Please help us test our new pre-print finding feature by giving the pre-print link a rating. A 5 star rating indicates the linked pre-print has the exact same content as the published article.
Please help us test our new pre-print finding feature by giving the pre-print link a rating. A 5 star rating indicates the linked pre-print has the exact same content as the published article.
Authors:Timothy Insoll Pages: 135– - 135– Abstract: Archaeology is in a unique position to offer a material culture based perspective on Islamization and conversion to Islam, particularly in regions where historical sources might be limited or absent. This is explored with reference to two archaeological areas, Gao in Mali, and Harlaa in Ethiopia to assess if similar material markers can recur archaeologically through evaluating mosques, Muslim burials and Arabic epigraphy, settlement structure and domestic architecture, animal and plant remains, ceramics, and miscellaneous artifacts potentially suggestive of Islamization in both regions, primarily for the period between the 11th–13th centuries CE. It is concluded that the evidence from Gao and Harlaa attests the variety of interpretations of Islam that exist, but, correspondingly, through the recurrence of key markers such as mosques, Muslim burials, and Arabic epigraphy, also affirms material similarity, yet without having to make course to a unitary and erroneous concept of “African Islam.” PubDate: 2023-03-31 DOI: 10.1558/jia.25864 Issue No:Vol. 9, No. 2 (2023)
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Authors:Nathan J Anderson Pages: 173– - 173– Abstract: Islamic towns dotted the northern coasts of Madagascar in the immediate precolonial period. The heritage of these settlements was not unlike their coastal East African contemporaries. Elaborating upon what is known from regional oral traditions and Islamic histories, archaeology has increasingly served as a conduit for understanding, facilitating the investigation of Muslim chronologies and lifeways in Madagascar. Tangible cultural heritage has corroborated Malagasy tradition, attesting to a human landscape sculpted by centuries of colonization, disparate and interconnected micro-migrations, and seasonal visitations. These finds are echoed in the genetics of the present-day Malagasy, where a legacy of Austronesian, African, and Indian Ocean inputs and population fluidity is found (Heiske et al. 2021; Radimilahy and Crossland 2015, 504–505). The compositional peculiarities of Muslim communities along the northern flanks of Madagascar recommend that Islamic beliefs reached the great island via the Comorian Archipelago in the early 2nd millennium CE, arriving via maritime routes and as components of larger southward dispersion phenomena, which included ideological dissemination, socio-religious affiliation, and the physical movement of people over multiple generations. The diffusion of Islamic ideologies to Madagascar was not realized according to a uniform Islamization pathway, nor was the development of member communities constrained within a single moment in time, as told in Antalaotra and Zafiraminia foundational biographies. Recent archaeological investigations at the Islamic town of Kingany in Madagascar’s northwest help clarify the trajectories of said ideological transmission and elaborate on underlying Islamizing mechanisms pertinent to the Mozambique Channel in this period. PubDate: 2023-03-31 DOI: 10.1558/jia.25865 Issue No:Vol. 9, No. 2 (2023)
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Authors:Corisande Fenwick Pages: 199– - 199– Abstract: North Africa (west of Egypt) is a compelling locale to explore how and when a Muslim minority became the Muslim majority. Previous scholarly approaches to medieval religious change rely almost exclusively on much later written sources, and as a result, little is understood about the religious landscape in which believers operated in. This article examines critically the material evidence for mosque construction and church abandonment and proposes certain tipping points in the process by which Islam become the dominant religion. While mosque construction reveals more about state and elite religious investment than the believers who may have used them, other forms of evidence, including funerary evidence, dietary practices and inscribed material culture, occasionally give us an intimate glimpse into the practices of simple believers. The evidence shows that the chronology of religious change differs between those regions under Byzantine rule (eastern Algeria, Tunisia, coastal Libya), and those ruled by Berber chiefdoms in late antiquity. Much of the latter converted in the 8th century, whereas the late 9th century marks the mass conversion of town dwellers from the Byzantine core and a first period of crisis for Christianity. This early conversion was an important factor in the collapse of the caliphate in North Africa and the emergence of successor states that used Islam as the main idiom through which to establish and legitimize their right to rule. PubDate: 2023-03-31 DOI: 10.1558/jia.25866 Issue No:Vol. 9, No. 2 (2023)
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Authors:Kevin C MacDonald Pages: 227– - 227– Abstract: Islamization in Mande West Africa gradually accompanied the expansion of mercantile groups and was surprisingly accommodating via syncretic processes with local spiritual traditions. Elites of the Empire of Mali were amongst the first to embrace Islam and mediate between it and indigenous earth religions. Yet this process was patchy across different cultural sectors and from the seventeenth century onwards there were upswellings of Bamanaya, earth religions, in open conflict with waves of Islamic jihadism (e.g. the Umarian movement). Thus, historic polities could retain both mosques and non-Islamic shrines, and maraboutic practices incorporated forms of local magic. This article considers results from “Project Segou”: historical and archaeological fieldwork undertaken between 2005 and 2013 in the Segou region of Mali, stretching approximately from Sinsanni in the east to Nyamina in the west. As a heartland of the Empire of Mali (c. AD 1235–1500) and the core of Bamana Segou (c. AD 1700–1861), its oral and archaeological sources inform our deep time appreciation of ideological and spiritual change at the margins of the Middle Niger from the thirteenth through nineteenth centuries AD. PubDate: 2023-03-31 DOI: 10.1558/jia.25867 Issue No:Vol. 9, No. 2 (2023)
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Authors:Hagit Nol Pages: 249– - 249– Abstract: Seeking Transparency: Rock Crystals across the Medieval Mediterranean, edited by Cynthia Hahn and Avinoam Shalem. Mann Verlag 2020. 334pp., 36 pl., index. Hardback €49. ISBN-13: 9783786128434. PubDate: 2023-03-31 DOI: 10.1558/jia.25919 Issue No:Vol. 9, No. 2 (2023)
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Authors:Hagit Nol Pages: 252– - 252– Abstract: The Umayyad Mosque of Damascus. Art, Faith and Empire in Early Islam, by Alain George. Gingko 2021. Gingko Library Art Series. 260pp., 165 ill. Hardback 60£. ISBN0-13: 9781909942455. PubDate: 2023-03-31 DOI: 10.1558/jia.25920 Issue No:Vol. 9, No. 2 (2023)
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