Al-ʿUsur al-Wusta

Masthead & Table of Contents

2025-11-14

The Relative Lenience or Strictness of the Sunni Schools of Law

Christopher Melchert — 2025-11-14

ʿAbd al-Wahhāb b. Aḥmad al‑Shaʿrānī (d. Cairo, 973/1565), al-Mīzān, is a survey of agreements and disagreements among the Sunni schools of law. For each question, it locates the rules of the different schools on a spectrum from lenient to strict, suggesting that a believer may choose whichever suits his situation, such as his capacity for self-control. The Ḥanafī school has a reputation for relative lenience, which al-Shaʿrānī’s survey tends to confirm.

Indian Ocean Histories

Jyoti Gulati Balachandran — 2025-11-14

Introduction to the Special Dossier on Indian Ocean Histories

White Camphor and Peppercorn Hair

Guangtian Ha — 2025-11-14

Reading classical Arabic and Chinese sources at once comparatively and intersectionally, this article initiates an investigation of Black labor—specifically Black sailors and slaves—employed in medieval trade networks that connect Africa, Arabia, and Persia to South Asia, Southeast Asia, and China. It does not presume a homogeneous definition of Blackness, nor a generalized notion of slavery. While informed by concepts developed in scholarly studies of transatlantic slavery and Euro-American colonial history, this article strives to expand our understanding of the global articulation of Blackness beyond both the modern period and the Atlantic world. I draw on numerous genres of classical literature—Islamic ḥadīth commentaries, stories of marvels, geographical works, poetry, Buddhist dictionaries, and polemical treatises—and corroborate them with visual evidence from the same or adjacent periods. Rather than aiming for a social history of Black labor, I suggest that we harness the magical qualities of these half-true, half-invented narratives, capitalize on their marvelousness, and instead of laying claim to a definitive account of who the Black sailors were and what they did, create new avenues of research and imagination that may help us regain access to the breathtakingly rich and layered world of a Black subalternity articulated translingually across the medieval Indian Ocean world.

Across Sea and Ocean

Mustafa Banister — 2025-11-14

Although universal recognition of the caliphate diminished substantially in the post-Mongol territories of the Islamic East it remained a symbol of culture and tradition capable of bridging Muslim societies across the Mediterranean, Red Sea, and Indian Ocean. The eighth-/fourteenth- and ninth-/fifteenth-century Muslim rulers of India considered themselves in need of symbolic ties with the Abbasid line in Egypt to better strengthen their claims to ruling authority. This article examines diplomatic exchanges linking Syro-Egyptian elites with those in Delhi, Gujarat, Bengal, Malwa, and the Deccan, placing emphasis on the role of late medieval Indian sultanates in shaping the discourse associated with the Abbasid Caliphate in Cairo. Analysis also considers the relationships connecting premodern societies that spanned the Red Sea, Indian Ocean, and Eastern Mediterranean, framed through the prism of religious diplomacy involving transoceanic ideas of caliphate.

The “Lamp of Hind” in Cairo

Sohaib Baig — 2025-11-14

This article explores scholarly exchange across the Arabian Sea in the fourteenth century with respect to Islamic law. It connects legal contexts from the Delhi Sultanate to the Cairo Sultanate and shows how the Sunni legal schools (madhhabs) and the recently emergent system of legal pluralism shaped transoceanic exchanges of scholarship. In particular, this article focuses on the career of Sirāj al-Dīn al-Hindī (d. 773/1372), an Indian scholar who traveled from Delhi via Mecca to Cairo, and then built an accomplished career that culminated with him as chief Hanafi judge in Cairo. It examines his relationships with Turkish mamluks and sultans as well as his prolific writings to uncover their shared investment in the Hanafi madhhab and the significance of ongoing transregional debates between the Hanafi and Shafiʿi legal schools. In so doing, this article sheds light on a missing history of how Mamluk initiatives towards expanding legal pluralism between the madhhabs created new opportunities across the Indian Ocean for Hanafi jurists like Sirāj al-Dīn. Hence, it widens our understanding of premodern Islamic intellectual exchange between South Asia and the Middle East, showing how South Asia also served as an exporter of Islamic scholarship and legal expertise rather than its peripheral recipient.

What’s in a World?

Maria Gajewska — 2025-11-14

The Indian Ocean World is a popular topic of cross-disciplinary academic research. However, the framework of this very large and diverse macro-region as a “world” is rarely questioned or defined. This article attempts to offer a working definition of the “Indian Ocean world” that would make it useful as a research framework for historical disciplines, particularly those focused on material culture. It then turns to the western Indian Ocean between the eighth and fifteenth centuries, especially as visible through the lens of archaeological evidence, to question whether the macro-region fits this definition. It concludes that there are substantial differences in how different regions engaged with, and were influenced by, other parts of the oceanic littoral and by maritime connections. A significant part of these differences can be linked to environmental conditions, specifically to how local topography and climate facilitated or obstructed connections to the maritime littoral and to other (economic, political, cultural) networks, and how it shaped receptivity to maritime imports and influences. While each region was unique, environmental conditions allow the definition of two broad spheres of transoceanic influence: a relatively closely integrated shared world, and an associated sphere whose connections to the littoral world were more tenuous.

The Multiplicity of Mosque Architecture in China

Sylvia Wu — 2025-11-14

This pedagogy file examines the diversity of mosque architecture in China as an entry point for considering the intersections of Islam, regional traditions, and transregional exchange. Chinese mosques demonstrate a wide range of architectural strategies through which Muslim communities have articulated religious practice and cultural identity. Focusing on three case studies—the Ashab Mosque in Quanzhou, the Great Mosque of Xi’an, and the Amin Mosque in Turfan—the file highlights how architectural forms reflected the particular circumstances of diasporic merchant communities on the coast, imperially supported Hui congregations in central China, and Uyghur patronage along the frontiers of Central Asia. These examples illustrate both the circulation of forms through maritime and overland networks and the translation of global Islamic idioms into local building traditions and epistemologies. By engaging with these sites, students are encouraged to recognize that mosque architecture in China resists reductive classification and reflects processes of adaptation, continuity, and negotiation. Framed within broader histories of global architecture, the file provides resources for classroom discussion on center–periphery models and the transregional dynamics of religious built environments.

Review of Aillet, L’archipel ibadite

Antonia Bosanquet — 2025-11-14

Review of Thaver, Beyond Sectarianism

Mushegh Asatryan — 2025-11-14

Review of Ibn Buṭlān, The Doctor’s Dinner Party

Elaine van Dalen — 2025-11-14

Review of Hollenberg and Asatryan, The Nusayri Path of Knowledge

Daniel De Smet — 2025-11-14

Review of Muhammad, Sufis in Medieval Baghdad

Pascal Held — 2025-11-14

Review of Brack, An Afterlife for the Khan

Blain Auer — 2025-11-14

Review of Morimoto and Rizvi, Knowledge and Power in Muslim Societies

Nebil Husayn — 2025-11-14

A Sea of Sorcery

Shireen Hamza — 2025-11-14

Witches

Liana Saif — 2025-11-14

Transformation

Shireen Hamza — 2025-11-14

Faith, Freedom, and Favors

Rebecca Hankins — 2025-11-14

This essay aims to situate Shannon Chakraborty's work within the broader tradition of American Muslim science fiction and fantasy literature.

Piracy

Mahmood Kooria — 2025-11-14

The Swahili Coast

KD Thompson — 2025-11-14

Voyage Stories

Fahad Ahmad Bishara — 2025-11-14

Remarks by the Recipient of the 2024 MEM Lifetime Achievement Award

Jürgen Paul — 2025-11-14

Kitāb al-Safar

Muḥammad ʿAbd al-Raḥīm Jāzim — 2025-11-14

The sixth sultan of Rasulid Yemen, al-Malik al-Afḍal al-ʿAbbās, wrote the Kitāb al-Safar wa-mā yakūn fīhi min al-tadbīr in the mid-fourteenth century as a guide to the best ways to manage travel at that time, whether on land or by sea. In this unique work, the sultan describes common problems encountered by travelers due to weather, fatigue, illness, hunger, and thirst. He recommends food, drinks, and medicinal plants to treat different conditions and includes advice from earlier physicians, such as Ibn Sīnā. This short text can be found in a mixed manuscript of writings by and for the sultan, which has been published previously in facsimile. Here, Muḥammad ʿAbd al-Raḥīm Jāzim, a Yemeni historian of the Rasulid era, provides an Arabic critical edition of the Kitāb al-Safar with extensive notes on Yemeni dialect usage. The foreword in English is by Daniel Martin Varisco.

Serious Laughter

Jonny Lawrence — 2025-11-14

Ibn Khaldūn’s Muqaddima and the Maps of al-Idrīsī

Alfred Hiatt — 2025-01-13

It has long been noted that in compiling a geographical preface to his famous Muqaddima, Ibn Khaldūn relied on the maps contained in the twelfth-century geographer al-Idrīsī’s Nuzhat al-mushtāq fī ikhtirāq al-āfāq. Yet Ibn Khaldūn’s reading of nearly seventy regional maps of al-Idrīsī has not to date been the subject of a detailed examination. This article seeks, first, to establish patterns in Ibn Khaldūn’s map reading as recorded in the Muqaddima, noting the focus and direction of his reading as well as its omissions. In addition to his descriptions of the maps, it considers Ibn Khaldūn’s use of the text of the Nuzhat al-mushtāq and occasional examples of his updating and addition of information. Second, this analysis leads to a discussion of the significance—or lack thereof—of al-Idrīsī’s maps for the larger project of the Muqaddima: what role, in the end, did geography play within Ibn Khaldūn’s theory of history?

A Neglected Armenian Source of the Late Umayyad Era

Tim Greenwood — 2025-01-15

The Armenian Martyrdom of Vahan of Gołt‘n, composed in 744 CE, offers a fresh perspective from which to study the Umayyad caliphate. A sophisticated literary composition assembled in a monastic context, the Martyrdom traces contemporary networks of power, communication, and knowledge within and beyond Armenia. As a product of the late Umayyad world, it constitutes a work of major significance for the study of the Umayyad caliphate at large and the caliphal North in particular during the first half of the eighth century. The Martyrdom reveals contemporary Armenian perceptions of Umayyad hegemony, including ʿaṭā (stipend) payments, public executions, conversions, apostasy, contemporary apologetics, and the nature of Caliph Hishām’s court at Ruṣāfa. At the same time, it portrays members of the Armenian elite, lay and clerical, reacting in different ways to new political circumstances. The present article provides the first annotated English translation and extensive thematic introduction to the Martyrdom of Vahan of Gołt‘n, with the aim of making the text accessible to Islamicists and thereby integrating this rich source into discussions of the late Umayyad era.

Mkrtičʻ Nałaš: An Armenian Bishop as Pillar of the Aqquyunlu State?

Georg Leube — 2025-01-21

Although the fifteenth century CE has commonly been recognized as a crucial saddle period in both the history of the Armenian church and the administrative history of the Middle East, which is largely focused on Muslim rulers before the Ottoman-Safavid confrontation, the two topics are usually approached separately. To bridge this gap, the present contribution examines three pivotal moments in the tenure of the Armenian bishop, painter, and poet Mkrtičʻ Nałaš (d. after 1469 CE) in Diyarbakır to argue that his career was inextricably entangled with the trajectory of the Aqquyunlu “Turkmen” rulers who were establishing Diyarbakır as a regional center at the time. Accordingly, I suggest that we should see the processes of Aqquyunlu state formation as including members of the Armenian clerical elite such as Mkrtičʻ Nałaš.

I propose to use the concept of synchronisms to reflect the joint and entangled agency of multiple individuals and interpersonal networks of mobilization and patronage. This concept enables the description of entanglements and linkages without attributing primacy to any of the involved parties. I argue that the synchronisms linking Mkrtičʻ Nałaš and early Aqquyunlu rulers of Diyarbakır demonstrate that the histories of Christian clerical elites and the histories of the Muslim etatist and administrative configurations they inhabited must be told together.

'Masʾalatun or Mas'ʾalatun? That Is the Question!

Arya Tabibzadeh — 2025-07-10

Word stress in Classical Arabic (ClAr) is usually reconstructed through cross-dialectal and diachronic analyses of a number of varieties of Arabic and other Semitic languages. However, this paper introduces a new source of data on ClAr stress—namely, the traditional recitation of metra in metrical sequences by Persian prosodists. It shows that the reconstructed pattern of ClAr stress is also observed in such traditional recitation. This stress pattern has nothing to do with Persian phonological or metrical rules, and it should rather be considered an artificial performance practice whose purpose was to imitate the original pronunciation of the metra in Arabic metrics. In view of the oral nature of this practice, I suggest that it has persisted in Persian over a long period (maybe over centuries), and it can therefore be a reliable source of data on ClAr word stress. I also provide some supporting evidence for my hypothesis from medieval Persian texts. On the basis of this new source, I propose that in words with a final heavy syllable preceded by two or more light syllables, the antepenultimate stress pattern was common in many varieties of early Islamic Arabic, including ClAr, and that it was perhaps even more prestigious than the initial stress pattern. This hypothesis may allow us to trace the antepenultimate stress in this syllable structure back to the Proto-Arabic stage.

Emotional Manipulation, Coercion, and Precarity in the Tales of Jamīl and Buthayna

Jonny Lawrence — 2025-07-17

This article rereads several canonical anecdotes from the story-cycle of the famed ʿudhrī lover Jamīl b. Maʿmar and his beloved, Buthayna. Rather than flatly accepting the stories’ internal interpretations or the traditional frameworks through which these stories have been interpreted, in this article, I provide an alternative interpretation of the story-cycle by focusing on how Buthayna might have experienced the relationship. This article argues that the Jamīl-Buthayna story-cycle can be read as more open-ended than previously considered, that it explores themes of emotional manipulation and abuse just as much as it deals with abstemious chastity and noble sentiments, that Jamīl might not be the outstanding moral exemplar for the modern reader that the medieval tradition built him up to be. Beyond that, when we read these stories from Buthayna’s—or any beloved’s—perspective, it becomes apparent how far this role might expose an individual to threat, scandal, and precarity within their broader social world.

The Tatars of the Sūdān

Hannah Barker — 2025-09-27

Scholars in the medieval Islamicate world occasionally compared peoples of the far south and the far north, referencing their barbarity to illustrate the effects of extreme climate on human bodies and societies. This article discusses a specific north-south comparison: the portrayal of the Damādim as “the Tatars of the Sūdān,” introduced by Ibn Saʿīd al-Maghribī in his thirteenth-century geography. He used it to connect the Chinggisid devastation of Khwarazm in the thirteenth century with the Damādim’s devastation of the Nūba and the Ḥabasha in Northeast Africa. Analyzing this comparison in a historical and discursive context tells us little about the Tatars, Northeast Africa, or the Damādim. Instead it reveals Ibn Saʿīd’s work as a racemaker. His comparison emerged in a historically specific moment: it was shaped by the imposition of Tatar rule in the Islamicate East and the constructs of the intellectual community in which he participated. The fact that Ibn Saʿīd invented entirely new content for the term “Damādim” and that this came to be adopted by his peers illustrates how racial stereotypes could change. Finally, the comparison reveals the power dynamics of racialization, as Tatars and Turks holding power in the Islamicate world could intervene in Islamicate racial discourse in a way that Black Africans could not.

Selenocentrism and Heliocentrism in Early Modern Persianate Imperial Cultures: ʿAlī versus Jesus, with Hermes Presiding

Matthew Melvin-Koushki — 2025-10-29

Islam, as all moderns know, is the religion of the Moon. Yet it has been experienced as equally Solar (and Venusian) since late antiquity, thanks to its Iranian-Egyptian-Greek-Roman imperial Heliocentrist genetics. By the same genetic token, the Sun-supremacism that is colonialist-Orientalist Eurocentricism merely continues Latin Christian Jesuan Heliocentrism—a theological rite that, painfully ironically, remains the textbook touchstone of modern Western rationality; meanwhile non-Latin Christian but equally Western philosophical, scientific, technological, and imperial genealogies of both Moon and Sun continue to be actively unmapped.

As astro-decolonial remedy, I propose Selenocentrism and Heliocentrism as a primary binary pair whose creative tension helped shape human cultures generally and Islamicate ones specifically, and early modern Persianate imperial cultures above all: for they saw the apotheosis of the peculiarly Islamic embrace of Harranian-Hermetic astral magic as the preferred vehicle of Neoplatonic philosophical-theurgic practice, rejecting the weird Greek insistence on Moon as nonimperial female only in favor of the Harranian devotion to male Moon as Cosmic King and brother to male-female Hermes. The Islamic marriage of Avicennan Moon-ascent to Suhravardian Sun-ascent that defined the post-Mongol era was emblematized by a new, also peculiarly Islamic Trinity—Muḥammad-ʿAlī-Fāṭima as Sun-Moon-Venus—used talismanically by Sunni and Shiʿi alike, as well as the curiously Joycean association of Moon and Mercury in Arabo-Persian grimoires and imperial horoscopes. And as in any Space Race, imperial astro-theurgic politics became pitched with the approach of the Islamic Millennium. Thus was Timurid, Safavid, and ʿAdilshahid Selenocentrism, starring ʿAlī as Moon, countered by Mughal and Ottoman Heliocentrism, starring Jesus as Sun—both on the basis of Ibn ʿArabī’s cosmic-imperial doctrine of sacral power (walāya) and Pythagorean fusion of the Names and the Planets.

This astro-history of Islam, the Greater West, has since been garbled to the point of illegibility. Its political association today solely with the Crescent Moon (per many state and territorial flags) has little to do with the Islamic Lunar calendar, but is rather an artifact of the Latin Christian obsession with the Ottomans—who claimed Jesus as Sun but increasingly also ʿAlī as Moon in their contest with the Safavids and Mughals—as Selenocentric Oriental Saracens, horrified by their self-identification as European Jesuan Heliocentrists too. As such, “the West and the Rest” colonial fable is not merely historicidal and genocidal, but also a weirdly aberrant (gharīb) form of the Moon-Sun Dance ubiquitous across human cultures in its dysfunctional relationship with the Moon. I therefore further propose Islamic Neopaganism as a Hermetic partycrashing trick for showing up the reflexive modern historiographical reduction of Science to strictly male Heliocentrism (think the “Scientific Revolution”) and Religion to strictly female Selenocentrism (think Islam and Wicca). Remarrying active-passive Solar “West” to passive-active Lunar “Not-West” by means of Consort-Warrior Venus and Trickster-Psychopomp Mercury is a more historiographically empirical means of decolonially Drawing Down the Panopticon Moon.