In this conference, we seek to explore how particular ruins were interpreted, described, memorialised and utilised in the Islamic period, from 622-1800 – i.e. from the dawn of Islam to the onset of the philological and archaeological discoveries in the nineteenth century. The purpose of our conference is to explore how Muslims interacted with the remains of pre-Islamic history present in their contemporary landscapes, and how the physical ruins of the pre-Islamic past were visualised, imagined and put to use in historical, theological and other literary contexts, and in material formats too.
The guiding purpose of this enquiry is not to weigh the relative accuracy of Muslim reconstructions of the pre-Islamic past, but rather to interrogate the functions of how Muslims chose to interpret it. At this juncture in scholarship, it is imperative to open our enquiries onto the panoply of different approaches to the pre-Islamic past across the different regions, eras and cultural contexts encompassed in the notion of ‘Muslim World’, and the conference’s approach by which each paper will present one case study of a particular physical ruin aims to ground enquiry within a specific landscape and thereby uncover the variety of approaches to ruins and the idea of the past in distinct times, locales, and discursive contexts.
Understanding Ruins
The states and cultures of the Muslim world are built upon the lands of many and diverse prior civilisations, and the presence of the ruins of those past peoples have been a mainstay in the physical reality and landscape of Muslim cultures since the dawn of Islam. Many contemplated the ruins and pondered the history of those past peoples, but the actual history of the pre-Islamic past remained rather obscured since the ancient languages were no longer known by the Muslim era, inscriptions were thus largely indecipherable, and archaeological approaches of empirical reconstruction of the past did not drive most excavations. New approaches for the empirical exploration of the ancient past began taking shape in the nineteenth century via philological and archaeological methods, but prior to time, the ruins of the past still had meaning – even if formed in the imagination – and this conference seeks to explore how specific ancient sites in the landscape of the Middle East acquired meaning.
Important scholarship has opened the topic of the interpretation of ruins in Muslim cultures via typologies of literary depictions of ruins, via exploration of premodern interactions with inscriptions, and via the framework of wider Muslim approaches to the idea of the past and considerations of how pre-Islamic civilisations interacted with the concept of al-Jāhiliyya. This conference seeks to build upon the scholarship, directing emphasis to the materiality of specific case studies.
Conference Programme:
14–16 September
Monday, 14 September
| Time | Session |
| 10:00-10:20 | Welcome and Opening Remark by team/organisers |
| 10:20-11:05 | Jelle Bruning – The Serapeum of Alexandria in Medieval Muslim Literature |
| 11:05-11:50 | Bilha Moor – The Perception of Ancient Egyptian Ruins in Illustrated Islamic Cosmographies of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries |
| Lunch | 11:50-13:00 |
| 13:00-13:45 | Dr Peter Webb – Don’t Visit the Ruins: Antiquities and Taboo Spaces in Early Muslim-era Arabia |
| 13:45-14:30 | Zahra Mohagheghian – From Ruin to Demoness: The Discursive Reconstruction of al-ʿUzzā’s Destruction in Early Islamic Historiography |
| 14:30-14:55 | Coffee |
| 14:10-14:50 | Mohammed Benabbes – The Ruins of Great Ancient Towns and the Parable of the Unjust Cities in Medieval Arabic Literature : The case of North Africa |
| 14:50-15:10 | Coffee Break |
| 15:10 onwards | Pop-up Exhibition: Ruins of West Asia and North Africa through literary and visual cultures. |
Tuesday 15 September
| Time | Session |
| 10:00-10:45 | Sümeyra Ocak Ahmed – From the Ancient Temples to the Mosque: The Journey of the Spolia Between Sacred Places in Anatolia: The Case of the İsa Bey Mosque in Selçuk |
| 10:45-11:30 | Daniel Watling – Inverting Jerusalem: Islamic Antiquarianism and Maimonides’s Guide of the Perplexed |
| 11:30-11:50 | Coffee Break |
| 11:50-12:35 | Katarína Mokránová – Rest in Pieces: On the Convergence of the Ruined and Mortuary Spaces in Early Islamic Egypt |
| 12:35-14:00 | Lunch |
| 14:00-14:45 | Finn Lindo-Dunn – The Face of Shirin: Seeing Sassanid ruins in Classical Arabic Geography |
| 14:45-15:30 | Imar Koutchoukali – Grave encounters – socio-political aspects of al-Hamdānī’s qubūriyyāt |
Wednesday, 16 September
| Time | Session |
| 10:00-10:45 | Ayşe Kara – Standing among the Ruins of Ifrīqiyyā: Remembering North African Cities in Maghribi Travel Writing (13th–16th Centuries) |
| 10:45-11:30 | Hanene Ben Slimen – the material treasures of Antiquity and their perception in medieval Arabic writings : Treasure Hunting and Historical Memory |
| 11:30-12:00 | Coffee |
| 12:00-13:00 | Final Discussion |