This book is the result of a one-year seminar series “Islam médiéval d'Occident (VIIe–XVe)”, held at the Colegio de España in Paris in 2006–07 by the Association des doctorants en histoire des mondes musulmans médievaux (Diwan http://diwan.hypotheses.org), and a second volume focusing on Arabization is expected (p. 33). The contributors' experience, alongside their university and research backgrounds, have led to the publication of articles of an outstandingly high level throughout this book. This scholarly achievement is combined with a thought-provoking theoretical framework, where Arabization and Islamization give a common theme to the proceedings, which are developed in four parts.
The first part presents a nuanced understanding of both concepts, and explores a long, lasting and radical change in social, cultural, religious, settlement and political patterns in Late Antiquity. The first paper, by Cyrille Aillet, outlines the key proceedings with an appraisal of the two main processes, Islamization and Arabization, and the analytical approaches required. Christophe Picard is concerned with the critical approach to Arabic medieval sources and their use in order to ascertain the main trends in the Islamization process. Sophie Gilotte and Anneliese Nef discuss the meaning and scope of data collected from archaeological sources, giving a balanced attention to the development of archaeological research in the three areas of the Western Islamic Mediterranean, with their full panoply of methodological, academic and historic problems.
The second part contains three studies on Islamization. Allaoua Amara provides a clear and critical account of the traditions developed in Arabic medieval sources relating to the Islamic conquest of the central Maghreb, i.e. Algiers. Dominique Valérian reviews the Christian documentary sources, Latin and Arabic, to ascertain how many of the Maghreb Christian communities survived in the wake of Muslim conquest, and their gradual disappearance between the eighth and eleventh centuries. Cyrille Aillet discusses the change and evolutionary adaptation processes, reflected in settlement patterns and in the archaeological record, which the Islamic conquest brought to Christian communities in al-Andalus.
The third part is devoted to Islamization as a process with broad and complex social, cultural and political consequences. Sonia Gutiérrez Lloret focuses on her team's comprehensive and long-running archaeological research in the Tolmo de Minateda (Murcia, Spain): the full and uninterrupted stratigraphic sequence, dating from the sixth to tenth centuries, allowed a thorough analysis of the transition between Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages in south-eastern Spain. Eduardo Manzano Moreno concludes that Iberian place names which begin with “Banu-” and “Beni-” are not related to any tribal or segmented system, but to patronymic names which are neither tribal nor collective. Maribel Fierro offers a full insight into the relationship between religious, ethnic and political affiliations in the first three centuries of Islamic history in al-Andalus, as these were identity marks and policy tools for Arabic, Berber, muwallad and Christian communities. Elise Voguet uses the fatwa compilation to offer a clear and concise account of the tax system in the Maghreb, giving due attention to its implementation according to Islamic law and tradition.
The fourth part is posed as a question, but the contributors' papers point to an affirmative answer: that is, there are specific trends and patterns in Islamization in the Maghreb. Yassir Benhima explains at great length what these trends are in the westernmost part of the Magrib and points to the resilience of polytheist practices and the use of Berber languages as a tool for the first inroads in Islamization, as Arabization was a later process in Morocco in the High Middle Ages. Nelly Amri relies upon al-Mālikī's biographical dictionary, the Kitāb riyāḍ al-nufūs, to demonstrate that ribāṭ is neither a place nor a building, but a function, which includes the waging of jihad and the practices and rituals of sufi ascetics. Emmanuelle Tixier offers the reader an original approach to the life and work of al-Bakri, an Andalusi scholar who wrote a masterpiece of the kutub al-masālik wa-l-mamālik genre, where al-Maghrib received the attention that its geopolitical place deserved in the eleventh century.
All of the contributors offer a thorough, up-to-date select bibliography for their subject, a very difficult accomplishment when Islamic studies, archaeology, history and historiography are focused in the period between Late Antiquity and the High Middle Ages, and more specifically, Early Islam. Furthermore, the writing style is clear and easily readable, even for those papers translated into French from Spanish, a very remarkable achievement for scholarly matters and disciplinary specialized language to coincide. However, this book needs an introductory chapter.
The original seminar and this book were arranged by French university professors and research teams where national and religious boundaries, as well as disciplinary backgrounds, were different; nevertheless, all the contributors succeed in integrating in their research the knowledge brought from material culture through archaeological fieldwork and the knowledge from written sources, Latin and Arabic: a twofold approach that has become the trademark of high-level research.
There is no trace of the Orientalist and colonial paternalistic approach that gave birth to French, British and Spanish scholarship focusing on the Maghreb and the Middle East. In this sense, this book and its contributors stand as critical and compromised heirs to the long-standing tradition of French scholarship and research, with a selection of Spanish researchers focused on al-Andalusi history and archaeology.
The contributors have applied to the Western Islamic Mediterranean the historical knowledge, both textual and archaeological, and the critical approaches to the written sources which originated in John Wansbrough and Patricia Crone's work, but without the most sceptical and hypercritical connotations and, as pointed out above, with due attention to the material culture.
History and archaeology are not the result of fully objective and uncommitted research and the contributors have shown fairly and straightforwardly their previous theoretical approach to the research fields. In sum, I cannot but recommend strongly this book.
