Landscapes of the Islamic World

The aim of this volume, summed up in the concluding remarks by Alan Walmsley, is to highlight the importance of looking at the entirety of rural landscapes—not just the sites with tangible remains but also the wide spaces in between. By doing so, what was considered barren becomes visible. For the world of Islam, such a perspective is crucial, given the perceived importance of the desert and of transhumant societies in Islamic history. But it is also a task that is beyond any one discipline. The texts available to historians have a marked urban bias, and ethnography distorts the past. It is therefore the archaeologists who are taking the lead, as they do in this volume, edited by Stephen McPhillips and Paul D. Wordsworth, which contains a series of case-studies focusing on small settlements and agricultural and transhumant communities from the Islamic Middle East in the medieval and the early modern periods

Archaeology · Art · Desert (philosophy · Ethnography · Human settlement · Islam · Middle East · Perspective (graphical · Political science · Sociology · Anthropology · Archaeology and Historical Studies · Global Maritime and Colonial Histories · History · Islamic Studies and History · Law