What Was The Islamic Conquest Of Iberia

What Was the Islamic Conquest of Iberia? Understanding the New Debate brings together leading scholars to offer an introduction to a recent debate with far-reaching implications for the study of history, as well as our understanding of the present. In the year 711 CE, Islamic armies conquered the Iberian Peninsula. This seemingly uncontroversial claim has in fact been questioned, becoming an object of intense scholarly debate, debate that has reached a fevered pitch in recent decades within Spain. This volume introduces an anglophone audience to the terms and contours of this controversy, from its emergence in the late nineteenth century to its contemporary recrudescence. It suggests that far from an abstract discussion, this dispute reveals methodological and moral questions that remain vital to the study of the distant past, questions than cannot be easily resolved and have far-reaching consequences for the present. This volume offers novel perspectives on, not only the controversy, but also the latest research on the events of 711. These exemplary studies of historical, literary, and material cultural evidence demonstrate the promise and challenges for a new generation of scholarship. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of the Journal of Medieval Iberian Studies.

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.

Leaving Iberia examines Islamic legal responses to Muslims living under Christian rule in medieval and early modern Iberia and North Africa, links the juristic discourses on conquered Muslims on both sides of the Mediterranean, and adds a significant chapter to the story of Christian-Muslim relations in the medieval Mediterranean.

This is a historiography of western Muslim writers on the subject of the eighth century conquest of the Iberian peninsula. It examines the distinct cultural and political significance of historical narratives from the ninth through the fourteenth centuries.

This book, now available in paperback, is a challenging and controversial account of the history of Spain in the eighth century. In it Roger Collins assesses the political and cultural impact on Spain of the first hundred years of Arab rule, focusing upon aspects of continuity and discontinuity with Visigoth Spain.

This ebook is a selective guide designed to help scholars and students of Islamic studies find reliable sources of information by directing them to the best available scholarly materials in whatever form or format they appear from books, chapters, and journal articles to online archives, electronic data sets, and blogs. Written by a leading international authority on the subject, the ebook provides bibliographic information supported by direct recommendations about which sources to consult and editorial commentary to make it clear how the cited sources are interrelated related. A reader will discover, for instance, the most reliable introductions and overviews to the topic, and the most important publications on various areas of scholarly interest within this topic. In Islamic studies, as in other disciplines, researchers at all levels are drowning in potentially useful scholarly information, and this guide has been created as a tool for cutting through that material to find the exact source you need. This ebook is a static version of an article from Oxford Bibliographies Online: Islamic Studies, a dynamic, continuously updated, online resource designed to provide authoritative guidance through scholarship and other materials relevant to the study of the Islamic religion and Muslim cultures. Oxford Bibliographies Online covers most subject disciplines within the social science and humanities, for more information visit www.aboutobo.com.

This three-volume set of previously out-of-print titles closely examines three key aspects of Muslim Spain: the Muslim conquest and settlement, together with its political and economic administration; spirituality in the region; and El Cid and the Spanish reconquest. Together they form an important overview of the period and the region.