From “Islam and the Medieval Mediterranean” to “Journal of the Medieval Mediterranean”

The journal Al-Masāq was conceived in 1988 by its founding editor, Dionisius Agius, as a welcome source of inspiration for and response to changing historiographical perceptions and reconstructions of the Mediterranean space in the medieval period. At that time, there was a clear and particular need for a journal with the subtitle “Islam and theMedieval Mediterranean”. In the often unconscious periphery of the Cultural Turn in the social sciences, there was an increasing interest in research organised around transcultural and interdisciplinary medieval Mediterranean questions that explicitly integrated in their scope Islam as a complex and multi-layered socio-cultural phenomenon. After all, conceptualisations of the Mediterranean had long been plagued by binary constructions that tended to ‘other’ its Islamic side, to consider it an intruder, outsider or opponent in Mediterranean places and spaces, conceived as rooted in antiquity and only re-integrated in an emerging Europe from the later Middle Ages onwards. Arguably, this goes back to Henri Pirenne’s development in the 1920s and 1930s of the much debated thesis – famously formulated in his Mahomet et Charlemagne as “sans Mahomet, Charlemagne est inconcevable” – that medieval Europe emerged only when the Arab-Muslim empire conquered the Mediterranean space and disrupted any further continuities between Mediterranean (late) antiquity and the Latin West. On the socio-economic side of things, this particular but influential construction of Mediterranean – and European – history was to a large extent made obsolete by the longue durée structuralism – and its many offshoots – of Fernand Braudel’s La Méditerranée et le monde méditerranéen à l’époque de Philippe II. A similar historical consciousness of socio-cultural medieval Mediterranean complexities and of the dynamics of cultural constructions and reproductions (whether of longue or courte durée) of a variety of Mediterranean frontiers – as in the Pirenne-thesis – was slower to catch up. Incorporating Islam into this latter problematisation was therefore an important step forward, and a journal for “Islam and the Medieval Mediterranean” served as a timely vehicle to offer some modest assistance in this respect (and the subsequent