The Material Culture of the Caliphate

8. März 2022, von AAI Webmaster

Foto: Photo: Courtesy of Universität Jena, Orientalisches Münzkabinett

Tuesdays, 2-3:30pm EST/20:00-21:30 Central European Time Spring 2022 Prof. Abigail Balbale Assistant Professor, Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies, New York University

Course description:

The caliphate emerged in the seventh century as a form of political succession to the Prophet Muhammad. The early caliphs aimed to lead the spiritual community that had united under the Prophet's authority. Within decades, the institution was contested by rival parties with radically different understandings of its parameters. Should the caliph be the arbiter of righteous spiritual activity, or a political ruler on the model of pre-Islamic kings and emperors? Should the caliph inherit his position, or be elected by his peers based on his piety?

These arguments played out differently across the growing territories under Islamic rule and have recently reemerged with the so-called Islamic State, whose minting of Islamic coins echo earlier strategies of caliphal legitimation even as their destruction of Iraq and Syria's cultural heritage departs radically from historical attitudes.

This course examines the visual and material culture of the many groups that have claimed the caliphate, from the first caliphs until the present. We will focus on objects associated with the Prophet Muhammad and the early caliphs (many of which had long afterlives), as well as coins, manuscripts, luxury objects, inscribed textiles, palaces, and mosques made by or for later caliphs. Close examination of these objects and spaces reveals the intersection of religion, political power, and material culture, and sheds light on the emergence of a conception of "Islamic art."

About this course:

This course forms part of an innovative new program of webinars in Islamic Material Culture, centered at NYU, the Universities of Hamburg and Bonn, and Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität in Munich. This program is a collaboration among numismatist Stefan Heidemann, papyrologist Andreas Kaplony, archaeologist Bethany Walker and cultural historian Abigail Balbale that aims to offer students and scholars of the Islamic past comprehensive tools to approach its material culture.

The Material Culture of the Caliphate will be offered in person to students at NYU and, for the second half of the course, simultaneously online via interactive web presence to students around the world. We will be joined by a series of guest lecturers for these later webinar sessions.

1. March 8 – Coins

GUEST LECTURE – Prof. Stefan Heidemann, University of Hamburg.

Required reading:

• Philip Grierson, Numismatics, London u.a. (1975). pp. 95-120. (“The making of a coin”).
• American Numismatic Society: Introduction to Numismatic Terms and Methods. (http://www.numismatics.org/Seminar/TermsMethods)
• Stefan Heidemann, “The Evolving Representation of the Early Islamic Empire and Its Religion on Coin Imagery,” in: Angelika Neuwirth, Nicolai Sinai & Michael Marx (eds.): The Qur’an in Context: Historical and Literary Investigations into the Qurʾanic Milieu (Text and Studies on the Qur'an 6), Leiden, pp. 149-195.

Recommended further reading:

• Philip Grierson, Numismatics, Chapter 2 (The western tradition), chapter 3 (The eastern tradition).
• Luke Treadwell, “The Formation of Religious and Caliphal Identity in the Umayyad Period: The Evidence of the Coinage,” in F. B. Flood and G. Necipoglu, A Companion to Islamic Art and Architecture (Wiley Blackwell, 2017), Vol. 1, pp. 89-108.
• Jere L. Bacharach, "Signs of Sovereignty: The Shahada, Qur'anic Verses, and the Coinage of Abd al-Malik," Muqarnas 27 (2010): 1-30.

2. March 29 – Relics

GUEST LECTURE: Adam Bursi, University of Utrecht.

• Adam C Bursi, “Fluid Boundaries: Christian Sacred Space and Islamic Relics in an Early Ḥadīth.” Medieval Encounters (2021): 1–33. doi:10.1163/15700674-12340108.
• Luca Patrizi, “Relics of the Prophet,” in Muhammad in History, Thought, and Culture: An Encyclopedia of the Prophet of God (2 vols.), Edited by C. Fitzpatrick and A. Walker, Santa Barbara, ABC-CLIO, 2014, pp. 517-520.
• J. Allan; D. Sourdel, "Khātam, Khātim." Encyclopaedia of Islam, Second Edition. Edited by: P. Bearman, Th. Bianquis, C.E. Bosworth, E. van Donzel, W.P. Heinrichs. Brill Online.
• P. Hassan, “The Footprint of the Prophet,” Muqarnas 14 (1993), pp. 335-343.

3. April 5 – Architecture and ornament

Required reading:

• Nadia Ali, “The royal veil: early Islamic figural art and the Bilderverbot reconsidered,” in Religion, Vol. 47, number 3 (2017): 425-444.
• Marcus Milwright, “Samarra and Abbasid Ornament,” in F. B. Flood and G. Necipoglu, A Companion to Islamic Art and Architecture (Wiley Blackwell, 2017), Vol. 1, pp. 177-196.
• Glaire Anderson and Jennifer Pruitt, “The Three Caliphates: A Comparative Model,” in F. B. Flood and G. Necipoglu, A Companion to Islamic Art and Architecture (Wiley Blackwell, 2017), Vol. 1, pp. 223-249.

Recommended further reading:

• Garth Fowden, Quṣayr ʿAmra: Art and the Umayyad Elite in Late Antique Syria, University of California Press, 2004.
• Finbarr Barry Flood, The Great Mosque of Damascus: studies on the makings of an Umayyad visual culture, Brill, 2001.

4. April 12 – Symbols of Authority

• Gülru Necipoglu, “An Outline of Shifting Paradigms in the Palatial Architecture of the Pre-Modern Islamic World,” Ars Orientalis 23 (1993), pp. 3-24.
• Robert Hillenbrand, “The Symbolism of the Rayed Nimbus in Early Islamic Art,” in Lyle (ed.), Kingship.
• J. Sourde-Thomine, “L’Expression symbolique de l’autorité dans l’art islamique,” in La notion de l’autorité au môyen-age – Islam, Byzance, Occident, Paris, 1982, pp. 273-86.
• Nadia Jamil, “Caliph and Qutb. Poetry as a Source for Interpreting the Transformation of the Byzantine Cross on Steps on Umayyad Coinage”, in Bayt al-Maqdis. Jerusalem and Early Islam, Oxford Studies in Islamic Art IX,2, edited by Jeremy Johns, 11-57, Oxford, 1999.

5. April 19 – Associating with the Caliphate: The Mamluks, the Ottomans and beyond

• David Ayalon, “Studies on the transfer of the Abbasid caliphate from Baghdad to Cairo,” Arabica vii (1960), pp. 41-59.
• Suzanne Pinckney Stetkevych, “From Text to Talisman: Al-Būṣīrī's ‘Qaṣīdat al-Burdah’ (Mantle Ode) and the Supplicatory Ode,” Journal of Arabic Literature, Vol. 37, No. 2 (2006), pp. 145-189.
• Estelle Whelan, “Representations of the Khāṣṣakīyah and the Origins of Mamluk Emblems,” in Priscilla Soucek, ed., Content and Context of Visual Arts in the Islamic World, Penn State Press, 1988, pp. 219-253.
• H. Aydin, The Sacred Trusts: Pavilion of the Sacred Relics. Istanbul: Topkapi Palace Museum, 2010, selections.

6. April 26 – Modern imaginings

• Donald Malcolm Reid, “The Postage Stamp: A Window on Saddam Hussein's Iraq,” Middle East Journal, Vol. 47, No. 1 (Winter, 1993), pp. 77-89.
• Christoph Günther, ‘The land of the two rivers under the black banner: Visual communication of al-Qa’ida in Iraq’, International Journal of Contemporary Iraqi Studies 8: 1 (2014), pp. 35–53.
• Christopher W. Jones, “Understanding ISIS's Destruction of Antiquities as a Rejection of Nationalism”, Journal of Eastern Mediterranean Archaeology & Heritage Studies, Vol. 6, No. 1-2 (2018), pp. 31-58.
• Nico Prucha, “Pictures Matter: The Visual Culture of Jihadism,” VOX Pol Network of Excellence Blog,  June 17, 2015, http://www.voxpol.eu/pictures-matter-the-visual-culture-of-jihadism/