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Medieval Damascus: Plurality and Diversity in an Arabic Library: the Ashrafīya Library Catalogue

Medieval Damascus: Plurality and Diversity in an Arabic Library: the Ashrafīya Library Catalogue AL-MASĀQ 303 handful of Qurʾānic verses as an indication of the motivations of conquerors whose under- standing of the finer points of Islam may have been (as Hitchcock acknowledges) limited at best. The proposition that the conquests may have had little or nothing to do with Islamic ideology is – like the questions posed in the conclusion – a stimulating one, which breaks with a common assumption about Islamic history, namely that religion always came first for medieval Muslims (as opposed to medieval Christians, who are allowed to have more prag- matic concerns). Yet it is left dangling, under-developed and disengaged from recent scholarly discussions; it would have been very welcome to see this argument advanced at greater length. Similar contentions are advanced with regard to the back-and-forth border warfare that his- torians have collectively, and tendentiously, labelled the “reconquest”. Hitchcock points to the influence of Crusading ideology – and the role of the North African empires of the Almoravids and Almohads – in temporarily changing the tone of conflict in Iberia, but he considers the “reconquest” to have lacked “a religious element” (73) before the eleventh century, and there- after to have been largely secondary to more material http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png Al-Masaq: Journal of the Medieval Mediterranean Taylor & Francis

Medieval Damascus: Plurality and Diversity in an Arabic Library: the Ashrafīya Library Catalogue

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Medieval Damascus: Plurality and Diversity in an Arabic Library: the Ashrafīya Library Catalogue

Abstract

AL-MASĀQ 303 handful of Qurʾānic verses as an indication of the motivations of conquerors whose under- standing of the finer points of Islam may have been (as Hitchcock acknowledges) limited at best. The proposition that the conquests may have had little or nothing to do with Islamic ideology is – like the questions posed in the conclusion – a stimulating one, which breaks with a common assumption about Islamic history, namely that religion always came first for...
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Publisher
Taylor & Francis
Copyright
© 2016 Nicholas Morton
ISSN
1473-348X
eISSN
0950-3110
DOI
10.1080/09503110.2016.1243783
Publisher site
See Article on Publisher Site

Abstract

AL-MASĀQ 303 handful of Qurʾānic verses as an indication of the motivations of conquerors whose under- standing of the finer points of Islam may have been (as Hitchcock acknowledges) limited at best. The proposition that the conquests may have had little or nothing to do with Islamic ideology is – like the questions posed in the conclusion – a stimulating one, which breaks with a common assumption about Islamic history, namely that religion always came first for medieval Muslims (as opposed to medieval Christians, who are allowed to have more prag- matic concerns). Yet it is left dangling, under-developed and disengaged from recent scholarly discussions; it would have been very welcome to see this argument advanced at greater length. Similar contentions are advanced with regard to the back-and-forth border warfare that his- torians have collectively, and tendentiously, labelled the “reconquest”. Hitchcock points to the influence of Crusading ideology – and the role of the North African empires of the Almoravids and Almohads – in temporarily changing the tone of conflict in Iberia, but he considers the “reconquest” to have lacked “a religious element” (73) before the eleventh century, and there- after to have been largely secondary to more material

Journal

Al-Masaq: Journal of the Medieval Mediterranean – Taylor & Francis

Published: Sep 1, 2016

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