Entre M Moire Et Pouvoir

Dans une perspective d'histoire de la mémoire et d'histoire des sens, cet ouvrage offre une nouvelle approche de l'espace syrien du 2e/8e siècle, mettant en lumière les projets historiographiques omeyyades et abbassides et leurs pratiques du pouvoir. In a perspective of history of memory and history of the meanings, this book offers a fresh approach of the 2nd/8th century Syrian space, revealing Umayyad and Abbasid historiographical projects, as well as their practices of power.

Building on new interest in the study of memory and Islamic historiography and including interdisciplinary perspectives from Arabic literature, art, and archaeology, the papers in this book consider the achievements of the Umayyad dynasty in the Near East and Islamic Spain, and highlight the shaping of our knowledge of the Umayyad past.

Between Memory and Power intends to demonstrate that a robust culture of historical writing existed in 2nd/8th century Syria, and to offer new methodological approaches to access this now lost history, torn between memory and oblivion. By studying the making of Umayyad heroes or Abbasid origins-myths, this book aims to reveal the successive meanings granted to Syrian history, and to identify the various layers of historical writing and rewriting during the first centuries of Islam. Taken together, these elements make possible a history of meanings of the very space of Syria, articulated around power and its expression, which grants a clear coherence to the period, extending well beyond the dynastic caesura of 132/750.

In the rapidly changing world of the early Middle Ages, depictions of the cosmos represented a consistent point of reference across the three dominant states--the Frankish, Byzantine, and Islamic Empires. As these empires diverged from their Greco-Roman roots between 700 and 1000 A.D. and established distinctive medieval artistic traditions, cosmic imagery created a web of visual continuity, though local meanings of these images varied greatly. Benjamin Anderson uses thrones, tables, mantles, frescoes, and manuscripts to show how cosmological motifs informed relationships between individuals, especially the ruling elite, and communities, demonstrating how domestic and global politics informed the production and reception of these depictions. The first book to consider such imagery across the dramatically diverse cultures of Western Europe, Byzantium, and the Islamic Middle East, Cosmos and Community in Early Medieval Art illuminates the distinctions between the cosmological art of these three cultural spheres, and reasserts the centrality of astronomical imagery to the study of art history.

Structured as five microhistories c. 632-705, this book offers a counternarrative for the formation of Islamic architecture and the Islamic state. It adopts a novel periodization informed by moments of historical violence and anxiety around caliphal identities in flux, animating histories of the minbar, throne, and maqsura as a principal nexus for navigating this anxiety. It expands outward to re-assess the mosque and palace with a focus on the Qubbat al-Khadraʾ and the Dar al-Imara in Kufa. It culminates in a reading of the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem as a site where eschatological anxieties and political survival converge.

This book focuses on the conceptualization of the court, palace and ruler of the Umayyad Caliphate of al-Andalus. Western terminology still plays a normative role in the representation of foreign courts, determining concepts that fit poorly into chronologies with their own dynamics and specificities, which is the case of Muslim courts. While Court Studies is a well-developed field for modern Western societies, Muslim medieval courts lack a consistent field of research. Sources elaborate a specific terminology for medieval Muslim court societies. In the specific case of the Umayyad Caliphate of al-Andalus, the court is usually articulated as Bāb Suddat al-Khalīfa (“The door of the Sudda of the caliph”) – a reference to the symbology of the main city gate of Cordoba – or simply as Bāb. Bāb Suddat al-Khalīfa became the most emblematic concept to name the Umayyad palace and its society, which will be additionally interpreted in the framework of the performance of ceremonial. The strong conceptualization of the Umayyad court of Cordoba was highlighted through the articulation of ceremonial, as the mis-en-scène of the conceptualization, expressed by gestures, insignia and hierarchies. The preliminary comparative perspective with the Umayyad Caliphate of Damascus, the ‘Abbasid and Fatimid Caliphates and the Byzantine Empire further discusses the Umayyad Andalusi model in relation to other dynasties. While this book focuses on the Umayyad conceptualization and articulation of ceremonial, this model will be discussed within the Mediterranean and Eastern framework of the 10th and 11th centuries, which broadens the interest of the book to other fields of research.

Authority and Control in the Countryside looks at the economic, religious, political and cultural instruments that local and regional powers in the late antique to early medieval Mediterranean and Near East used to manage their rural hinterlands.