The Aghlabids and their Neighbors

The first dynasty to mint gold dinars outside of the Abbasid heartlands, the Aghlabid (r. 800-909) reign in North Africa has largely been neglected in the scholarship of recent decades, despite the canonical status of its monuments and artworks in early Islamic art history. The Aghlabids and their Neighbors focuses new attention on this key dynasty. The essays in this volume, produced by an international group of specialists in history, art and architectural history, archaeology, and numismatics, illuminate the Aghlabid dynasty’s interactions with neighbors in the western Mediterranean and its rivals and allies elsewhere, providing a state of the question on early medieval North Africa and revealing the centrality of the dynasty and the region to global economic and political networks.

Contributors: Lotfi Abdeljaouad, Glaire D. Anderson, Lucia Arcifa, Fabiola Ardizzone, Alessandra Bagnera, Jonathan M. Bloom, Lorenzo Bondioli, Chloé Capel, Patrice Cressier, Mounira Chapoutot-Remadi, Abdelaziz Daoulatli, Claire Déléry, Ahmed El Bahi, Kaoutar Elbaljan, Ahmed Ettahiri, Abdelhamid Fenina, Elizabeth Fentress, Abdallah Fili, Mohamed Ghodhbane, Caroline Goodson, Soundes Gragueb Chatti, Khadija Hamdi, Renata Holod, Jeremy Johns, Tarek Kahlaoui, Hugh Kennedy, Sihem Lamine, Faouzi Mahfoudh, David Mattingly, Irene Montilla, Annliese Nef, Elena Pezzini, Nadège Picotin, Cheryl Porter, Dwight Reynolds, Viva Sacco, Elena Salinas, Martin Sterry.

Glaire D. Anderson, PhD (2005), MIT, is Associate Professor of Islamic Art History at UNC-Chapel Hill. Specializing in the arts of al-Andalus and the caliphal era, she is author of The Islamic villa in early medieval Iberia(Ashgate, 2013).

Corisande Fenwick, PhD (2013), Stanford University, is Lecturer in Mediterranean Archaeology at UCL. She is the author of many articles on North African archaeology and co-editor of the forthcoming Oxford Handbook of Islamic Archaeology.

Mariam Rosser-Owen, PhD (2002), University of Oxford, is Curator of Arab World collections at the Victoria & Albert Museum. She has published many articles on the arts of the Islamic West, and is author of Islamic Arts from Spain (V&A Publishing, 2010).

"This collection, as a statement on the state of the field as well as what remains to be discovered, will be a vital resource and a first stop for anyone undertaking future study of the third/ninth and fourth/tenth-century regions of the western Mediterranean and northern Africa." - Sarah Davis-Secord, University of New Mexico, in: Al-Masāq 30/3 (2018)

"As an elegant (collective) status quaestionis, on a much-neglected field, and a stimulus to further work, it is hard to imagine a more welcome book." - Andrew Merills, University of Leicester, in: Medieval Archaeology 62/2 (2018)

"The Aghlabids and their Neighbors is a long overdue contribution to the study of Islam and North African history. The genuinely interdisciplinary approach offers numerous possibilities for further research, not least because of the relatively small number of primary texts for this region, and the difficulty of accessing many of the manuscripts that do exist. The contributors must be praised for their skill in presenting complicated and specialized material in a manner that is both accessible and relevant to the non-initiate of their field. So too should the editors be commended for the volume's internal consistency (no small feat in a collection of this size and range) and its coherent and helpful structure." - Antonia Bosanquet, Hamburg University, in: Journal of the History and Culture of the Middle East 96/1 (2019)

"The weighty edited volume of 29 contributors, many drawn from an international workshop held in 2014, is an extremely welcome addition to the rather sparse array of scholarship on the history, art, architecture and material culture of early Islamic North Africa. Compiled and edited by Mariam Rosser-Owen, Corisande Fenwick and Glaire Anderson, a trio of scholars, known for their multi-disciplinary, multi-lingual and often revisionist endeavours in the field, it has a refreshing unapologetic Maghribi perspective which encourages the reader to see North Africans as agents in the production of their own early Islamic material culture, rather than as somewhat passive imitators of what Muslims in the Islamic East or al-Andalus were doing better." - Amira K. Bennison, University of Cambridge in: Bibliotheca Orientalis LXXVI N° 1-2 (2019)