This monograph is, according to the foreword by Bethanay J. Walker, a ‘ground-breaking’ book with a clear mission: to denounce the historical narrative of the ‘otherness’ of Islamicate societies on European soil through archaeological research. According to the book’s editor, David J. Govantes-Edwards, the choice of the term ‘Islamicate’ is a statement in itself. The term was coined in 1974 by Marshall Hodgson (Hodgson, Reference Hodgson1974), advocating for a distinction between Islam as a religion, and the overall society and culture associated historically with this religion. The term has not found common usage, as exemplified by the titles of publications such as The Archaeology of Islam (Insoll, Reference Insoll1999) and Islamic Archaeology (Millwright, Reference Millwright2010), and has been declared dead by Shahab Ahmed (Ahmed, Reference Ahmed2016), among others, who argued that the concept of ‘Islamicate’ is based on a false distinction between the religious and the cultural. For a book that aims to ‘examine the insertion of the archaeology of historical European societies in which Islam was the dominant cultural factor in national and ethnic historical narratives of the modern European nation-states’ (p. 1), followed by the announcement that such ambition is an impossible task for a single book, the use of the term ‘Islamicate’, however, seems appropriate.
In his introductory chapter, Govantes-Edwards argues that archaeology has too often played an ancillary role in writing a new history of Islamicate Europe. Chloë N. Duckworth goes a step further in the second introductory chapter, ‘Shooting Ourselves in the Foot: A Personal Take on the Political’, by taking an activist stance on archaeology. She argues that the silent voice of archaeology about the political not only contributes to the framing of Islamicate archaeology and cultural heritage as ‘the other’, but that the vast majority of academic archaeologists have also ‘spectacularly failed to tackle the systemic racism, sexism, and other forms of discrimination in our discipline, which is still deeply entwined with colonialism’ (p. 17). According to Duckworth, unravelling the narratives that have been constructed around archaeological ‘facts’ requires active political engagement by archaeologists.
The chapters presenting individual case studies are arranged geographically in three sections dealing with different European Islamic societies: the Western Mediterranean (six contributions), the Balkans (two contributions), and Russia (two contributions). For the discussion of the chapters, instead of following this geographical arrangement, I opt for a different grouping that is based on content that I think better reflects the different approaches towards the archaeological material presented: 1. Case studies offering new perspectives on existing archaeological data, 2. Case studies presenting ‘new’ archaeological data, and 3. Neglected or erased cultural heritage.
1. Case Studies Offering New Perspectives on Existing Archaeological Material
David J. Govantes-Edwards’ chapter ‘Politics and the History of al-Andalus’ is in fact a continuation of his introduction to the book. He makes some general observations, for example that Islamicate polities are presented as a static reality. He notes that issues such as agency, the conceptualization of time and chronology, and the role of narratives play a negligible role in Andalusi archaeology because of the lack of a clear theoretical framework. As for al-Andalus, he argues for challenging its ‘otherness’ by considering it not as a break in history but as part of a process and as a European phenomenon. This means that the dichotomy between a ‘clash of civilizations’ or convivencia (the peaceful coexistence of Christianity and Islam in Iberia) can also be dismantled. To do so, novel archaeological questions must be asked, but what these questions are is not made clear by the author. The extent to which the archaeological tissue of al-Andalus can be regarded as a palimpsest where old layers shine through new layers and thus testify to the process of change could, in my view, have been one of those questions asked (Fowden et al., Reference Key Fowden, Çağaptay, Zychowicz-Coghill and Blanke2022).
In their chapter ‘Gendered Pasts: Women in al-Andalus’, Mikel Herran and Nicola Clarke try to challenge the image of Islamic women as ‘other’ as well as normative assumptions associated with Islamic discourse. By examining domestic spaces and lived experiences, they convincingly argue that women were active agents during the religious and social Islamization. The main finding in relation to the theme of the book is that Arab and Berber women, also through intermarriage with the local population, contributed to a blending of pre-Islamic behaviours with regional Islamic identities.
Pottery is the active agent in the chapter ‘Accentuating the Ordinary: Pottery and Everyday Life in Islamic Sicily’ by Veronica Testolini and Peter M. Day, which they use to provide an insight into the lives of the ordinary inhabitants of Sicily during the transition from Byzantine to Islamic rule. The authors advocate for moving away from treating the Islamic period as a different past and introduce the concept of ‘community of practice’ instead. They note that with the arrival of Islam in Sicily, new technologies were introduced, but elements of continuity in ceramic production and use pre-dating the Islamic period can be established especially on the basis of the use of certain cooking pots.
Amila Buturovic’s chapter ‘Between Transculturation and Re-Enculturation: The Gravestones of Ottoman Bosnia and Europe’s Islamicate Archaeology’ addresses the book’s themes most specifically and originally. Before presenting a new perspective on grave stones and other burial markers in Ottoman Bosnia, Buturovic addresses more general notions such as disciplinary rifts and the paradigm of ‘us’ versus ‘them’ already discussed in the introductory chapters. In order to achieve ‘the empowerment of the object’, the author introduces two concepts, i.e. enculturation and transculturation. Enculturation is defined as a conscious, deliberate, and functional acquisition of established cultural values and norms and is employed to demonstrate that the process of Islamization in Bosnia involved a multidirectional shaping of the material culture of death in an organic and lasting way. Transculturation involves a simultaneous loss and acquisition of culture in all situations of contact, where no sphere of culture remains immune. These concepts are applied to Bosnian cemeteries where gravestones tangibly inscribe multiple layers of history and memory. On the basis of these burial markers, Buturovic shows that past Bosnians imported many of the Ottoman beliefs and practices into the local mortuary culture, and that conversely Ottoman imperial culture was also enriched by Bosnian input, resulting in an enhancement of funerary symbols as well as epigraphic and architectural forms. Specific examples include the appearance of pre-Ottoman stećak (stone monolith) images on Ottoman gravestones and Christian symbols on nišan, the Ottoman type of burial marker. Buturovic convincingly argues that our perspective determines the interpretation of these objects as heterogeneous in the context of transculturation or as an anomaly, as has been done in the public and academic discourse in modern European history. Buturovic also shows that these gravestones are truly ‘Islamicate’ in the way Hodgson intended the term, because they do not prioritize religious over other aspects of the deceased’s identity.
2. Case Studies Presenting ‘New’ Archaeological Material
In ‘Rethinking the Borders of Islamic Art: Paterna Ceramics from the Fourteenth Century to Today’, Anna McSweeney focuses on the little-studied material culture of Muslim potters in Paterna near Valencia. One could call this case a counter narrative, because the Paterna ceramics were made by Muslim potters in the fourteenth century in a town that in 1238 had surrendered to the Chistian forces of Jaume I, king of Aragon. One of the goals of this chapter is to offer a glimpse into the world of an ‘unheard community’ that lacked political or social power. However, McSweeny argues that the material culture of this community with its mixed imagery, diverse appeal, and particular historic techniques was influenced by the multiple cultures, religions, media, and social strata with which its potters interacted. Therefore, the term ‘Islamicate’ does more justice to the character of this artistic production than the classification mudejar or Hispano-Moresque, which is generally used in the context of museum display and academic scholarship, and which has been used for Muslims that lived under Christian rule.
Alberto García Porras, in his chapter ‘The Last Islamicate Society in South-Western Europe: The Projection of Power in the Nasrid Kingdom of Granada’, rather than presenting new archaeological material, argues that archaeological analysis of the Nasrid Kingdom is a relatively recent phenomenon. This is unjustified, at least according to the author who wants to show that archaeology is actually quite suitable for the reconstruction of this historical period and the role political power played in it, especially for those social groups and practices that are not reflected in the written record. To this end, he provides a comprehensive overview of the presence of structures related to the power of the state and their uneven distribution throughout the territory and the countryside. As in the case of the Paterna potters, García Porras aims to show through archaeological evidence that the boundaries between this (last) Islamic society on the Iberian Peninsula and that of post-Christian conquest were porous, and that the Nasrid Kingdom was not a static entity.
Where García Porras uses a wide range of material to support his arguments, Vladimir Koval and Denis Badeev present a single case study in their chapter ‘The Central Bazaar in the City of Bolgar on the Volgar’. It concerns the remains of a stone-and-brick building built in the 1350s, which was excavated in 1989–90 and 2011–16. Although an interesting example of the influence of Islamic culture in a region situated at the periphery of the Muslim World, the claim that it also bears witness to the mutual influence of ‘Christendom’ and ‘Islamdom’ is not substantiated, except by the evidence that luxury goods from around the world were traded here. This case is particularly interesting because of contemporary claims projected onto this cultural heritage. The authors make clear how the bazaar is now being used to promote the notion that the Muslims of Tatarstan represent all Russian Muslims and to showcase a ‘modern and tolerant’ form of Euro-Islam, a notion that, like that of ‘otherness’, is too simplistic and mainly politically deployed.
The scene for the case study ‘Nomadic Islam: An Archaeological Approach to the Islamization of the Caspian Steppe’ by Irina Shingiray is constituted by the Caspian steppe, the nomadic core territory of the Khazar Empire between the seventh and tenth centuries. Like a number of other authors, Shingiray emphasizes that archaeological research can provide evidence for the cross-cultural practices that followed the process of Islamization, in this case through the study of Caspian nomadic graves. According to Shingiray, evidence from the Caspian nomadic graves, such as the position of the dead within the grave, clearly demonstrates an aspect largely overlooked by previous research, namely that the nomads’ Islam in the Caspian Steppe was not a derivative of an ‘urban religion’ or the consequence of migration of different people to the region, but a phenomenon that represented a distinct nomadic form of Islam in which new Islamic and old indigenous ritual actions were blended.
3. Neglected or Erased Cultural Heritage
The two chapters I have categorized under this heading, namely the contributions of Amalia Pérez-Juez and Elena Sintes Olives, ‘Damnatio Memoriae: Islamicate Medieval Archaeology in the Balearic Island of Menorca’, and that by Ioannis Stavridopoulos, ‘The Material Past of the Other: The Ottoman Architectural Heritage of Greek Macedonia’, are mainly descriptive. Pérez-Juez and Sintes Olives note that, as far as Menorca is concerned, there is not only a lack of interest in the Islamic heritage that relates to four centuries of Muslim rule between 685 and 1287, but that many of the traces have been buried or destroyed. According to the authors, with the few remains that have been excavated and studied, such as irrigation systems, land cultivation, domestic spaces, and linguistic traits, a new picture can be created, which they leave open for future scholarship.
Stavridopoulos shows that, in Greek Macedonia, the destruction of Islamic architecture was more drastic. The approximately six centuries of Ottoman rule are almost absent from the archaeological record. Instead of analysing the context within which this de-Ottomanization took place in the twentieth century, the chapter offers only an inventory of what remains of Ottoman architecture in Greek Macedonia and its state of preservation. It is clear that this Ottoman heritage was considered to be the heritage of the ‘other’, but the statement at the end of the chapter that archaeology as the science of materiality par excellence could turn the unfamiliar ‘other’ into the familiar self is not substantiated and seems a rather obligatory phrase to fit the theme of the book.
The book concludes with two contributions that for some unclear reason are presented as ‘counter narratives’. Virginie Rey’s contribution, ‘From “Islamic Art” to “Muslim Heritage”: The Display of Islam in Museums of Europe and Beyond’, surveys the exhibition of Islamic material and visual culture in museums in Europe and beyond through history. Here, too, we see a development from presenting ‘Islamic’ objects as a distinct category to Muslim-led museum projects exhibiting Islamic collections as living and transnational heritage (see also Puzon et al., Reference Puzon, Macdonald and Shatanawi2021).
Philip Woods’ chapter ‘Islamicate Archaeology and Its Counter-narratives’ has much overlap with David J. Govantes-Edwards’ introductory chapter, and Woods’ suggestion to go beyond Hodgson in differentiating the phenomena that are labelled as Islamic comes rather late in the day in relation to the content of the book.
In my opinion, the volume as a whole is not as ‘ground-breaking’ as the editors claim in the introduction, but certainly succeeds in elucidating the role and added value of archaeological research in adjusting the historical narrative of the ‘otherness’ of Islamicate societies. A definitive denouncement and decolonization of this frame, however, requires the active political engagement that Duckworth calls for, but which is hardly visible in the other chapters.
