Islam and war: the complex relation between these two elements has a long past and an infinite series of historically determined forms. This book investigates several tracks, captured in places and times that are very distant but share the same point of view: how war and the representations of the same have been translated at the level of the institutions and of political legitimisation. This leads to a number of investigations: how the Caliphate of Muslim Spain used the practice of war to reconstruct its own political memory; how the idea of the "just war" managed to circulate for centuries in the Mediterranean, passing from Greek and Latin writings to reach Arab texts and Hebrew translations; or how the recent Republic of the Maldives succeeded in reconstructing its Islamic identity through the fabulous account of an ancient Arab traveller.
This essay proposes a number of possible new spaces for the study of Islam in the Americas, relating this field to questions of cultural relationship in the medieval Mediterranean world -particularly Spain and Italy -and their projection in the Atlantic. After reviewing some of the ways in which Islam shaped the memory of the conquistadores, and influenced the practices of adaptation to the conditions of the New World, the article turns to the debated question of the presence -or absence -of men and women of Muslim faith; it concludes by suggesting that the most fruitful paths of inquiry may lie not in tracing the presence of a Muslim population, but rather in addressing the questions of cultural and linguistic interaction, all the more complex now that it no longer appears legitimate to conceive of a homogenous "Muslim," "Arabic" or "Berber" cultural bloc.
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