Re-framing the Near East in the Tenth Century

On Thursday 20th February, the Oxford University Byzantine Society and the Oxford Medieval Society hosted their first joint meeting. We were particularly pleased to see that the biggest audience the Medieval Society had seen for twenty years gathered to hear papers from Prof. Garth Fowden and Prof. Hugh Kennedy. The aim of the event was to broaden the views of both Byzantinists and Medievalists by looking at the history of the Near East in the tenth century. Garth is the Sultan Qaboos Professor of Abrahamic Faiths at Cambridge, so his work encompasses the intellectual and social history of Byzantium, Rabbinic Judaism, and Islam. Hugh is the Professor of Arabic at SOAS and has spent part of this year as a visiting fellow at All Souls, where he has been working on a comparative project on the 'Late Antique' Abbasid state of the tenth century. Garth and Hugh introduced us to their comparative perspectives, and demonstrated how Medievalists and Byzantinists alike could benefit from such approaches.

Garth opened the event by explaining how we need to reframe some of our assumptions about interactions between cultures. Medievalists and Byzantinists alike have often fallen into the trap of assuming that the heritage of ancient Greece and Rome was valued primarily within the Christian cultures that took root in the geographical centres of these empires. We often view the Arabic preservation of ancient philosophy as an interlude before the translation of such texts into Latin in the twelfth century. But Garth explained that the scholarly culture that grew around ancient Greek philosophy in the tenth century, particularly in Baghdad, produced a flourishing and cosmopolitan intellectual community. The doctrinal outlooks of Jewish, Muslim, and Christian scholars were subsumed by their desire to debate in Aristotelian terms. Likewise, our tendency to look at religious groups in isolation from one another obscures the complex ways in which scholars expressed awareness of the cultures of religions other than their own. The demarcation between the faiths was certainly a firm community marker, but Garth pointed out that this is not the same as cultural isolation. For example, he explained how the tenth-century Muslim bibliophile Ibn al-Nadim listed the religious books of other faiths, even claiming that a priest had explained the Christian Bible to him. Garth then moved on to explain how our assumptions about chronological frameworks should also be reviewed. Historians often frame their work according to a linear movement from event A to event B, but in a comparative view this might not give space for the full complexity of interacting societies and cultures. Instead, Garth suggests that historians should think of other 'shapes' for their chronologies, such as a broader study pivoting around a key event. This is an approach that Garth has recently employed for his history of the Near East in the first millennium, pivoted around the life of Muhammad.

The importance of reviewing of chronological and geographical boundaries is amply demonstrated by Hugh's work on the Abbasid caliphate of the tenth century. Hugh explained that traditionally, we have thought of antiquity giving way after the sixh century to a period that we might call either 'medieval' or 'Islamic.' This has curtailed comparative studies of the late classical world and periods that followed. Comparative studies could use all sorts of criteria, but Hugh has found the concept of the state to be the most fruitful way of looking at the parallels between the classical, medieval, and Islamic worlds. Hugh explained that in both classical antiquity and the early Abbasid Caliphate, the existence of a state could be seen in three major concepts: the active use of currency; the deployment of governors to provinces, rather than local elites; and the idea of a continuity of the power of an office, even when a ruling figurehead or dynasty was replaced. Looking at these three categories, Hugh found that the Abbasid world experienced the fragmentation of these systems in the tenth century, significantly later than comparable developments in sixth-century Western Europe. Both societies experienced the development of a hoarding mentality towards coinage, the sale of state lands to local lords, and increasing emphasis on the dynastic nature of office. Hugh brought these elements together in a comparative history of Late Antiquity that stretches across the geography of the Mediterranean and across our preconceived assumption about periodisation. Hugh expanded on this research project in his keynote paper at the Leeds International Medieval Congress 2014.

Dr Mark Whittow chaired an active discussion about these two papers. The audience was particularly taken with the potential for further comparative viewpoints, for example whether there is scope to include China and Scandinavia in such projects. Likewise, Garth and Hugh's focus on the tenth century as a period of significant cultural interaction struck a chord with medievalists, as it offers a way of contextualising what their field has often regarded as a time of particular change around 'l'an mille.' We would all like to thank Garth and Hugh for introducing us to such fresh research and new approaches.