The Aghlabids and Their Neighbors: An Introduction

Abstract

This book takes an interdisciplinary and transregional approach to the Aghlabid dynasty and ninth-century North Africa, to highlight the region’s important interchange with other medieval societies in the Mediterranean and beyond. It comprises new invited essays alongside revised versions of select papers presented at the symposium, “The Aghlabids and Their Neighbors: Art and Material Culture in Ninth-Century North Africa,” held in London in May 2014 under the aegis of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.1 This event was originally intended as a small interdisciplinary workshop on the history and material culture of the Aghlabid dynasty of Ifriqiya and its immediate neighbors in the region, but it rapidly became a larger event when we realized the scale of scholarly interest in the topic. The workshop brought scholars together from different national as well as disciplinary traditions to consider the Aghlabids and their neighbors, with the aim of moving toward a more integrated understanding of this crucial dynasty and period within the Islamic world. Our stated aim in the call for papers was to consider North Africa not as a peripheral frontier whose artistic production was inferior to or derivative of trends in the Abbasid heartlands of Iraq and Egypt, which is how it has long been situated in the history of Islamic art, but as one of the vibrant centers of the early medieval dār al-Islām. In doing so, we hoped not only to reevaluate problematic yet persistent notions of the region’s peripherality in Islamic (art) history and archaeology, but also to illuminate processes of acculturation and interaction between ninth-century North Africa, Iberia, Sicily/Italy, and other regions. These same hopes inform the production of this volume, which we would like to stand as a state of the question on the Aghlabids and their material culture at this academic moment, as well as to propose new directions for future study.