Al-ʿUsur al-Wusta

Soundscapes of Eranshahr

Domiziana Rossi — 2026-01-28

Aspects of the sensory experience of past environments, such as tastes, smells, textures (including of food), sounds, and other sensory stimuli, cannot be fully reconstructed and appreciated with archaeological evidence alone. Interpreting the importance of sounds from archaeological evidence presents challenges due to the ephemeral nature of sound and biases inherent in historical sources. The recreation of soundscapes, closely associated with sensory archaeology, addresses this gap by focusing on the auditory environment of past societies. This article presents the methodology used to create a soundscape of a Sasanian city, Rev-Ardashir, to better understand auditory experiences in ancient urban settings. The methodology involves an extrapolation of sound-related data from a comprehensive analysis of historical sources, complemented by archaeological investigations and contextual environmental information. Through meticulous analysis of available data and the application of theoretical frameworks from sensory archaeology, this research has the potential to enhance our understanding of the daily lives and behaviors of Sasanian city dwellers and illuminate gaps in historical and archeological research.

Intellectual Practice and Manuscript Culture in Early Islamic North Africa

Clément Salah — 2026-03-13

This article examines the figure of Abū al-ʿArab al-Qayrawānī (d. 333/945) as a scribe-scholar in early Islamic North Africa, situating his manuscripts within the broader history of intellectual and material practices in Ifrīqiya. Moving beyond his well-studied role as jurist and historian, the study highlights his intense scribal activity as a constitutive dimension of scholarly authority. Through codicological and paleographical analysis of nine manuscripts copied in his own hand and preserved within the Kairouan collection, it reconstructs the material formats, graphic conventions, and paratextual strategies through which Abū al-ʿArab enacted intellectual responsibility—clarifying ambiguous readings, correcting transcriptional slips, and documenting oral and written transmission chains. These fascicles, subsequently endowed and annotated by later readers, reveal how manuscripts functioned not only as textual vessels but also as enduring instruments of teaching, verification, and communal memory. By tracing their trajectory from private notebooks to endowed objects of collective learning, the article argues that the material labor of copying was central to the formation and transmission of scholarly authority in Kairouan. More broadly, it demonstrates how the study of manuscript culture reshapes our understanding of scholarly practice and authority in the Islamic West.

Thus Spoke the Author

Ingrid Austveg Evans — 2026-06-26

A defining feature of premodern Arabic literature is the practice of recycling textual snippets and repurposing them in new contexts. Studying the different purposes underlying this practice promises to expand our understanding not only of how texts are interlinked, but also of how authors relied on text reuse to promote their own work. This article teases out the logic of an instance of self-promotional text reuse through association and allusion in an adab anthology, Ibn Nubāta al-Miṣrī’s (d. 768/1366) Maṭlaʿ al-fawāʾid wa-majmaʿ al-farāʾid (The appearance of the useful and the collection of the unique). Situating this anthology in its contemporary context of literary and historiographical writing, I argue that Ibn Nubāta’s genre-specific self-citational practices constitute a subset of text reuse with wider implications for our understanding of authorial self-promotion in the Mamluk period.

A Slave per Day in Perpetuity

Rachel Nicole Schine — 2026-06-29

A curious repetition occurs in narratives of the Muslims’ first encounters with polities along the Sahara’s edge, extending from Nubia to Niger. At each turn, agreements involving tributes of 360 enslaved persons were reached with local leaders. I use this recurrence to explore two aspects of Islamic conquest literatures: the significance within this genre of numbers in describing worldly events and the cosmic structures that background them, and the historiographical question of how to contextualize conquest numeracy in practices of statecraft and their representation. I argue that these agreements deploy a Late Antique symbolic vernacular that moved orally across domains of culture and knowledge to define diplomatic and trade relations between Saharan states and their new Muslim neighbors. Using the number of days of the idealized calendar year, authors signified these relationships’ continuous and cyclical returns. Attention to varying uses of the figure of 360 enslaved people allows us to track political and narrative developments as well as to critique the projection of borderland African regions as passive and perpetual “slaving zones.”

Cheap Perfume?

Ahoo Najafian — 2026-07-04

This article examines the shifting fortunes of the Pand-nāma, once the most widely read work attributed to the twelfth-century Persian poet Farīd al-Dīn ʿAṭṭār, in order to challenge prevailing notions of literary center and margin in the study of Islamic literature. While today ʿAṭṭār is mainly celebrated as the author of The Conference of the Birds, a mystical allegory of a spiritual quest, the early modern Islamicate world had a different ʿAṭṭār in mind. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, it was not the soaring tale of birds in search of their king that defined ʿAṭṭār’s literary presence, but rather the Pand-nāma, a didactic text of moral instruction. Modern scholars have largely dismissed the Pand-nāma due to its disputed authorship, viewing it as the work of a so-called Pseudo-ʿAṭṭār and thus unworthy of sustained attention. This article shifts the focus away from questions of authenticity to ask: who (or what) was “ʿAṭṭār” to a reader in the medieval and early modern world? What does the difference between their ʿAṭṭār and ours reveal about evolving understandings of authorship, authority, and tradition? And finally, how might the rise and fall of the Pand-nāma help us make sense of the wandering centers and margins in the Islamic world?

Approximation and Interleaving

James White — 2026-07-27

This article examines instances of multilingual literary comparison practiced by critics in late medieval Iran and argues that the methods of these premodern comparatists can help scholars of World Literature today to connect texts across languages and temporalities. The sources used for this inquiry are three bilingual anthologies compiled between the turn of the fourteenth century and the late sixteenth century, which intermix—and create dialogues between—Arabic and Persian poems. The modes of thinking that are recovered here may be representative of larger theoretical and pedagogical paradigms that were current in medieval Iran, speaking as they do to concerns raised in other premodern writing in both Arabic and Persian, including texts on metapoesis and doxography. I suggest that late medieval understandings of multilingual comparison hinge on the idea of “approximation” (muqāraba), which preserves the alterity of literatures while allowing them to be brought into conversation with one another through the act of “interleaving” (insilāk). The result is an autochthonous form of multilingual comparison, predating modern European empiricism, which can nevertheless speak to the concerns of contemporary comparative method.