Islamic Crosspollinations. Interactions in the Medieval Middle East.

AKASOY, A., J.E. MONTOGOMERY, and P.E. PORMANN, (eds.),

ISBN 10: 0906094550 / ISBN 13: 9780906094556

Published by Edinburgh University Press, 2007

About this Item

Gibb Memorial Trust, n.p., 2007. XII,204p. Original balck cloth with pictorial dust wrps. Spine gilt titled. Like new, ?It is rare that one reads a collection of essays resulting from a colloquium or workshop with a sense of real excitement. This collection is one of those rare occasions. (? ) Several pieces brought particular enlightenment and pleasure. For instance there is Elizabeth Fowden?s examination of the early Muslim engagement with Christian churches and holy places, an engagement of sharing and respect in which monasteries by the early Abbasid period had come ?to represent in the Muslim literary imagination places of sensual beauty and ease where food, wine, sacred books and sexual titillation converged? She demonstrates in a range of ways how Christian monastic culture nourished Arab muslim culture. This cross-pollination is one notion which Manu, both Christian and Muslim, might deny should they ever get to hear of it. In a most entertaining piece of detective work Garth Bowden decodes a distinctive Greek presence in the bathhouse of al-Walid?s hunting lodge. He identifies a painting in a key transitional point in the building as a version of an image relatively widely available in the eastern Mediterranean world, that of Dionysus discovering Ariadne asleep on the beach at Naxos. He links this to al-Walid?s poetry mourning the loss of his beloved Salma. Ariadne asleep ?is a symbolic expression of longing for reawakening from death throug the intervention of a god.? Great hunch, great crosspollination! Then, there is Deborah Howard?s fascinating demonstration of how the citizens of Venice appropriated the Egyptian city of Alexandria - cradle of Christianity, the place where the Bible was translated into Greek and the site of the martyrdom of St Mark (?). Montgomery?s piece, which rounds of the collection is a magisterial survey of the approaches to cultural contact in the Islamic context which have already been taken and also approaches which might yet be taken. (?) All scholars addressing issues of cultural interaction will benefit from consulting this essay. The book as a whole, moreover, for this and other essays should go on to the undergraduate bibliographies of those reading Islamic and European history.? (FRANCIS ROBINSON in Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, 2009, pp.258-260).

Seller Inventory # 59846

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Islamic Crosspollinations. Interactions in the Medieval Middle East.
• Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
• Publication Date: 2007
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0906094550
• ISBN 13: 9780906094556
• Binding: Hardcover

About this title

Synopsis

Islam as a cultural, intellectual, and religious venture appears in the popular imagination as a monolithic entity. Orientalists of the traditional ilk have tended to describe it in essentialist terms, whilst many fundamentalist Muslims themselves promote their construction of a pure and unadulterated Islamic past, to which they strive to return by purging foreign or unauthentic elements from their religion. Next to these attempts, another more traditional view sees the influence between the Western and the Islamic world in linear and teleological terms. Knowledge was transmitted, so to speak, from Alexandria to Baghdad, and hence to Toledo and Paris. The present volume challenges both these concepts regarding the development of Islamic cultures. To do justice to the complexity of structures within which the Muslim Middle Ages unfolded, it approaches the questions of interaction and influence through a novel conceptual framework, that of crosspollination. Instead of telling the story of the transmission of Western works from Greece via Islam into the Latin world, a number of case studies highlight the plurality of encounters between Islam and other adjacent cultures.

About the Authors

James E. Montgomery is The Sir Thomas Adams’s Professor of Arabic at Fellow of Trinity Hall, Department of Middle Eastern Studies, Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, University of Cambridge.

Peter E. Pormann is a Wellcome Trust Lecturer in the Department of Classics and Ancient History at the University of Warwick. He studied in Paris (Sorbonne), Hamburg, Tübingen, and Leiden, and received a D.Phil. from the University of Oxford in 2002. He won The Hellenic Foundation’s 2003 Award for the best doctoral thesis in the United Kingdom, in the Byzantine/Medieval History category, and is the author of The Oriental Tradition of Paul of Aegina’s ‘Pragmateia’ (2004).