Land, space, power: Landscapes of the early caliphate

A new VICI Project led by Dr. Petra Sijpesteijn. More information on the PhD and postdoc postiions will be published soon

 The great Arab-Islamic conquests of the 7th century CE set in motion transformations that fundamentally changed the social and cultural fabric of the Middle East, bedding in a package of systems, structures and ideas that continue to characterise the region to this day. How the Arab-Islamic project was able to remake centuries of deeply rooted custom and practice and why it has proved so enduring is one of the defining questions of early Islamic history. Attempts to address this question though have been hampered by the limitations inherent in the sources and the ways in which the discipline is organised. The result is that we know what happened, but we are no closer to understanding why.

 To overcome these limitations LAND, SPACE, POWER offers a powerful new approach, looking at the multidimensional dynamics of place-making and the ways by which Arab-Islamic society organised its understanding of the environments in which it operated. 
The project contends that the Arab-Islamic system achieved a remarkably comprehensive and widely accepted understanding of space that invested its places, landscapes and environments with a specifically Arab-Islamic meaning.  To do this the project goes beyond conventional sources, using archaeology, epigraphy, history, papyrology, literature and geography to look at how the Islamic system interacted with its physical and spatial context and how the patternings of trade, transport, land tenure, religious observance, social practice, and infrastructure combined to organise the physical environment and, in turn, shape the parameters according to which lives were lived and daily choices made.  A key tenet of the project is that this process was dialogical process enacted across different regions that, by mediating between messages from the centre and incremental grass-roots decision-making, created Islamic places and gave form and meaning to the Islamic experience.