Military Foundations, Ribāṭs, and Urbanization
Workshop, February 1 – 2, 2024
RomanIslam Center (Early Islam) – Universität Hamburg
Organizers: Stefan Heidemann and Kurt Franz (RomanIslam Center)
The workshop wants to challenge the ongoing discourse on the origins of the ‘Islamic’ city. It looks at military settlements and the presence of garrisons as a driving force of colonialization as well as the proliferation of Islamic civilization. Using a comparative approach to Empire Studies, the workshop aims at looking at cases of military city foundations in empires that were likewise founded by conquering military elites promoting at the same time a salvation religion, i.e., the Roman and Hispanic empires.
Since the seminal book edited by Hourani and Stern (1970), scholarship has been dedicated above all to the transformation, or Islamication, of inherited classic cities in the Islamic empire east and west. The early discussion was largely inspired by Weber’s criticism of the Islamic city that, for one, it was lacking much of the municipal spirit typical for the classic Hellenistic or Roman imperial city. For another, it is now widely agreed on the basis of the past four decades of archeological research that the process of urban decline had already begun during late antiquity.
Often underrated—although frequently noted—is the role of the military both in the foundation of many a settlement and in the increasing urbanization of the early Islamic empire. Therefore, the foundation of cities as military hubs (sg. miṣr), encampments (sg. muʿaskar), or garrison cities (madīna, ḥiṣn, ribāṭs) may be taken into account as a driving force of urbanization.
Comparatively speaking, the foundation of cities to include also a military population is characteristic of imperial expansions in that their dispatched military are foreign to the incorporated region. They so serve as agents of the spreading of Imperial civilization, culture, and the Empire’s (salvation) religion, and while they also may challenge these, they would largely do so on terms inherent to the Empire. The way such cities were formed affected their social, economic, cultural, and religious fabric, and three transregional empires offer themselves for comparison in particular: the Macedonian Empire, the Roman Empire, and the Habsburgian Hispanic Empire in the Americas.
The workshop wants to explore in a comparative mode how military structures effected Imperial urban foundations and the cultures of Empires.
In order to attend, please register by January 29, 2024 with katharina.mewes"AT"uni-hamburg.de .
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