In the century following the Prophet Muhammad’s death, Islam spread rapidly from the Arabian peninsula across North Africa and Asia, where new Muslim populations played a central role in transforming the political and cultural landscape of the conquered territories. Scholarship has emphasized the interconnected web of political, administrative, economic and artistic developments that shaped this revolution. However, the contribution of literature to this process has received comparatively little attention. Across the pre-modern Muslim world, landscapes were inscribed with stories.
The conference ‘Literary Topographies: Storied Landscapes of the Premodern Muslim World c.650-1650 CE ’ seeks to investigate placemaking as a literary phenomenon across the Dar al-Islam, from the shores of the Atlantic in the West to the mountains of Sindh in the East. Rather than treating landscape as a passive backdrop to the contours of history, we seek to understand how places emerged as narrative touchstones which were subject to layers of storytelling and memory. Our focus is not on landscape as a product of materiality but rather on the narrative traditions which forged the ‘cultural biography’ of a place. With this in mind, we invite contributions that examine how texts transformed human-made and natural landscapes into living archives of memory and historical perception.
A broad array of narrative traditions conferred meaning, memory and historical significance onto cities, forts, battlefields, shrines, cemeteries, ruins, rivers, deserts and mountains, amongst others. Places were ‘made’ through the stories told about them; accounts of saintly mirabilia and miracula, conquest narratives, supernatural legends, genealogies, poetry and historiography imbued the landscape with a deliberately Islamic syntax of meaning. Over time, these literary topographies developed into integral mechanisms through which communities imagined the past, displayed common identities, and located themselves within the broader framework of historical and sacred geography. Rather than reading texts for their positivistic historical value, this conference seeks to investigate how literary forms, narrative structures, and textual inventions transformed landscapes into sites of historical memory and evocative symbols of belonging.
Papers may engage with one or more of the following themes:
1) How did literary topographies shape local identities?
2) How were ancient civilizations remembered in the storied landscapes of the Muslim world?
3) How did dynastic aims and political patronage influence the representation of different places in geographical and historiographical writing?
4) Can we discern transregional storytelling motifs that characterize Islamicate geographical literature?
5) How did storied landscapes articulate claims to power, ancestry or holiness?
6) How did local and transregional geographies interact?
Papers may draw from a variety of limited sources in any of the languages current at the time. These include, but are not limited to: hagiographies, biographies, chronicles, Faḍāʾil literature, epic and romance literature,poetry, geographies and religious literature.
We welcome submissions from leading and junior scholars, advanced graduate students, and independent researchers. The organizers are committed to gathering a diverse group of presenters and will do their best to give more visibility to the work of scholars from traditionally underrepresented groups in academia, including but not limited to junior scholars.
Please send your abstract of ca. 300 words by the deadline of 16th November 2026 to: f.c.lindo-dunn@hum.leidenuniv.nl
Details
- The conference takes place in Tunis, in October 25-27 2027.
- Papers will be 20 mins with 20 for Q&A.
- The papers are to be published in a collected volume.
- Travel and accommodation with be provided by the University of Leiden.
