Reviving Al-Andalus in Almohad Chronicles
Conférence
Talk by Emma Snowden "Reviving Al-Andalus in Almohad Chronicles", September 18th at 5pm at Fullbright Morocco
Emma Snowden, PhD Candidate, University of Minnesota
The swift takeover of North Africa and al-Andalus by the Almohads in the twelfth century has been referred to as a “revolution” by some scholars, a view that is often reflected in medieval texts from the caliphate. The Almohads sought to distinguish themselves from the preceding Almoravid dynasty in every respect, waging holy war against all those who opposed them, Muslim and non-Muslim alike. This lecture will discuss the ways that Almohad chronicles understood the role of the caliphate in the Iberian Peninsula. It argues that chroniclers like Ibn Ṣāḥib al-Ṣalāt employed a kind of logic of resurrection, framing the Almohad conquest of al-Andalus as a sequence of corruption, destruction, and ultimate revival. A similar logic of resurrection can be identified in earlier Christian Iberian chronicles that dealt with the role of Maghribis and Muslims in Iberia. The lecture will close by briefly considering the two historiographical traditions together, exploring the extent to which they suggest a shared literary-historical imagination in which the mutual ideological problem of competing Muslim and Christian claims to power over the same territory was conceptually resolved by presenting that space as a slate to be wiped clean by individual dynasties.
Lieu : Fulbright Morocco - 7, rue d'Agadir, Rabat
