Conference Report

Al-ʿUṣūr al-Wusṭā 25 (2017): 141-148

Fo r  t w o  d a y s  i n  t h e  p i c t u r e s q u e Swabian university town of Tübingen, a lively cohort of researchers came 
together for the first international confer-
ence on spatial thought in Islamicate 
societies, 1000-1600 CE. Organized by Kurt 
Franz, Jean-Charles Ducène, and Zayde 
Antrim and funded by the University of 
Tübingen, the École Pratique des Hautes 
É t u d e s  ( E P H E ) — R e s e a r c h  U n i v e r s i t y 
Paris, the Centre national de la recherche 
scientifique (CNRS), and Trinity College 
(Hartford, CT), the conference schedule 
was intense, but also left time for informal, 
if no less vigorous, discussions over walks 
and meals in a variety of attractive local 
venues. What was absolutely clear at the 
end of two days is that a new genera-
tion of scholars is challenging traditional 
approaches to historical geography and 
cartography, uncovering exciting new 
sources, and integrating novel theoretical 
considerations and methodologies into 
their work.

The presentations were organized in 

panels that treated each of the themes 
in the conference subtitle: genre, image, 
and text. Kicking off the conference 
o n  T h u r s d a y  e v e n i n g ,  Z a y d e  A n t r i m 
(Trinity College, Hartford, CT) gave an 
introductory lecture in Tübingen’s historic 
Alte Aula entitled “Spatial Thought and the 
Limitations of Genre.” Antrim questioned 
the dichotomizing effects of conventional 
genre distinctions, such as that between 
mathematical and human geography or 
that between geography and history. 
She also invoked, not for the last time 
during the conference, the foundational 
work of André Miquel and its complicated 
ramifications for the study of spatial 
thought in the period after about 1000 CE. 

On Friday morning, the participants 
gathered in the lofty tower seminar room 
of the Institute of Classical Archaeology in 
Hohentübingen Castle, boasting panoramic 
views of the surrounding countryside. 
Opening the first panel on the theme 
of genre, Emmanuelle Tixier du Mesnil 
(Université Paris X Nanterre La Défense) 

Spatial Thought in Islamicate Societies, 1000-1600:  
The Politics of Genre, Image, and Text 
(Tübingen, 30 March to 1 April 2017)

Zayde Antrim, Jean-Charles Ducène, and Kurt Franz



142  •  Zayde antrim, Jean-Charles duCène, & Kurt FranZ

Al-ʿUṣūr al-Wusṭā 25 (2017)

challenged traditional history of science 
approaches to Islamicate geography that 
amount to a catalog of discoveries (or, 
as she quipped, errors) shorn of social or 
political context. She argued, following 
Miquel, that medieval Arabic geography 
was not merely a vector carrying ancient 
geography to Renaissance Europe, and 
that its significance cannot be properly 
appreciated without understanding the 
social and political context in which 
i t  e m e r g e d .  A s  a  c a s e  i n  p o i n t ,  s h e 
demonstrated the effect of the turbulence 
and fragmentation of eleventh-century 
al-Andalus on the geographical work of 
al-Bakrī (d. 487/1094), who, by turning 
toward the south, was emphasizing its 
importance in his own political context.

While Tixier du Mesnil critiqued the 
way geographical literature has been 
t r e a t e d  a s  a  d e c o n t e x t u a l i z e d  g e n r e 
b y  h i s t o r i a n s  o f  s c i e n c e ,  K u r t  F r a n z 
(Universität Tübingen) introduced a new 
way of reading what might be called a 
“subgenre” of Arabic geography—the 
encyclopedia—exemplified by Yāqūt’s 
thirteenth-century Muʿjam al-buldān. 
Instead of using Yāqūt’s encyclopedia as 
a “quarry” from which to solve problems 
in footnotes, he argued that it should be 
approached as a coherently composed 
work that conveys meanings and opinions. 
Proposing narrative analysis as the best 
way to understand Yāqūt’s project, Franz 
identified geographical micro-narratives 
at the level of individual articles and meta-
textual master narratives that integrate 
the book. Although doing so for the 
entire work brings up problems of scale 
and methodology, Franz demonstrated 
his approach with a subset of Yāqūt’s 
entries for the Arabian Peninsula, Syria, 
and al-Jazīra. His analysis revealed a 

p reoc c u p at ion wit h forg ot t en p laces 
and uninhabited sites in the desert or 
steppe that might be reanimated by a 
“salvage operation” that featured, most 
prominently, poetry. These were not 
spaces shaped by the reach of imperial 
power, but rather by poetic allusions and 
the memory of readers whose knowledge 
of the poetic canon Yāqūt relied upon to 
fill in the blanks in his entries. 

Rounding out the panel, Travis Zadeh 
(Yale University) used the concept of 
wonder, often associated with but not 
confined to the genre of ʿajāʾib literature, 
to interrogate the epistemological basis 
u p o n  w h i c h  W e s t e r n  d i s c o u r s e  h a s 
determined what “qualifies,” drawing 
from Ann Stoler’s work, as “discovery” 
and “curiosity.” Opening his paper with 
the claim made by the Turkish president, 
Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, in 2014, that 
Muslims were the first to discover America, 
Zadeh argued that this represented a 
response to a persistent colonial history in 
which Islamicate society has been deemed 
inward-looking and lacking in curiosity 
about the rest of the world. Instead, he 
proposed the concept of wonder as a 
discursive formation within Islamicate 
societies that made possible a serious 
engagement with the heterogeneity of 
existence, the ever-shifting boundary 
between the known and the unknown, and 
the limits of human capacity. According to 
Zadeh, meditations on wonder presumed 
c u r i o s i t y  t o  b e  a  p o w e r f u l  d r i v e .  I t 
was therefore never a matter of lack 
of curiosity, but of how—or where—to 
channel it. This was one of the purposes of 
spatial thought and geographical writing, 
Zadeh concluded, to establish frontiers as 
relational concepts—not as barriers to the 
unknown, but as historically contingent, 



Al-ʿUṣūr al-Wusṭā 25 (2017)

 Spatial Thought in Islamicate Societies, 1000-1600  •  143

a n d  t h u s  a l w a y s  c h a n g i n g ,  w a y s  o f 
ordering a world defined by its diversity. 

The second panel, on the theme of 
image, was convened after a refreshing 
lunch at Café Ranitzky in the Marketplace 
Square of Tübingen. Yossef Rapoport 
( Q u e e n  M a r y  U n i v e r s i t y  o f  L o n d o n ) 
opened the panel with a paper on mapping 
urban space. He began by noting that 
scholars have frequently dismissed maps 
of cities as rare or ignored them entirely. 
In response, he assembled a sampling 
of maps from manuscripts, such as the 
“Book of Curiosities,” an anonymous 
cosmographical work composed in the 
eleventh century, and Ibn Mujāwir’s 
thirteenth-century account of the Arabian 
Peninsula, to show a recurrent pattern 
i n  t h e  g r a p h i c a l  d e p i c t i o n  o f  c i t i e s . 
According to Rapoport, these images 
focus on protection—walls, harbors—and 
sites of political authority. The rest of the 
urban space is frequently portrayed as 
empty. This offers a contrast to written 
representations of cities and urban life, 
which often emphasize religious structures 
and markets. This paper prompted a 
debate about whether or not such maps 
represent continuity with pre- and extra-
Islamicate depictions of cities, such as the 
Madaba map.

Next, Feray Coşkun (Freie Universität 
B e r l i n )  a d d r e s s e d  w o r l d  m a p s  i n 
manuscripts of the popular sixteenth-
century Ottoman Turkish translation 
o f  I b n  a l - W a r d ī ’ s  f i f t e e n t h - c e n t u r y 
Kharīdat al-ʿajāʾib. With examples from 
a variety of manuscripts, Coşkun argued 
that these world maps are particularly 
revealing of the historical context of 
their copying. For instance, the legendary 
Throne of Iblīs, pictured in East Africa 
in fifteenth-century Arabic manuscripts, 

was moved to northern Europe in one 
of the earliest manuscript copies of the 
Turkish translation, mirroring an Ottoman 
orient at ion t oward  t he nort h as  t he 
land of the unknown or the dangerous. 
Another compelling example came from 
a seventeenth-century manuscript, which 
features an extremely large depiction of 
Constantinople, along with additional 
copyist commentary describing the city 
as the divinely protected center of the 
Caliphate. Coşkun concluded that these 
changing features indicate the flexibility 
of maps, which can be altered in dramatic 
or subtle ways to reflect their historical 
c o n t e x t ,  a n d  h e l p  a c c o u n t  f o r  t h e 
prolonged popularity of the work in the 
Ottoman milieu. Like Rapoport, Coşkun 
s h o w e d  t h a t  m a p s  p r o v i d e  a l t e r n a t e 
venues for promoting conceptions of space 
than written works.

In the third and final paper on image, 
Nadja Danilenko (Freie Universität Berlin) 
analyzed the manuscript tradition of one 
of the most frequently copied cartographic 
texts from the medieval Islamicate world, 
al-Iṣṭakhrī’s “Book of Routes and Realms.” 
Danilenko’s paper made three main points: 
first, that al-Iṣṭakhrī employed a novel 
visualization strategy that stayed relatively 
stable across centuries of manuscript 
copying; second, that al-Iṣṭakhrī’s work 
w a s  t h e  o n l y  t e n t h - c e n t u r y  A r a b i c 
geography translated into both Persian 
and Ottoman Turkish, a fact that reflects 
the cultural efflorescence of the Mongol 
and post-Mongol Persianate world; and 
third, that the continued copying of the 
manuscript up to 1898 was driven by 
many factors but perhaps primarily by 
its aesthetic appeal as a showpiece for 
elites. Danilenko’s research has uncovered 
heretofore unknown manuscripts of this 



144  •  Zayde antrim, Jean-Charles duCène, & Kurt FranZ

Al-ʿUṣūr al-Wusṭā 25 (2017)

work, bringing the total extant copies 
up to 51 (Arabic, Persian, Turkish), a 
major contribution to the field that has 
entailed painstaking archival work on four 
continents. Hers was one of the few papers 
in the conference that addressed the 
materiality of the sources and their role as 
commodities in circulation. 

A long and lively day was capped by 
a visit to the Research Unit for Islamic 
N u m i s m a t i c s  ( F I N T )  h o s t e d  b y  t h e 
Department of Oriental and Islamic Studies 
at the University of Tübingen. There, 
conference participants were treated to 
a presentation by curator Lutz Ilisch on 
coins as sources for historical geography. 
It was a fascinating lesson not only on 
the ways in which distributions of coins 
and mints yield insight into political and 
economic fluctuations, but also on the 
challenges of assembling and maintaining 
such an extensive collection, second only 
to that of St. Petersburg. Afterwards, 
we gathered in Kurt Franz’s office for a 
brief introduction to “eTAVO” (Tübinger 
Atlas des Vorderen Orients), the massive 
geoinformation project under preparation 
he is coordinating, and the alpha version 
o f  t h e  c o m m u n i t y - b u i l d i n g  w e b s i t e 
“Mamâlik: Place and Space in Islamic 
History,” to be launched shortly.

Day two was equally exciting, featuring 
two panels on the theme of text: a poster 
session in which four graduate students 
presented their dissertation work, and an 
energetic and fruitful summary discussion. 
The Saturday morning panel was convened 
by a guest chair, Dana Sajdi (Boston College), 
and opened with a presentation by Stefan 
Heidemann (Universität Hamburg) on a 
digital humanities project that draws from 
ninth- through twelfth-century Arabic 
geographies to map the Abbasid Empire 

“on its own terms.” Focusing on the five 
regions of Ifrīqiya, al-Shām, al-Jazīra, Fārs, 
and Khurāsān, the project’s preliminary 
findings show that the locations included 
in each regional unit varied considerably 
among the geographers under study. This 
suggests that such regions did not function 
as territorially-defined provinces, but were 
rather administrative projections from 
the center without defined territoriality. 
He presented a sampling of maps of 
al-Shām from the project, which use 
translucent polygons to represent each 
of the region’s administrative districts 
(ajnād) superimposed on a Google Earth 
base. This method makes it possible to 
layer different interpretations of the ajnād 
on the same map. It also has an advantage 
over previous attempts to map the Abbasid 
Empire, which have been less successful at 
conveying ambiguity and territoriality at 
the same time. 

T h e  s e c o n d  p a p e r  o f  t h e  m o r n i n g 
on al-Idrīsī’s twelfth-century Nuzhat 
al-mushtāq constituted one of the only 
i n - d e p t h  d i s c u s s i o n s  o f  a n  a u t h o r ’ s 
method for integrating word and image. 
According to Irina Konovalova (Russian 
Academy of Sciences, Moscow), al-Idrīsī 
used route data to organize space, but this 
presented problems, since the singularity 
of each of his sectional maps fragmented 
long-distance itineraries. He managed the 
limitations of his cartographic method 
by taking advantage of the possibilities of 
the written text for toponym repetition 
and intratextual cross-referencing, which 
together allow a reader to keep track of 
itineraries that stretch over more than 
one sectional map. Konovalova also argued 
that toponyms function in al-Idrīsī’s work 
like “geographical objects.” Consumers 
of this toponymy might appreciate the 



Al-ʿUṣūr al-Wusṭā 25 (2017)

 Spatial Thought in Islamicate Societies, 1000-1600  •  145

“idea” of the toponym—the object that 
it constituted, rather than the one it 
signified—without having need of detailed 
locational information about it. This was 
particularly true for faraway or large 
and boundless places. She concluded 
that for al-Idrīsī word and image not 
only represented two different ways of 
presenting information but also conveyed 
t w o  d i f f e r e n t  t y p e s  o f  i n f o r m a t i o n , 
s o m e t i m e s  i n  i n t e r d e p e n d e n t  a n d 
sometimes in independent ways.

The last paper of the morning panel 
straddled the themes of genre and text, as 
Jean-Charles Ducène (École pratique des 
hautes études, Paris) examined a set of 
works usually identified as administrative 
or chancellery manuals from the Mamlūk 
period. While al-ʿUmarī’s fourteenth-
century Masālik al-abṣār is sometimes 
included under the rubric of geographical 
literature, in particular because of its maps, 
other works, such as his Taʿrīf bi-l-muṣṭalaḥ 
al-sharīf and Qalqashandī’s Ṣubḥ al-aʿshā, 

not to mention works by their lesser 
known contemporaries Ibn Nāẓir al-Jaysh 
and al-Saḥmāwī, are rarely considered 
in discussions of spatial thought. Indeed, 
D u c è n e  a r g u e d  t h a t  a n a l y z i n g  t h e s e 
texts reveals a very different approach 
to space than that of more “universalist” 
geographers like al-Idrīsī. Mamlūk-era 
chancellery manuals order space in terms 
of proximity and relevance to the imperial 
center—in this case, Egypt—and sketch a 
geography of “states,” recognized as such 
by their political, economic, and military 
power and their diplomatic relations with 
the Mamlūks. In short, Ducène contended, 
these authors developed a real political 
geography.

Before breaking for lunch on the lovely 
terrace of the Hotel am Schloss, the group 
assembled for a poster session featuring 
four PhD researchers who won travel 
grants to attend the conference. Brief 
presentations accompanied by compelling 
visuals addressed the importance of the 

Conference participants in Tübingen, Germany, 2017. 



146  •  Zayde antrim, Jean-Charles duCène, & Kurt FranZ

Al-ʿUṣūr al-Wusṭā 25 (2017)

qibla as ritual, metaphor, and identity 
marker in early Islam (Ari M. Gordon, 
University of Pennsylvania); Bosnian hajj 
literature and local cosmopolitanism in the 
Ottoman Empire (Dženita Karić, School of 
Oriental and African Studies, University of 
London); Ibn Baṭṭūṭa’s vision of Southeast 
Asia as a frontier (Aglaia Iankovskaia, 
Central European University, Budapest); 
and a new digital approach to comparing 
descriptive geographies (Masoumeh Seydi, 
in collaboration with Maxim Romanov, 
Universität Leipzig).

The Saturday afternoon panel on the 
theme of text consisted of two, rather 
than three, papers, as unfortunately 
Sergey Minov (Oxford University) was 
prevented from presenting his work on 
Syriac cosmography due to last-minute 
visa complications. The panel was opened 
by Alexis N. Wick (American University 
of Beirut), whose paper on Ibn Mājid’s 
fifteenth-century navigation guide to 
the Indian Ocean moved us from land 
to sea. Like Konovalova’s al-Idrīsī, but 
unlike Ducène’s Mamlūk administrators, 
Ibn Mājid organized space in terms of 
toponyms and routes, not sovereignty. His 
regular use of the first and second person 
suggested the importance of personal 
experience in providing practical guidance 
to others. Such references to firsthand 
knowledge were, of course, a means of 
authorial legitimation, but Wick argued 
that they must also be seen as part of a 
wider epistemological system in which 
experience, scholarship, and instruction 
were seamlessly integrated in the service 
of ordering, appreciating, and enabling 
movement through space. This system 
produced the sea as an inclusive space, 
mediated by the authority of navigators 
to be sure, but with the effect of making 

it more, not less, accessible outside of 
limited circles of personal experience and 
expertise. 

The final paper of the conference 
was also the first one to deal with a 
t e x t  e m e r g i n g  f r o m  w h a t  h a s  b e e n 
called the genre of local history rather 
than geography. In a discussion of Ibn 
Isfandiyār’s early thirteenth-century 
Persian Tārīkh-i Ṭabaristān, Robert Haug 
(University of Cincinnati) stressed the 
importance of an author’s autobiography 
to the representation of space. According 
to Haug, Ibn Isfandiyār’s experience in 
exile, watching the Bāwandid dynasty 
fall to the Khwārazmshāhs, caused him 
to represent Ṭabaristān as a place of 
sanctuary. By narrating anecdotes about 
foreigners seeking refuge in Ṭabaristān 
over the centuries, Ibn Isfandiyār inserted 
his home region into the larger political 
dramas of the time. Haug concluded by 
speculating that this may also be a clue 
as to Ibn Isfandiyār’s intended audience, 
a circle of fellow exiles for whom the 
ill treatment of refugees was a pressing 
concern.

The closing event of the conference was 
a summary discussion led by Nasser Rabbat 
(Massachusetts Institute of Technology). 
Rabbat began by sketching three modes 
for depicting space in Islamicate societies 
b e t w e e n  1 0 0 0  a n d  1 6 0 0 .  T h e  f i r s t , 
“verbal,” consisting of oral or written 
descriptions of space, was already highly 
developed by the beginning of this period. 
The second, “graphic,” consisting of 
non-mimetic visualizations of space, was 
gathering momentum over the course 
of, but especially toward the end of, this 
period. And the third, “representational,” 
c o n s i s t i n g  o f  m i m e t i c ,  p e r s p e c t i v a l 
visualizations of space, became important 



Al-ʿUṣūr al-Wusṭā 25 (2017)

 Spatial Thought in Islamicate Societies, 1000-1600  •  147

only from the sixteenth-century  on. 
Rabbat cautioned that this typology should 
be seen along a historical continuum, not 
as a template for discrete, consecutive 
p e r i o d i z a t i o n .  I n d e e d ,  t h e  “ v e r b a l ” 
persisted as, arguably, the dominant mode 
for expressions of spatial thought until 
the modern period, and there have always 
been overlaps between the three modes, 
both within the sources themselves and 
within historical periods. Nonetheless, 
Rabbat contended that a pressing question 
for the study of spatial thought after 
circa 1000 is why—and in what cultural or 
historical circumstances—one mode was 
chosen rather than another. What do these 
choices tell us about, for instance, the 
development of genres, technologies, and 
divisions of labor?

Rabbat then provided some comments 
on recurring themes over the two days 
of paper presentations. He noted the 
importance of the political context to the 
production and circulation of spatially 
oriented texts, as well as to the shaping 
of their contents; he suggested ekphrasis 
as a conceptual tool to understand the 
rhetorical purpose of many of these texts; 
and he emphasized the significance of 
the concept of wonder and questions of 
the unknown—or unknowable—in spatial 
thought. The discussion that ensued 
was extremely vigorous and thought-
provoking, as the group grappled with 
questions of epistemology—what “counts” 
as geography or cartography? How do 
we respond to persistent discourses that 
identify “absences” in Islamicate societies? 
Do we respond with “presences”? Or do we 
reject the epistemological terms that such 
questions force us into? The issue of genre 
was one of the more contentious, with some 
participants insisting on the usefulness of 

generic distinctions between, for instance, 
m a t h e m a t i c a l  a n d  h u m a n  g e o g r a p h y 
and others seeing such distinctions as 
problematic or ill-suited to the sources. 
Rabbat asked whether it is even possible 
for us to identify “indigenous” genres 
of medieval spatial thought or whether 
we are trapped between two options, 
imposing our own genres or defaulting 
to assumptions of “genre fluidity.” In 
other words, have we arrived at limits of 
our own, a frontier behind which lies the 
unknown—or unknowable? 

W h i l e  l e a v i n g  t h i s  o p e n  t o  f u t u r e 
d e b a t e ,  t h e  c o n f e r e n c e  d i d  g e n e r a t e 
consensus in several areas. The period 
1000-1600 proved productive, despite 
often-heard classicist opinions of a deep 
decline following roughly the year 1000. 
Instead of denigrating “post-classical” 
geographies as derivative or inferior, 
participants stressed the ability of authors 
to innovate and adapt to a variety of 
contexts in a changing world. Also, it was 
consistently emphasized that the stock 
of relevant books and maps from this 
period is by no means exhausted. Making 
more manuscript materials available was 
deemed a prerequisite for understanding 
better the significance of spatially oriented 
works. Third, it went almost without saying 
that the multifold linguistic and cultural 
character of these centuries calls for more 
cross-sectional and interdisciplinary study. 
This pertains not only to the movement of 
spatial concepts between Arabic, Persian, 
Ottoman, and other literatures, but also to 
intertextuality among works composed in 
different genres or for different audiences, 
and, it may be added, even among literary 
or cartographical sources and spatially-
relevant objects or buildings. Finally, the 
wrap-up session allowed participants to 



148  •  Zayde antrim, Jean-Charles duCène, & Kurt FranZ

Al-ʿUṣūr al-Wusṭā 25 (2017)

place the discussion in a larger framework. 
S o m e  o f  t h e  m o s t  f r e q u e n t l y  r a i s e d 
questions during the conference addressed 
the social context in which geographers 
and mapmakers worked, to what extent 
their thought was shaped by practical 
needs, and what impact their products had 
on others and on the physical environment. 
These questions, as Franz put it, implied 
that the spatial thought of expert literati 
should be seen as but a very specialized 
and visible expression of the basic human 
activities that are movement and spatial 
cognition. As such, Franz concluded, 
the conference provided an incentive to 
integrate the study of spatial thought 
more fully into the field of social history.  

If two days of papers on these topics 
taught us anything, however, it was 
that frontiers are always shifting. This 
r e p r e s e n t s  b o t h  a  c h a l l e n g e  a n d  a n 
opportunity, and the group resolved to 
continue such discussions with the goal of 
reconvening in some form in two years. A 
celebratory farewell dinner at Tübingen’s 
culinary treasure Le Romarin cemented 
this resolve and we dispersed into the 
night, some to early morning flights and 
others to a final day of spring weather on 
Tübingen’s River Neckar, but all looking 
forward to future work on the frontiers of 
Islamicate spatial thought. 

For the full conference programme 
and paper abstracts, see: http://www.
spatial-thought.uni-tuebingen.de/

 

http://www.spatial-thought.uni-tuebingen.de/
http://www.spatial-thought.uni-tuebingen.de/