The Muslim conquest of Iberia : medieval Arabic narratives
Author(s)
Bibliographic Information
The Muslim conquest of Iberia : medieval Arabic narratives
(Culture and civilization in the Middle East, 30)
Routledge, 2013, c2012
- : pbk
Available at 2 libraries
  Aomori
  Iwate
  Miyagi
  Akita
  Yamagata
  Fukushima
  Ibaraki
  Tochigi
  Gunma
  Saitama
  Chiba
  Tokyo
  Kanagawa
  Niigata
  Toyama
  Ishikawa
  Fukui
  Yamanashi
  Nagano
  Gifu
  Shizuoka
  Aichi
  Mie
  Shiga
  Kyoto
  Osaka
  Hyogo
  Nara
  Wakayama
  Tottori
  Shimane
  Okayama
  Hiroshima
  Yamaguchi
  Tokushima
  Kagawa
  Ehime
  Kochi
  Fukuoka
  Saga
  Nagasaki
  Kumamoto
  Oita
  Miyazaki
  Kagoshima
  Okinawa
  Korea
  China
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  United Kingdom
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Note
"First issued in paperback 2013"--T.p. verso
Includes bibliographical references (p. [209]-237) and index
Description and Table of Contents
Description
Medieval Islamic society set great store by the transmission of history: to edify, argue legal points, explain present conditions, offer political and religious legitimacy, and entertain. Modern scholars, too, have had much to say about the usefulness of early Islamic history-writing, although this debate has traditionally focused overwhelmingly on the central Islamic lands.
This book looks instead at local and regional history-writing in Medieval Iberia. Drawing on numerous Arabic texts - historical, geographical and biographical - composed and transmitted in al-Andalus, North Africa and the Islamic east between the ninth and fourteenth centuries, Nicola Clarke offers a nuanced and detailed analysis of narratives about the eighth-century Muslim conquest of Iberia. Comparing how individual episodes, characters, and themes are treated in different texts, and how this treatment relates to intellectual debates, literary trends, and socio-political conditions at the time of writing, she shows how competing priorities shaped myriad variations on a single story and how the scholars and patrons of a corner of the Islamic world distant from Baghdad viewed their own history.
Offering a framework in which historians of Christian Iberia (and of Christian Europe more generally) can approach and make sense of culturally-significant texts from Muslim Iberia, this book will also be relevant to broader debates about the historiography of early Islam. As such, it will be of great interest to scholars of historiography, world history and Islamic studies.
Table of Contents
Introduction 1. The Late Antique Historiographical Backdrop 2. Successors, Jurists, and Propagandists: Reconstructing the Transmission History of Spanish Conquest Narratives 3. Accommodating Outsiders, Obeying Stereotypes: mawali and muwalladun in Narratives of the Conquest 4. To the Ends of the Earth: Extremes of East and West in Arabic Geographical and Ajaib Writings 5. The Table of Soloman: A Historiographical Motif and its Functions 6. Excusing and Explaining Conquest: Traitors and Collaborators in Muslim and Christian Sources 7. On the Other Side of the World: Comparing Narratives of Contemporary Islamic Conquests in the East. Conclusion: History on the Margins
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