Routes And Realms

Routes and Realms explores the ways in which Muslims expressed attachment to land from the ninth through the eleventh centuries, the earliest period of intensive written production in Arabic. In this groundbreaking first book, Zayde Antrim develops a "discourse of place," a framework for approaching formal texts devoted to the representation of territory across genres. The discourse of place included such varied works as topographical histories, literary anthologies, religious treatises, world geographies, poetry, travel literature, and maps. By closely reading and analyzing these works, Antrim argues that their authors imagined plots of land primarily as homes, cities, and regions and associated them with a range of claims to religious and political authority. She contends that these are evidence of the powerful ways in which the geographical imagination was tapped to declare loyalty and invoke belonging in the early Islamic world, reinforcing the importance of the earliest regional mapping tradition in the Islamic world. Routes and Realms challenges a widespread tendency to underestimate the importance of territory and to over-emphasize the importance of religion and family to notions of community and belonging among Muslims and Arabs, both in the past and today.

In Picturing the Islamicate World, Nadja Danilenko explores the message of the first preserved maps from the Islamicate world. Safeguarded in al-Iṣṭakhrī’s Book of Routes and Realms (10th century C.E.), the world map and twenty regional maps complement the text to a reference book of the territories under Muslim rule. Rather than shaping the Islamicate world according to political or religious concerns, al-Iṣṭakhrī chose a timeless design intended to outlast upheavals. Considering the treatise was transmitted for almost a millennium, al-Iṣṭakhrī’s strategy seems to have paid off. By investigating the Persian and Ottoman translations and all extant manuscripts, Nadja Danilenko unravels the manuscript tradition of al-Iṣṭakhrī’s work, revealing who took an interest in it and why.

Mapping the Middle East explores the many ways people have visualized the vast area lying between the Atlantic Ocean and the Oxus and Indus River Valleys over the past millennium. By analyzing maps produced from the eleventh century on, Zayde Antrim emphasizes the deep roots of mapping in a region too often considered unexamined and unchanging before the modern period. As Antrim argues, better-known maps from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries—a period coinciding with European colonialism and the rise of the nation-state—not only obscure this rich past, but also constrain visions for the region’s future. Organized chronologically, Mapping the Middle East addresses the medieval “Realm of Islam;” the sixteenth- to eighteenth-century Ottoman Empire; French and British colonialism through World War I; nationalism in modern Turkey, Iran, and Israel/Palestine; and alternative geographies in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Vivid color illustrations throughout allow readers to compare the maps themselves with Antrim’s analysis. Much more than a conventional history of cartography, Mapping the Middle East is an incisive critique of the changing relationship between maps and belonging in a dynamic world region over the past thousand years.

The history of Islamic mapping is one of the new frontiers in the history of cartography. This book offers the first in-depth analysis of a distinct tradition of medieval Islamic maps known collectively as the Book of Roads and Kingdoms (Kitab al-Masalik wa al-Mamalik, or KMMS). Created from the mid-tenth through the nineteenth century, these maps offered Islamic rulers, scholars, and armchair explorers a view of the physical and human geography of the Arabian peninsula, the Persian Gulf, the Mediterranean, Spain and North Africa, Syria, Egypt, Iraq, the Iranian provinces, present-day Pakistan, and Transoxiana. Historian Karen C. Pinto examines around 100 examples of these maps retrieved from archives across the world from three points of view: iconography, context, and patronage. By unraveling their many symbols, she guides us through new ways of viewing the Muslim cartographic imagination.

Routes and Realms explores the ways in which Muslims expressed attachment to land in formal texts from the ninth through the eleventh centuries. These texts reveal that territories were imagined specifically as homes, cities, and regions and acted as powerful categories of belonging in the early Islamic world.

The beloved Harpers series kicks off with a thrilling tale about an outcast witch, a foreign agent, and the endangered desert tribes of the Anauroch Determined to drive a trade route through Anauroch, the Zhentarim have sent an army to enslave the fierce nomads of the great desert. As tribe after tribe fall to the intruders, only a single woman, Rhua, sees the true danger—but what sheik will heed the advice of an outcast witch? Ruha finds help from an unexpected source. The Harpers, guardians of liberty throughout the Realms, have sent an agent to counter the Zhentarim. If she can help this stranger win the trust of the sheikhs, perhaps he can overcome the tribes’ ancestral rivalries and drive the invaders from the desert. The Parched Sea is the first book in a series of loosely-connected novels about the Harpers.

How did gender figure in understandings of spatial realms, from the inner spaces of the body to the furthest reaches of the globe? How did women situate themselves in the early modern world, and how did they move through it, in both real and imaginary locations? How do new disciplinary and geographic connections shape the ways we think about the early modern world, and the role of women and men in it? These are the questions that guide this volume, which includes articles by a select group of scholars from many disciplines: Art History, Comparative Literature, English, German, History, Landscape Architecture, Music, and Women's Studies. Each essay reaches across fields, and several are written by interdisciplinary groups of authors. The essays also focus on many different places, including Rome, Amsterdam, London, and Paris, and on texts and images that crossed the Atlantic and the Mediterranean, or that portrayed real and imagined people who did. Many essays investigate topics key to the ’spatial turn’ in various disciplines, such as borders and their permeability, actual and metaphorical spatial crossings, travel and displacement, and the built environment.

Land is embedded in a multitude of material and cultural contexts, through which the human experience of landscape emerges. Ethnographers, with their participative methodologies, long-term co-residence, and concern with the quotidian aspects of the places where they work, are well positioned to describe landscapes in this fullest of senses. The contributors explore how landscapes become known primarily through movement and journeying rather than stasis. Working across four continents, they explain how landscapes are constituted and recollected in the stories people tell of their journeys through them, and how, in turn, these stories are embedded in landscaped forms.