Mediterranean Captivity Through Arab Eyes, 1517-1798

Erscheinungsjahr 2020
ISBN: 978-90-04-44024-1
Verlag: Brill

Buch, Englisch, Band 176, 294 Seiten, Format (B × H): 155 mm x 235 mm, Gewicht: 636 g

Reihe: Islamic History and Civilization

The post-Lepanto Mediterranean was the scene of “small wars,” to use Fernand Braudel’s phrase, which resulted in acts of piracy and captivity. Thousands upon thousands of Europeans, Arabs, and Turks were seized into bagnios stretching from Cadiz to Valletta and from Salé to Tripoli. After returning to their homelands, dozens from England and France, Germany and Spain, Malta and Italy wrote about their captivities. Their accounts were printed, distributed, translated, and plagiarized, making captivity a key subject in Europe’s Mediterranean history. While Europeans wrote extensively about their ordeals, the Arabs wrote little because their religious culture militated against such writings, which would be construed as expressing disaffection with the will of God. Nor were there detailed records and registers of captives – their names, places of origin, and ransom prices – similar to what was kept in the European archives. Contrary, however, to what some historians have claimed, there was a distinct Arabic narrative of captivity that survives in anecdotes, recollections, reports, miracles, letters, fatawa, exempla and short biographies in both verse and prose. Cumulatively, these sources constitute the Arabic qissas al-asra, or stories of the captives, in the native language and idiom of the men and women of the early modern Mediterranean.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Matar, Nabil

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Religionswissenschaft Religionswissenschaft Allgemein
• Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Weltgeschichte & Geschichte einzelner Länder und Gebietsräume Geschichte einzelner Länder Naher & Mittlerer Osten

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Acknowledgements

Illustrations

Prologue: 21 June 2019

Introduction: Mediterranean Captivities

1 Writing Captivity in Arabic

2 Between the Lands of the Christians and the Lands of Islam, Bilad al-Na?ara and Bilad al-Islam

1 Qi?a? al-Asra, or Stories of the Captives

1 ?Abd al-Karim al-Qaysi (fl. 1485)

2 A?mad ibn al-Qa?i (1553–1616)

3 A?mad Baba al-Tinbakti (1556–1627)

4 Ta?liqat Mus?afa ibn Jamal al-Din ibn Karama (9 July 1606)

5 Mu?ammad ibn Mu?ammad al-?ayyib al-Tafilati al-Maliki (Early Eighteenth Century)

6 Sayyid ?Ali ibn al-Sayyid A?mad (ca. 1713)

7 Fa?ma (1798)

8 Ibra?im Libris (1802)

9 Conclusion

2 Letters

1 Conclusion

3 Divine Intervention: Christian and Islamic

1 Christian

2 Muslim

4 Conversion and Resistance

1 A?mad ibn Ya?ya al-Zwawi al-Yusifi (1630s)

2 Mu?ammad al-Tazi and Bil-Ghayth al-Drawi (1656–1667)

3 Imam Ibn ?Abdallah al-?a?idi (1718)

4 Conclusion

5 Ransom and Return

1 Abu al-?Abbas A?mad ibn Mahdi al-Ghazzal (1766)

2 Ibn ?Uthman al-Miknasi (1779–1783)

3 Conclusion

6 Captivity of Books

Epilogue: Esclaves turcs in Sculpture

Postscript: How Should the Sculptures Be Treated?

Bibliography

Index

Über Autor(innen)

Nabil Matar, Ph.D. (Cantab. 1976), University of Minnesota, holds the Samuel Russell Chair in the Humanities at the university. He has published widely on the Christian-Islamic relations in the Mediterranean and on the history of captivity, including British Captives in the Mediterranean and the Atlantic 1563-1760 (Brill 2014).