Speakers

In the year 1064, in a campaign described by historians as a proto-crusade, a Christian coalition conquered the city of Barbastro, an Islamic frontier stronghold in the north of the Iberian Peninsula. In Ibn Hayyan's account of this event, the chronicler stated that when the news of this defeat reached Cordoba, the entire Andalusian territory trembled. A few decades later, in 1153, an earthquake shocked Syria. The Egyptian Ibn Ruzzik linked this disaster with the loss of Jerusalem to the Crusaders, thus interpreting it in terms of divine punishment. In this contribution, I will first approach how territorial loss processes and the feelings and traumas they generate are represented in the sources through the appeal to natural disasters, whether real or imagined. Likewise, I will study how the natural environment serves to generate emotions and articulate them. In this sense, I will show how the description of the landscape of al-Andalus, idealized, is one of the most common means to represent the loss of this territory and the feelings of belonging to it that it provoked. Although the main focus will be the Islamic West, the analysis will be made from a Mediterranean perspective, comparing Andalusian and Maghrebi cases with Eastern ones.

How did the people of the Arabian Peninsula experience the Little Ice Age (LIA)? How did they articulate climatological and environmental changes? The Arabian Peninsula experienced the LIA in the Early Modern Period through a series of challenges, including invasions (Portuguese, Ottoman, Persian), droughts, famines, wars, millenarian movements, natural disasters, and epidemics. Arabian astrologers articulated these climatological, environmental, and political changes through various forms of documentation, such as treatises on the occult sciences, popular prognostication texts, hagiographies, poems, and historical chronicles. In this paper, I draw on these often-overlooked sources that provide valuable insights into how Arabians perceived and cosmologically intertwined astral movements, climatological and ecological changes, and political developments across confessional lines in Oman and Yemen. In these Indian Ocean-facing regions, different empires and dynasties based their legitimacy on cosmological grounds, interpreting the movements of celestial bodies and environmental changes as signs of cosmic significance and earthly consequences. For example, the Yaʿrubī Empire in Oman (1624-1749) framed its mandate to rule as a manifestation of divine providence expressed through astrological and environmental phenomena. During the Maunder Minimum (1645–1715), the Yaʿrubī Empire reached its peak, expelling Portuguese forces from Oman and expanding its naval presence toward South Asia, East Africa, and the Persian Gulf. Omanis interpreted these events as divinely ordained, heralded by celestial omens, and supported by both natural and supernatural forces. By examining Arabian sources, I showcase how both Omanis and Yemenis used occultist idioms at both popular and elite levels to express their concerns and observations about climate, environmental, and political changes.

In Islamic ethics, particularly the hadith compilations, drought, or qaḥṭ, is extensively recorded. However, not much research has been done on this subject in contemporary scholarship. This paper proposes to investigate the hadith literature primarily in order to close this gap. Our methodology entails determining the explanations offered by medieval Islamic ethics for drought, the responses of political and religious authorities to drought, including the Prophet's instructions, what actions or behaviors they advocated to overcome it, and the effects of drought on Muslim communities. Drawing on sources from traditional Sunni hadith compilations, this article aims to offer the most comprehensive description of how Islamic ethics address drought. It is argued here that Islamic ethics link drought to political, social, and religious corruption, combining the natural and the moral in a single perspective, even though endorsed practical solutions can be distinguished from religious ones in real life.

Arabic sources from the Abbasid era mention episodes of particularly severe or unexpected cold. These textual passages have often been linked with social and political upheavals, sparking robust debates about the impact of climatic fluctuations on human history in general and Islamic polities in particular. In this contribution, I intend to closely examine a specific passage where the author explicitly links adverse climatic events to socio-political unrest: the Mosul rebellion in the spring of 260/873 against the lieutenant of the governor recently appointed by the Caliph. This passage appears in the works of three authors: al-Azdī (d. 334/945-6), Ibn al-Aṯīr (d. 630/1233), and al-Nuwayrī (d. 733/1333), with the earliest two authors being natives of Mosul, while other sources confirm the bad agricultural year in the Mesopotamian region. These simple yet significant accounts illustrate how climatic and environmental factors can intersect with human history, potentially influencing it in conjunction with purely social dynamics. In this specific case, as noted by the Arab authors, there was late and intense cold, or possibly a frost, in 260/873. This report, moreover, may be read in conjunction with available textual and dendrological evidence of significant climatic fluctuations in European regions, the Western Islamic world, and present-day western China, and the possibility of 873 CE as an outlier year should be considered. In Mosul, the environmental factor collided with the social and political setting. There was pre-existing discontent towards increasingly early taxation due to the lack of an intercalation system in the fiscal calendar then in use, which was based on the Iranian calendar, and towards impositions from the capital, which had become increasingly disconnected from the important agricultural region of Jazīra, now northern Iraq. The first of these two elements is particularly interesting, given that the issue of the fiscal year opening increasingly earlier compared to the solar seasons, and thus to the maturation of crops, is found in other sources not directly connected with the event in question. It will be from Mosul itself, ultimately, that the calendar will be reformed to correct this state of affairs and connect it to a well-established understanding of seasonality in relation to agriculture. The second element is the factor that allows this revolt, born of intense but short-lived adversity, to become a key piece in a larger picture of political weakening and instability in the Mesopotamian regions of the empire.

Creating a digitized corpus is inherently a complex undertaking, which involves significant challenges in methodology and resource acquisition. Generally speaking, the process of corpus construction entails different key steps: i) the selection of an encoding language; ii) the identification of relevant sources; iii) the compilation of the corpus; and iv) the annotation of the text. The Disasters Corpus in Classical Arabic Sources (DiCCAS) has been conceived as an inclusive resource, encompassing a diverse range of materials, including the Qurʾān, Saḥīḥ al-Buḫārī, Saḥīḥ Muslim, as well as several significant historical works, such as al-Ṭabarī’s Kitāb Tārīḫ al-Rasūl wa-l-Mulūk, Ibn Taġrībirdī’s Kitāb al-Nuǧūm al-Zāhira fī Mulūk Miṣr wa al-Qāhira, Ibn Ḥajar al-ʿAsqalānī’s Baḏl al-Maʿūn fī Faṣl al-Ṭāʿūn, and al-Maqrīzī’s al-Sulūk li-Maʿrifa Duʿal al-Mulūk. The corpus also incorporates ādab texts by al-Jāhiz, notably his Rasāʾil. In fact, the PRIN project the DiCCAS is employed within, “Environmental Anomalies & Political Legitimacy in Global Eurasia, 12th-14th century", investigates the profound link between politics and power strategies used in response to disaster events, requiring the careful selection of pertinent passages from the sources and the annotation of various disaster typologies. While the breadth of this corpus is essential for fulfilling the project’s objectives, it presents a formidable challenge for the digital humanist whose job is developing a structure capable of accommodating a variety of textual types and their respective idiosyncrasies. In this regard, this presentation will consider the adoption of TEI (Text Encoding Initiative) as the optimal encoding language for the project scopes due to its inherent flexibility and adaptability. This contribution seeks to outline the methodological hurdles encountered in the creation of a historical corpus and explore the potential for integrating contemporary technological tools with classical sources. In doing so, it aims to assess how these tools can facilitate the comparative analysis of multiple sources, allowing researchers to understand the political and power strategies employed following disaster events.

“Hail to thee, O Nile, who came out of the earth, who came to make Egypt live!”. This is the Proem of an ancient hymn dedicated to god Hapy: the embodiment of the fertility of the flooding of the river Nile (to be distinguished from a personification of the river itself), and it was probably framed by a member of the priestly clergy of ancient Egypt; it is thus shown that since pre- Roman times, the annual floods of the Nile were of great relevance in decreeing the wealth of this land. This connection, therefore, played an important role when, following the Arab conquest and the advent of Islamic rule, Egypt and the Nile found themselves inseparably linked again in securing strategic importance both economically and militarily in the confrontation with the Christian world during the Levant Crusades, specifically. The possibility, therefore, that someone or something was able to block or divert the course of this river is attributed to the emergence of a narrative whose primary source is difficult to identify. Late-medieval European sources, from the 13th century onward and only partly related to the famous myth of the Priest John (Gianni), attribute this power to the Christian emperors of Ethiopia, both in the Zagwe (1137-1270) and post-Solomonic dynasties (1270 to contemporary age). This study, however, aims to delve deeper into the role and existence of Islamic sources (10-14th centuries) that, related to periods of drought, "created" or "favored" the avowal of the idea that Ethiopia, geographically and politically, was involved in this process. What tradition, or set of traditions, lies at the basis of this singular power? Can Ethiopia give life or death to Egypt, causing excessive floods or prolonged periods of drought? In fact, if the success of this narrative in Europe continued until the end of the 16th century, for obvious military and strategic reasons, al-Maqrizi (1364-1442), already between the 14th and 15th centuries, no longer seemed to pay effective attention to these rumors.

Ibn al-Wardī’s (d. 1349) Treatise on the Report of the Plague has been known and used by scholars ever since Michael Dols’ translation in 1974 in a festschrift volume devoted to the historian of numismatics, George C. Miles. Unfortunately, it has been treated as a factual report of the plague, rather than a maqāma, a literary genre in its own right, best understood as “narrative prose fiction,” as explained by Maurice Pomerantz and Jonathan Decter in the 2022 special issue on the maqāma for the Intellectual History of the Islamicate World. In this talk, I will try to understand Ibn al-Wardī’s text from the perspective of the maqāma genre, in light of at least two other maqāmas composed at the same time: one by Ibn Abī Ḥajala (d. 1375) and the other by al-Ṣafadī (d. 1363). How does the traveling nature of the plague in these maqāmas fit within the fictitious travel to real places in the maqāmas of earlier twelfth century scholars? How do we understand the engagement with religious norms in these fourteenth century maqāmas within the context of this genre? Were these new maqāmas broadening the horizon of the genre or staying within its confines? And what can we learn about the intended impact on a contemporary reader, living through the plague, of these maqāmas, when we consider them as a whole (especially since all three are collated together by Ibn Abī Ḥajala in his own work, along with some other poetry)? Finally, what information can historians draw from these texts about the fourteenth century outbreaks, and what information should they treat more sceptically once we understand these works to be maqāmas?

The ubiquity of occultism in premodern Islamic societies has long inspired colonialist-Orientalist Christian polemics against Islam as Neopagan corruption of Abrahamic-Hellenic monotheism. And in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, western European, Russian, and American colonial operatives damned Islamic societies as irredeemably animistic, even shamanistic, and so fit only for industrial destruction. Weirdly enough, some early modern British scholars went so far as to associate Iran, in particular, with Druidry. But all agree: Islamic Magic is suspiciously, damnably Earthy. I here take seriously this Christian-colonialist paganism-animism-shamanism-druidism continuum as a decolonial key: what if we reverse-colonize it by speaking of Islamic occultism in terms of Earth Magic? This paper, therefore, opens with representative case studies of three especially Earthy occult sciences: alchemy, agriculture, and geomancy, the very etymology of whose names is rooted in soil, seed, and land. But per the Hermetic and Platonic, Mesopotamian and Egyptian, Iranian and Indic, and hence “pagan” framework on which much of premodern Islamic occultism is indeed explicitly predicated, Earth can never be divorced from Heaven if we wish to begin to understand, much less harness, the cosmic whole. Both meteorology and medicine are occult sciences, too, and astrology empirically proves the terrestrial human and nonhuman environment to be subject to perpetual celestial cycling. This “cyclicist consciousness” was embodied in what I call the Occult-Scientific Revolution: an Islamic imperial-technological response not just to the traumatic political transformations of the Mongol Conquest but to the climatic and ecological ones that drove it and it helped drive it, in turn, from the Big Chill to the Black Death, whereby weather, land, crop and disease manipulation became prominent components of bestselling early modern Arabo-Persian grimoires. Resonantly animistic-shamanic-druidic, such “Islamic Neopagan Earth Magic”—simultaneously a violently colonialist-Orientalist construct yet ethically weirdly true—is a wonderfully revealing window onto premodern ecological transformations and their human scientific-political responses, and so a handy talisman for our present moment too.

In Persian epic poetry, the killing of the dragon by a king or hero, the king's champion, is implicitly and sometimes explicitly linked to the legitimisation of kingship since the malevolent beast obstructs the flow of vital resources such as water sources and rivers, causing drought and famine. In fact, one of the most important aspects of the political art of Persian rulers, whether legendary or historical, in the pre-Islamic and Islamic periods has always been to ensure a prosperous reign, and in this sense, Persian authors systematically associate good governance with prosperity and the flourishing of the fields, ultimately with the abundance of water. It is no coincidence that the Persian adjective ābād (‘prosperous’) contains the component āb, i.e. ‘water,’ and the noun ābādì (‘village/oasis/populated centre’) is directly related to the presence of settlements near rivers or water sources, ensuring a prosperous sedentary civilisation. The figure of the dragon, as an imaginary animal, is also analysed for its symbolic values so that the field of investigation is mainly mythological rather than historical. Consequently, the mythological-religious background of the demonic figure of the dragon (aždahā) will be examined first in pre-Islamic Persia and then in the medieval Persian epics of the 11th-14th centuries.

The religion of Ancient Iran (Mazdeism or Zoroastrianism) is particularly concerned with the care for life (human life, animal life, vegetal life) and for the environment together with its basic elements (such as earth, water, fire, air) that must be preserved from pollution. The reason why is a general perception of a rivalry between the Good and the Evil in terms of Life against non-life (i.e., Death) and Cleanliness against Contamination. According to the language of a dualistic religion, it also entails a strong opposition between the Gods and the Demons who threaten human life with sickness, famine, pollution, decay, and death. Then, the environment is the natural place for human life (childbirth), agriculture, the growth of plants, and livestock farming. Furthermore, even the concept of ‘sacred’ is understood by the notion of ‘growth,’ ‘increase,’ and ‘expansion’, matching the conception of life as development, safety, and healing against non-life. For this reason, the Iranian culture is very awake and reactive against any physical danger to life and against metaphysical risks of devilish origin, too: this explains the religious imagery within texts recording a battle against demons to preserve the environment and also to consider any natural phenomena as a sign of supernatural revelation and communication of a particular message. Earthquakes, plagues, famines, tempests, comets, and eclipses are thus envisaged as omina coming to display specific information about the destiny of the world, the meaning of history, human life, and its socio-political institutions. These supernatural signs of communication also are the omens of ghosts and terrors for the maintenance of life, for the possible end of history and society by means of natural catastrophes mixed with enemy events (wars, invasions, destructions). The cultural outcomes of this situation of crisis, because of psychological apprehensions, social fears, and yearning for salvation, are peculiarly represented by the Zoroastrian religious apocalyptical texts evoking these dramatic moods.

In his theodicy, unlike the Avicennian Arab philosophers, al-Ghazālī (d. 505/1111) considers natural disasters as manifestations of divine will, part of a higher design that illustrates God's sovereignty and humanity's inherent fragility. Far from being mere calamities, these events are ordained by God for pedagogical purposes designed to purify men's souls and hearts, encourage solidarity among them, and rekindle their faith. Although their comprehension eludes immediate human logic, thus posing a heuristic challenge, al-Ghazālī nevertheless incorporates these phenomena into his theodicy. However, there is another form of catastrophe, which disrupts the social and environmental life of the human community (umma) and is directly attributable to human intentions and actions. While man has no immediate control over natural disasters, it is up to him to avoid those resulting from his behavior. For al-Ghazālī, creation is not only a place where divine revelation manifests itself through the wonders it conceals, nor a mere place of retreat to God under the effects of the fear that disasters arouse in human souls. Creation is also a space requiring a revision of ethical behavior through the indispensable practice of asceticism (zuhd). This paper will highlight how al-Ghazālī's theodicy is marked by a twofold movement, where God's sovereignty and human responsibility come together: while natural disasters are a call to human beings to abandon themselves entirely to God (tawakkul), faith, associated with the conversion of heart, implies an attitude of asceticism towards the whole of creation. This asceticism manifests itself in multiple forms, enabling not only a return to God but also opening up to an altruistic vision of human relations, transcending all kinds of egoism. Following the teaching of al-Ghazālī, we will show how ascetic conversion is an instrument of human freedom to mitigate, or even suspend, natural disasters.

The COVID-19 pandemic, which peaked around the world in mid-2020, has seen not only conspiracist but also religious discourse of an eschatological and apocalyptic kind develops on social networks. The two are sometimes intertwined, borrowing from social, moral, religious, and political registers. In the predominantly Muslim world and Europe, clerics reacted in various ways to the spread of the virus, first and foremost by addressing their followers to inspire them with a method to follow, generally drawn from the teachings of a confident Islam. After a brief look at the global context of 2020, this paper will focus on two main points: on the one hand, the texts of Tradition (Koran and Sunna) that implicitly or explicitly refer to eschatology and apocalypse, and on the other, more specifically, the discourses of a number of contemporary Muslim religious figures with a worldwide aura who are interested in these two themes, and who took positions on the pandemic precisely by mobilizing words from the Islamic textual heritage to do so.