The Aghlabids and their Neighbors: Art and Material Culture in Ninth-Century North Africa(122 Handbook of Oriental Studies. Section 1 The Near and Middle East)

The first dynasty to mint gold dinars outside of the Abbasid heartlands, the Aghlabid (r. 800-909) reign in North Africa has largely been neglected in the scholarship of recent decades, despite the canonical status of its monuments and artworks in early Islamic art history. The Aghlabids and their Neighbors focuses new attention on this key dynasty. The essays in this volume, produced by an international group of specialists in history, art and architectural history, archaeology, and numismatics, illuminate the Aghlabid dynasty’s interactions with neighbors in the western Mediterranean and its rivals and allies elsewhere, providing a state of the question on early medieval North Africa and revealing the centrality of the dynasty and the region to global economic and political networks.

Contributors: Lotfi Abdeljaouad, Glaire D. Anderson, Lucia Arcifa, Fabiola Ardizzone, Alessandra Bagnera, Jonathan M. Bloom, Lorenzo Bondioli, Chloé Capel, Patrice Cressier, Mounira Chapoutot-Remadi, Abdelaziz Daoulatli, Claire Déléry, Ahmed El Bahi, Kaoutar Elbaljan, Ahmed Ettahiri, Abdelhamid Fenina, Elizabeth Fentress, Abdallah Fili, Mohamed Ghodhbane, Caroline Goodson, Soundes Gragueb Chatti, Khadija Hamdi, Renata Holod, Jeremy Johns, Tarek Kahlaoui, Hugh Kennedy, Sihem Lamine, Faouzi Mahfoudh, David Mattingly, Irene Montilla, Annliese Nef, Elena Pezzini, Nadège Picotin, Cheryl Porter, Dwight Reynolds, Viva Sacco, Elena Salinas, Martin Sterry.

Table of Contents:
Acknowledgments List of Maps List of Figures List of Tables List of Contributors Aghlabid Timeline List of Aghlabid Rulers Maps 1 The Aghlabids and Their Neighbors: An Introduction  Glaire D. Anderson, Corisande Fenwick, and Mariam Rosser-Owen Part 1: State-building 2 The Origins of the Aghlabids  Hugh Kennedy 3 Comment les Aghlabides ont-ils gouverné l’Ifriqiya ?  Mounira Chapoutot-Remadi 4 Reinterpreting the Aghlabids’ Sicilian Policy (827–910)  Annliese Nef 5 Topographies of Power in Aghlabid-Era Kairouan  Caroline Goodson 6 L’atelier monétaire d’al-ʿAbbassiyya: du « vieux château » (al-Qasr al-Qadim) à la ville princière aghlabide  Abdelhamid Fenina 7 Le changement du type monétaire des dinars aghlabides sous le règne de Ziyadat Allah III : évolution ou révolution artistique?  Mohamed Ghodhbane 8 Ziryab in the Aghlabid Court  Dwight Reynolds Part 2: Monuments: The Physical Construction of Power 9 La Grande Mosquée de Kairouan : textes et contexte archéologique  Faouzi Mahfoudh 10 The Marble Panels in the Mihrab of the Great Mosque of Kairouan  Jonathan M. Bloom 11 Fragments d’histoire du minbar de Kairouan  Nadège Picotin and Claire Déléry 12 Les carreaux verts et jaunes « cachés » du mihrab de la Grande Mosquée de Kairouan et analogie avec une sélection d’objets kairouanais  Khadija Hamdi 13 La Grande Mosquée Zitouna : un authentique monument aghlabide (milieu du IXe siècle)  Abdelaziz Daoulatli 14 The Zaytuna: The Mosque of a Rebellious City  Sihem Lamine 15 Le coufique des inscriptions monumentales et funéraires aghlabides  Lotfi Abdeljaouad 16 Les ribāṭs aghlabides : un problème d’identification  Ahmed El Bahi Part 3: Ceramics: Morphology and Mobility 17 La céramique aghlabide de Raqqada et les productions de l’Orient islamique : parenté et filiation  Soundes Gragueb Chatti 18 Aghlabid Palermo: Written Sources and Archaeological Evidence  Fabiola Ardizzone †, Elena Pezzini, and Viva Sacco 19 Palermo in the Ninth and Early Tenth Century: Ceramics as Archaeological Markers of Cultural Dynamics  Lucia Arcifa and Alessandra Bagnera 20 La céramique des niveaux idrisside et zénète de la Mosquée al-Qarawiyyin de Fès (IXe-Xe siècles)  Kaoutar El Baljani, Ahmed S. Ettahiri, and Abdallah Fili 21 Material Culture Interactions between al-Andalus and the Aghlabids  Elena Salinas and Irene Montilla Part 4: Neighbors: North Africa and the Central Mediterranean in the Ninth Century 22 Jerba of the Ninth Century: Under Aghlabid Control?  Renata Holod and Tarek Kahlaoui 23 Islamic Bari between the Aghlabids and the Two Empires  Lorenzo Bondioli 24 Nakur: un émirat rifain pro-omeyyade contemporain des Aghlabides  Patrice Cressier 25 Idris I and the Berbers  Elizabeth Fentress 26 Sijilmassa in the Footsteps of the Aghlabids: The Hypothesis of a Ninth-Century New Royal City in the Tafilalt Plain (Morocco)  Chloé Capel 27 Zuwila and Fazzan in the Seventh to Tenth Centuries: The Emergence of a New Trading Center  David Mattingly and Martin Sterry Part 5: Legacy 28 The Materiality of the Blue Quran: A Physical and Technological Study  Cheryl Porter 29 The Palermo Quran (AH 372/982–3 CE) and its Historical Context  Jeremy Johns Bibliography Index

About the Author :
Glaire D. Anderson, PhD (2005), MIT, is Associate Professor of Islamic Art History at UNC-Chapel Hill. Specializing in the arts of al-Andalus and the caliphal era, she is author of The Islamic villa in early medieval Iberia(Ashgate, 2013).

Corisande Fenwick, PhD (2013), Stanford University, is Lecturer in Mediterranean Archaeology at UCL. She is the author of many articles on North African archaeology and co-editor of the forthcoming Oxford Handbook of Islamic Archaeology.

Mariam Rosser-Owen, PhD (2002), University of Oxford, is Curator of Arab World collections at the Victoria & Albert Museum. She has published many articles on the arts of the Islamic West, and is author of Islamic Arts from Spain (V&A Publishing, 2010).



Review :
"This collection, as a statement on the state of the field as well as what remains to be discovered, will be a vital resource and a first stop for anyone undertaking future study of the third/ninth and fourth/tenth-century regions of the western Mediterranean and northern Africa." - Sarah Davis-Secord, University of New Mexico, in: Al-Masāq 30/3 (2018)

"As an elegant (collective) status quaestionis, on a much-neglected field, and a stimulus to further work, it is hard to imagine a more welcome book." - Andrew Merills, University of Leicester, in: Medieval Archaeology 62/2 (2018)

"The Aghlabids and their Neighbors is a long overdue contribution to the study of Islam and North African history. The genuinely interdisciplinary approach offers numerous possibilities for further research, not least because of the relatively small number of primary texts for this region, and the difficulty of accessing many of the manuscripts that do exist. The contributors must be praised for their skill in presenting complicated and specialized material in a manner that is both accessible and relevant to the non-initiate of their field. So too should the editors be commended for the volume's internal consistency (no small feat in a collection of this size and range) and its coherent and helpful structure." - Antonia Bosanquet, Hamburg University, in: Journal of the History and Culture of the Middle East 96/1 (2019)

"The weighty edited volume of 29 contributors, many drawn from an international workshop held in 2014, is an extremely welcome addition to the rather sparse array of scholarship on the history, art, architecture and material culture of early Islamic North Africa. Compiled and edited by Mariam Rosser-Owen, Corisande Fenwick and Glaire Anderson, a trio of scholars, known for their multi-disciplinary, multi-lingual and often revisionist endeavours in the field, it has a refreshing unapologetic Maghribi perspective which encourages the reader to see North Africans as agents in the production of their own early Islamic material culture, rather than as somewhat passive imitators of what Muslims in the Islamic East or al-Andalus were doing better." - Amira K. Bennison, University of Cambridge in: Bibliotheca Orientalis LXXVI N° 1-2 (2019)