Christian Impurity versus Economic Necessity: A Fifteenth-Century Fatwa on European Paper

Halevi, Leor

doi:10.1017/s0038713400017073

Cited by 26 publications

(7 citation statements)

References 3 publications

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“…For example, in a treaty of the fourteenth century with the king of Majorca, a Muslim ruler forbade Christian traders from buying weapons, leather, (p.126) bread, and other strategic goods. 86 But here we must be careful. 87 If we over-interpret the impact of those injunctions to explain the modest presence of Muslims from North Africa in Christian Europe, we risk minimizing the hostility toward Muslim merchants and sailors in Christian port cities, a latent hostility that persisted even if it rarely turned into open violence, as during the so-called "massacre of the Turks" in Marseilles in 1620.…”

Section: A Lubricant Of Tradementioning

confidence: 99%

The Economy of Ransoming in the Early Modern Mediterranean

Kaiser¹,

Calfat²

2014

Religion and Trade

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Drawing from diplomatic sources, commercial treatises, and legal documents, this chapter describes the ransoming of captives as an important economic sector of the early modern Mediterranean. It argues that, far from being an economy of booty and plunder that obstructed commercial exchanges, corsairing in the Mediterranean sustained a constant trade in captives that crossed religious, legal, and political boundaries. The official function of corsairing was to damage the enemy's economic activities. But in practice, corsairing also contributed to intensify contacts between Christian, Muslim, and Jewish merchants in the western Mediterranean.

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Section: A Lubricant Of Tradementioning

confidence: 99%

The Economy of Ransoming in the Early Modern Mediterranean

Kaiser¹,

Calfat²

2014

Religion and Trade

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“…According to Ibn Marzuq's decision, which saw the problem in terms of ritual purity, writing in Arabic rendered the idolatrous designs invisible. Writing God's name (and message) on such papers replaced falsehood with truth, much in the way Muslims used Christian churches as mosques (Halevi, 2008;Lagardère, 1995, p. 42).…”

Section: Trade Relations and The Decline Of Arab Papermakingmentioning

confidence: 99%

Papermaking: The Historical Diffusion of an Ancient Technique

Bloom

2017

Mobilities of Knowledge

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Paper was invented in China in the centuries before Christ and carried by Buddhist monks throughout East and Central Asia (Tsien, 1985), where Muslim Arabs encountered it in the eighth century CE. Muslims carried paper and papermaking to the Mediterranean region, and European Christians there learned how to make it by the twelfth century. Europeans not only forgot their debt to Muslim papermakers but also remained ignorant of paper's origins in China, so that when they first encountered Chinese paper in the sixteenth century, they thought that the Chinese must have learned the art of papermaking from the ancient Egyptians! Europeans then carried paper and papermaking, along with printing, throughout the globe. While the history of paper has traditionally been overshadowed by the history of printing, the spread of paper and papermaking is arguably equally important, for this relatively permanent, cheap, and flexible material not only encouraged the spread of written culture across the globe but also transformed many other human activities.This paper studies mobilities of knowledge from the perspective of paper making by examining how and when this technique diffused from China across Eurasia to the Mediterranean region and from there to the rest of Europe in the period between 600 and 1500. The main factors that enhanced and impeded this spatial diffusion of knowledge were the availability of raw materials and the adoption of differing technologies, but the roles of mediating aspects such as religion, trade, emigration, imports, and exports will also be discussed.

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“…41 Writing in the same period, the poet and caliph who reigned for a single day, , wrote romantic epigrams about men with ophthalmia and fever. 42 Mufīd al-ʿulūm wa-mubīd al-humūm (The Provider of Useful Kinds of Knowledge and Remover of Sorrows), an encyclopaedia compiled circa 551/1156, features information that its author, Jamāl al-Dīn Muḥammad b. Aḥmad al-Qazwīnī, judged to be useful information for an educated reader. 43 The work is organised into books.…”

Section: Medieval Historiographymentioning

confidence: 99%

Difference and Disability in the Medieval Islamic World

Richardson¹

2012

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This book began as a graduate seminar paper on al-Jāḥiẓ's Kitāb al-Burṣān for Professor Michael Bonner's course on classical Arabic biographical dictionaries. Set on writing a dissertation on slavery, and convinced that a study of disability would have too few primary sources, I put aside my interest in this text. However, the paper did awaken me to the idea of working on a topic that had not been so thoroughly studied as slavery. Encouraged by Dana Sajdi's fascinating work on a Chester Beatty Library manuscript of an 18th-century Damascene barber's local history, I leafed through the Chester Beatty manuscript catalogue in the hope of fi nding a singular source on which I could build a similarly interesting study. To my amazement, I stumbled across A. J. Arberry's entry for MS 3838, Ibn Fahd's 950/AD 1543 'treatise on the affl ictions suffered by famous scholars'. Only then did I begin to think a study of disability could be a possibility. With the support of the University of Michigan Rackham Graduate School and the International Institute, I arranged a visit to the Chester Beatty Library in the summer of 2005. Dr Elaine Wright, curator of the library's Islamic collections, was of immeasurable assistance during my stay there and granted permission to use a library image as the cover art.My thesis adviser, Dr Kathryn Babayan, introduced me to al-Badrī's poetry anthology, which quickly led me to the other writers featured in this study. I am immensely grateful for her continued support and mentorship. Support from the National Endowment of the Humanities allowed me to work under the supervision of Dr Monica Green and Dr Emilie Savage-Smith in London in the summer of 2009. These two experts in medieval medical history helpfully introduced me to Latin and Arabic medical literature on balādhur and baldness, which has strengthened Chapters 2 and 5. My current intellectual home,

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Christian Impurity versus Economic Necessity: A Fifteenth-Century Fatwa on European Paper

Cited by 26 publications

References 3 publications

The Economy of Ransoming in the Early Modern Mediterranean

The Economy of Ransoming in the Early Modern Mediterranean

Papermaking: The Historical Diffusion of an Ancient Technique

Difference and Disability in the Medieval Islamic World

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