Imagining distant lands: Representations of geographical otherness in ibn Khaldun's Muqaddimah

مرکز و کتابخانه مطالعات اسلامی به زبان های اروپایی

منو

" Imagining distant lands: Representations of geographical otherness in ibn Khaldun's Muqaddimah "
Gheorghe Gelu Pacurar Mikhail, Maged S. A.

Document Type	:	Latin Dissertation
Language of Document	:	English
Record Number	:	803555
Doc. No	:	TL48348
Call number	:	‭1708940017;‮ ‬1526663‬
Main Entry	:	Islam, Mohammad Faridul
Title & Author	:	Imagining distant lands: Representations of geographical otherness in ibn Khaldun's Muqaddimah\ Gheorghe Gelu PacurarMikhail, Maged S. A.
College	:	California State University, Fullerton
Date	:	2015
Degree	:	M.A.
student score	:	2015
Page No	:	45
Note	:	Place of publication: United States, Ann Arbor; ISBN=978-1-339-05899-3
Abstract	:	Ibn Khaldun's complex work conveys some of the most controversial ideas in medieval Muslim intellectual tradition. Scholars have usually tended to liken it to modern sciences such as historiography, sociology, or anthropology. Accordingly, Ibn Khaldun has appeared as a modern mind <i>avant la lettre </i>. However, a cultural reading of the geographical narrative of <i> The Muqqaddimah</i> shows that the rational approach employed by Ibn Khaldun veils a pre-modern mentality. The concept of 'otherness' betrays that the narrative is actually dominated by a normative self that projected its ethnocentric imagination upon the geographical data. This normative self is set against the antithetic other that takes different forms according to the distance from the Islamic center. The geographical global structure defines the other as the protean Surrounding Sea and unknown wastelands. When the narrative approaches climatic conditions and topography. the other is shaped in the form of inaccessible, strange, and marvelous distant countries or islands. These images of radical otherness are balanced by a more positive valuation of the geography of Islam's neighbors, characterized by the normality and temperateness that rule in the central zones of the <i>oikoumene</i>. It thus could be stated that Ibn Khaldun interprets the geographical data at his disposal in an imaginative way. The Muslim scholar follows the medieval tradition of representing the world in a highly schematic manner that eventually asserts the geographical centrality of the realm of Islamic rule.
Subject	:	Middle Eastern history; History; Medieval history
Descriptor	:	Social sciences;Arab Historiography;Geographical Imagination;Ibn Khaldun;Muqqaddimah;Otherness;Perceptions of the World
Added Entry	:	Mikhail, Maged S. A.
Added Entry	:	California State University, Fullerton