Sea of the caliphs : the Mediterranean in the medieval Islamic world /

"How could I allow my soldiers to sail on this disloyal and cruel sea?” These words, attributed to the most powerful caliph of medieval Islam, Umar Ibn al-Khattab (634-644), have led to a misunderstanding in the West about the importance of the Mediterranean to early Islam. This body of water,...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Author: Picard, Christophe (Author)
Format: Book
Language:English
Published: Cambridge, Massachusetts : Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2018.
Subjects:
Table of Contents:
  • Introduction: The end of the Noorish and Saracen pirate?
  • Part I. The Arab Mediterranean between representation and appropriation: The Arab discovery of the Mediterranean
  • Arab writing on the conquest of the Mediterranean
  • The silences of the sea: the Abbasid jihad
  • The geographers' Mediterranean
  • Muslim centers of the western Mediterranean: Islam without the Abbasids
  • The Mediterranean of the Western caliphs
  • The western Mediterranean: last bastion of Islam's maritime ambitions
  • Part II. Mediterranean strategies of the caliphs: The Mediterranean of the two empires
  • Controlling the Mediterranean: the Abbasid model
  • The maritime awakening of the Muslim West
  • The maritime imperialism of the caliphs in the tenth century: the end of jihad?
  • Islam's maritime sovereignty in the face of Latin expansion
  • Conclusion: The medieval Mediterranean and Islamic memory.