Continuing Tradition? Sacralization Practices in the Early Islamicate West and the Influence of Late Antiquity

Dear Colleagues,

The proposed volume will focus on social-cultural practices that were used to assert or increase the sacral significance of a particular space. The term practice is used here to refer to rituals, particularly the visual, audible and olfactory impact of these on their surroundings, and to the commemoration of persons and deeds through material culture, literature and liturgy. Rather than the legend, person or act to which the sacrality of a place is “attributed”, the articles in this volume will analyze what processes contributed to the creation of sacrality and how these invoked the attention of participants. For example, how was the construction of a shrine over the grave of an Islamic martyr or religious scholar related to procession or visitation rituals to this shrine and what material, sensory or intellectual devices were drawn on to heighten the religious significance of the rituals and the shrine?

The geographical scope will encompass urban spaces broadly within the Islamicate West (defined here as extending from today’s Libya to the Atlantic and the Iberian Peninsula). The historical focus will be the early Islamic period and the period of late Antiquity preceding and overlapping this. The purpose of this Special Issue is to bring new insights to the study of sacrality and topography by examining how the process of imbuing a space with religious significance interacted with existing memories of sacrality, as well as notions of divine choice that were associated specifically with the religious tradition in question.

The focus on the single geographical region of the Islamic West, across two contingent historical “periods” comprises the analytical framework for this research purpose because it allows direct comparison between traditions and notions, as well as an understanding of how the memory of sacrality influenced later developments of this notion. Existing studies of topography and sacrality (e.g., Hamilton and Spicer, 2005) tend to focus on a single religious tradition, without taking into account how later religious traditions built on the memories that already adhered to the land and landscape. The Islamic West is a particularly suitable focus for this comparative framework, as the religious traditions of Islam, Christianity and Judaism continued to interact with one another even after the Muslim conquests led to Islam acquiring political dominance in the region. The focus on how sacrality was affirmed within competing traditions will also enable the contributors to relate the construction of sacred space to inter-religious relations and to boundaries between believers. How far did the process of creating a religious topography relate to claims of ownership, domination, or of the appropriation of space? As Shira Lander has noted in relation to late Roman North Africa, sacred places served as a symbolic arena in which to generate and perform power, display shifting identities and create social cohesion. The articles in this special edition will build on findings of space and sacrality with respect to both the early Islamic (eg. Stephanie Mulder, Harry Munt, Simon O’Meara, Jacob Lassner, Michael Ehrlich et. al) and late Antique (e.g., Yvette Duval, Peter Brown, Robert A. Markus, Béatrice Caseau, Shira Lander et. al) period, bringing them together through the relation of both to a single geographical space and a specific urban landscape.

Dr. Javier Albarrán
Dr. Antonia Bosanquet
Guest Editors

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