, and the ever-encouraging Bernd Schneidmüller among others. During the past two years, many fruitful discussions have taken place with my colleagues from the DFG-network ‘Transcultural Entanglement in the Medieval Euromediterranean’, and I owe much to Georg Christ, Saskia Dönitz, the inimitable Şevket Küçükhüseyin, Margit Mersch, Britta Müller-Schauenburg, Ulrike Ritzerfeld, Christian Vogel, and Julia Zimmermann. Last but by no means least, Aouni Shahoud Almousa and Rosanna Sirignano have provided invaluable assistance to my teaching and research in the past year.
It is in this stimulating context that I was able to prepare the final manuscript, improved thanks to the helpful comments of Bernhard Jussen, Stefan Leder, Hartmut Leppin, Moritz Epple, Jan Rüdiger, and three anonymous reviewers. Noha Stephanos’ painstaking correction of my Arabic transcriptions saved me from many an embarrassment, all remaining mistakes being my own. I am also most grateful to Mandi Gomez for her patient, friendly, and very conscientious copy-editing that considerably improved the manuscript. It is thanks to my editors Stephanie Ireland and Cathryn Steele, production editor Carol Carnegie and project manager Manikandan Chandrasekaran, and their colleagues from Oxford University Press, including proofreader Karen Parker, that this book found its material form, the cover image having been designed by Shareef Fahim.
Writing this monograph would not have been possible without the unfailing support of my parents-in-law, Karl and Mathilde Rossa, and my mother, Johanna König, who regularly stepped in at short notice to help out our family in times of necessity. I would also like to give heartfelt thanks to my sister Barbara for many years of backing and encouragement, to my brothers Hans and Christian, as well as to Şevket Küçükhüseyin, Stephan Cursiefen, and Shareef Fahim for their support during the difficult last phase of preparing the manuscript for publication. My wife, Agnes Rossa, and my children Carmen, Penelope, and Simeon, have endured many phases of high tension from my side, but have nevertheless given and rightfully demanded the support and loving care that forms the basis of a stable family life. It is to them that I would like to dedicate this book. Daniel G. König Frankfurt/Heidelberg, 15 May 2015
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