Spanish-Maghribi relations can be considered within a very unique framework of geographical and historical confluences. This paper explores how the interwoven pasts of Spain and the Maghrib generated a particular rhetoric of exceptionalism that not only fostered colonial intervention in North Africa, but still permeates current institutional and academic literature. By problematising past and present from a postcolonial perspective, we would like to transcend the rhetoric of a splendorous shared past and a unique colonial experience.
Arabic science in "Die Rolle Antiochiens bei der Einführung der scientia Arabum in Westeuropa (11.-12. Jh.)", putting the Greeks back into the Crusades-era picture; and Stefan Leder offers a provocative and largely convincing re-reading of several twelfth-century Arabic chronicles, jihad tracts and monumental inscriptions, although the final section of his piecewhich points to the rise of al-Islāmī as a signifier in texts of the period (thus "Islamic territories", "Islamic fortifications", and similar)is crying out for a comparison between this terminology and that of the umma in earlier centuries. Documentary material is represented by Favreau-Lilie's mining of Italian archives and Houben's of the Teutonic Knights' charters, together with Peter Herde's look at letters exchanged between Mongol rulers and various western potentates from the reign of Güyük (1246-48) to that of Muslim convert Ghāzān (1295-1305). An entry on material evidence is the most obvious omission, particularly for the purposes of gaining a sense of how cross-cultural interaction took place outside the sphere of the literate elites; Amitai's and Frenkel's pieces both discuss military construction and infrastructure to a degree, but their focus is more on the processes that enabled building works rather than the works themselves. The programme for the original conference lists a paper on Christian architecture that, unfortunately, does not appear here.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.