This dissertation examines how and why late 20th century writers of disparate nationalities, ethnicities, and linguistic traditions use al-Andalus as a metaphor in their fiction. Following a critical introduction to the conflictual historiographies of al-Andalus that highlights …
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This dissertation concerns human-environment interactions in southeastern Portugal during the centuries following the dissolution of the Western Roman Empire. In contrast to the feudal systems that developed across Western Europe outside Iberia, the Islamic polities that control…
The thesis is a study on classical Arabic phraseology on the basis of prose works by Lisān ad-Dīn Ibn al-Khaṭīb (d. 776/1374). It reinvestigates the linguistic concept of a phraseme from a theoretical perspective and adopts the approach of cultural analysis to a selected corpus …
This thesis seeks to examine the political and administrative organisations of al-Andalus during the period of the Almohads. It employs close analysis of the sources in order to explore how the Almohad government system worked and to identify the extent of the development and th…
This thesis pioneers a study in the dynamics of territorial control of the island of Mallorca from ca. 902-1300 AD, with the aim of providing the first holistic and systematic study of the known Islamic fortresses of this island, and determining the reasons which account for the…
This thesis comprises an attempt to re-evaluate the experience and the survival of the indigenous Christian population of al-Andalus. It is a response to two problematic aspects of the historiography, whose authority has only recently begun to be questioned: first, the inordinat…
This dissertation re-examines a fatwa (formal response to a legal question) issued in 1491 C.E. by Ah[dotbelow]mad al-Wansharisi (d. Fez, 914/1508) confirming the obligation of Iberian Muslims to emigrate from their conquered homelands, which had become non-Muslim territory ( da…
Historians who specialize in the study of the Holocaust and genocide often view the medieval period as merely a precursor to the genocides that dominated the 18th, 19th, and 20th century. These historians typically argue that the medieval period marked a shift from tribal prejud…
Aging as a physical, aesthetic and intellectual process gained, after muhdath poetry, a position of prominence in Classical Arabic poetry and poetics. Despite its relevance to the development of subgenres such as that of shayb (white hair) and zuhd (ascetic poetry), Arabic verse…
This Ph.D. dissertation focuses on the nostalgic feelings of the Andalusian Arabs and Jews toward the East and on the role that eastern poetic conventions played in the literary composition of al-Andalus. The first chapter introduces a quick survey of nostalgia among Arabs from …
From the 5th/ 11th century, madīh nabawī (praise poetry for the Prophet Muhammad) began to emerge as a distinct poetic genre and spread throughout the Islamic world. In al-Andalus, devotion to the person of the Prophet Muhammad became an essential element of Islamic faith for bo…
How the musical and poetic traditions of the troubadours arose remains unknown, despite a century of scholarship that has attempted to account for their seemingly ex nihilo appearance in late twelfth-century Europe. Scholarly debate was particularly intense during the first half…
This dissertation investigates the cultural construction of a modern global diaspora by foregrounding the historical, linguistic and nationalist contexts embedded in literary works produced over the last two centuries, written by a diverse collection of writers who imagine a pre…
This dissertation interprets a corpus of geographical texts from al-Andalus, al-Maghrib, and Sicily produced from the fourth/eleventh to the seventh/thirteenth centuries as sites of an epistemology of the unknown expressed through the meta-geographical categories of sphere, clim…
This dissertation investigates the development of legal institutions in the Far Maghrib during its unification with al-Andalus under the Almoravids (434-530/1042-1147). It posits that political unification occurred alongside urban transformation and argues that legal institution…
There has been shockingly little scholarship produced concerning this towering Andalusian poet and Sufi mystic, Abu l-Hasan al-Shushtari. This thesis aims to rectify this neglect by uncovering not only the impact his poetry had on the Islamic world in the thirteenth century and …
This work examines ethnic group identities among the Muslim population in the Iberian Peninsula, or al-Andalus, between 881 and 1110 C.E. It specifically addresses three moments in Andalusi history in which ethnic conflict erupted into the political sphere: 1) The revolt of Ibn …
This thesis contends that a greater appreciation of the ulama will significantly enhance a historiographical analysis of Spain. The ulama were an elite class of individuals within medieval Islamic Spain, who controlled the majority of city administration. The administration of c…
Considerable critical attention has been devoted to the theme of lamentation in the Arabic and Hebrew poetry concerning the fall of cities and regions of Islamic Spain (al-Andalus/Sefarad, 711-1492 C.E.) to the Christian Reconquista. However, until now no attempt has been made t…