Creating the Mediterranean is an ambitious book, presenting nothing short of a comprehensive, eight-hundred year narrative of the history of Islamic cartography in (and of) the Mediterranean Sea. As the author states, rightly, in his introduction, until now the majority of available scholarship dedicated to this richly important topic has narrowly focused on individual maps and individual cartographers/geographers, without an overarching frame to make sense of these studies in an organic way. Khalaoui has thus embraced the project of building a comprehensive longue durée narrative in order to both reconfigure existing scholarship and to facilitate future research.
In both of these respects, the work is unquestionably a success. The sheer number of maps and other manuscript sources consulted within is astounding, and despite the complexity of the material, Khalaoui's presentation is a model of coherence and accessibility. For these reasons alone, Creating the Mediterranean should quickly gain recognition as a standard reference work for the field. But beyond this, Creating the Mediterranean also makes serious scholarly interventions both large and small. Among the most intriguing is Khalaoui's suggestion that the very concept of “the Mediterranean” as a unified cultural space was neither a legacy inherited from classical antiquity, nor a construct of Western modernity, but rather the creation of Islamic geographers working at the twilight of Abbasid universal empire in the eleventh–twelfth centuries. While this is a provocative claim, likely to provoke debate from a variety of quarters, it is here presented with more than enough evidence to be taken seriously. Moreover, it counts as only one of a number of more focused revisionist arguments presented throughout the work, many of which will require major reassessments of some of the most canonical figures in Islamic thought (from al-Idrisi to Ibn Khaldun).
Meanwhile, a separate stated ambition of Creating the Mediterranean is to use maps to probe what the author calls “the concept of the image and its meaning among Muslim cartographers”. This too is a potentially rich area of inquiry, touching on some of the most fundamental questions in the history of Islamic art, including debates over iconoclasm and the politics of representation, the relationship between visual and textual knowledge, and the relevance of the concept of “mapping” to various kinds of artistic and epistemological practices. In fact, each of these areas has already engendered lively scholarly discussion, and has a large and sophisticated body of literature attached to it. For the most part, however, Kahlaoui has preferred to stay very close to his sources, leaving his arguments about visual culture largely under-theorized.
The resulting limitations of this approach are most visible – at least to this reader – in the book's final chapter, dedicated to Ottoman map-making. I write this with some hesitation, since Kahlaoui's willingness to take his story up to the sixteenth century, and to include material from the Ottoman Empire (which is not his area of specialization), should be applauded in the first instance, rather than criticized. That said, it is fair to add that Kahlaoui's arguments would have been significantly enhanced through a deeper engagement with recent scholarship on Ottoman visual culture by Ciğdem Kafesçioğlu, Emine Fetvacı, Karen Pinto, Pınar Emiralioğlu, and Baki Tezcan (among others), all of whom have made quite sophisticated use of city views, portolans, world maps, and geographies in their research.
Kahlaoui's treatment of the Kitab-ı Bahriyye by Piri Reis, a major focus of his sixth chapter, provides a good illustration of the ways in which his arguments might have benefitted from the context and the methodological insights provided by this body of scholarship. As it stands, his analysis of the Kitab-ı Bahriyye is based on a formal reading of its maps, with comparatively little attention to questions of patronage, audience, and the complicated inter-relationship of the text's many surviving manuscripts. As a result, it lacks any discussion of the Ottoman grand vizier Ibrahim Pasha, who commissioned the final, expanded version of the Kitab-ı Bahriyye in 1526. The fact remains, however, that Ibrahim Pasha was an immensely important cultural patron, particularly well known for his support of works that drew from the visual and symbolic repertoire of the Italian Renaissance to present the Ottoman Empire as a “New Rome” destined for world domination. And against this background, it is difficult not to read Piri's meticulous mapping of the entirety of the Mediterranean – which he calls the “Roman Sea” (Bahr-ı Rūm) – as a project of imperial appropriation, presaging the physical incorporation of both the sea and the Christian lands along its northern shore into the borders of an expanding Ottoman state.
The potential relevance of all of this for Kahlaoui is that, elsewhere in his book, the evolving terminology employed by geographers and cartographers to describe the Mediterranean is a central thread that ties together Kahlaoui's larger narrative. Specifically, in earlier chapters he lays out an important evolutionary contrast, through mapping, between an initial period of Abbasid imperialism and a subsequent post-imperial period of Mediterranean unity. As he convincingly shows, in the first of these periods Muslim geographers closely associated “Rome” with Christian Europe, and consequently imagined the “Roman Sea” (Baḥr al-Rūm) as a maritime frontier that divided Islam from its Christian “other”. By contrast, geographers of the late medieval period used different terminologies – including Bahr al-Mutawassit, the literal translation of “Mediterranean” – which placed the Mediterranean at the centre of a shared contact zone. Piri Reis’ subsequent attempt to revive the terminology of the “Roman Sea”, but as a term of appropriation and imperial self-identification rather than of “othering”, would thus have provided an elegant concluding counterpoint to Kahlaoui's master narrative.
But perhaps lacunae of this kind are inevitable in a pioneering work that tackles such a large and understudied topic across so many chronologies and from so many perspectives. In the final analysis, Creating the Mediterranean is an impressive and meticulously researched work that lays the groundwork for countless areas of future investigation.
