Karen Pinto

In God's Eyes: The Sacrality of the Seas in the Islamic Cartographic Vision

Abstract In keeping with the theme of this issue, this article focuses on the sacrality embedded in the depiction of the seas in the medieval Islamic KMMS mapping tradition. Teasing apart the depictions, this article analyses the sacred dimensions of the fives seas that make up the classical KMMS image of the world: Baḥr al-Muḥīṭ (the Encircling Ocean), the Baḥr Fāris (Persian Gulf-Indian Ocean-Red Sea), Baḥr al-Rūm (the Mediterranean), Baḥr al-Khazar (Caspian Sea),and Buḥayrat Khwārizm (Aral Sea).

A Review of “American Sheikhs: Two Families, Four Generations, and the Story of America's Influence in the Middle East”

logic of the patterns that the particulars may form” (25). Moving from critiquing current practice to modeling what a historically problematized approach might yield, Miller argues that, whereas Davis and the historians laboring in his long shadow envisioned slavery as an institution persisting from classical to early modern times and differing primarily in the racial aspect of its Atlantic World iteration, they should, rather. focus on the “radical discontinuities of slaving in the Atlantic, and not in terms of race but in the unfettered commercialization and consequently expanding public sphere of law and contract” (71). For Miller, problematizing slavery ultimately rests on moving beyond the “pervasive temptation of this ahistorical ideologic, which has thus overwhelmed all historical aspects of the subject” by moving toward “telling the story in terms of selective originary (or ideologically claimed!) continuities from Europe, whether Roman legal formulations, or sugar, or, once we include Africa in the historical dynamics of the Atlantic, in the form of the African cultural practices of the enslaved” (129). For a work focused on so broad and fundamental a critique of an entire subdiscipline of history, Miller spends very little space demonstrating just how pervasive the problem of historians’ succumbing to this temptation has been. His solution to the problem of slavery as history is quite sophisticated, and the prose dense, but specialists in the field will ultimately find their labors in reading the book rewarding.

The Maps Are the Message: Mehmet II's Patronage of an ‘Ottoman Cluster’

ABSTRACT Maps were the coincidental locus of the Ottoman Sultan Mehmet IIs most passionate interests: war and art. So far, the focus has been upon the famed conqueror (Fâtih) of Constantinoples interest in, and demand for, European maps without mention of his patronage of classical Islamic cartographic material. In this article, I expand the perspective on Mehmets cartographical milieu by inserting into the historical picture consideration of a recension of cartographically illustrated manuscripts, those of al-Istakhris Kitab al-Masalik wa-al-Mamalik [Book of Roads and Kingdoms], dating from 1474 onwards and made in post-conquest Ottoman Constantinople. I also set out the circumstances under which this ‘cluster’ of manuscripts may have been copied and, by focusing on the world maps in particular, suggest ways in which the maps can be interpreted as cultural artefacts. I conclude by indicating how this particular group of manuscripts provides insights into map audience, patronage and propaganda in fifteenth-century Anatolia.

Trans-medieval geographic anxieties

This commentary is a response to Keith Lilley’s (2011) article from the perspective of a former student of geography, now historian of medieval Islamic history and Islamic cartography. It takes into consideration the impact of spatial and visual turns and trans-disciplinary concerns. It suggests that air-tight disciplinary categories no longer exist, and reinforces Lilley’s concern that geographers should take more of an interest in their medieval past.