Books by Camilo Gómez-Rivas
Arc Humanities Press, Past Imperfect Series, 2023
The Almoravid Maghrib uncovers the richness and complexity of a neglected past. A pivotal moment ... more The Almoravid Maghrib uncovers the richness and complexity of a neglected past. A pivotal moment in the history of North Africa, the rise of the Almoravids brought a corner of the Maghrib into closer contact with the world around. From the Cid to the Seljuqs, the Almoravids impressed contemporaries in ways no Maghribi regime had, signalling a transformation of western North Africa through burgeoning trans-Saharan and trans-Mediterranean commerce, urbanization (two of Morocco's four imperial cities were founded), and the epic encounter with the Christian, Muslim, and Jewish cultures of Iberia. The Almoravids witnessed a series of key transformations and beginnings, in cluding the introduction of one of the area's most successful gold currencies, the formulation of a new religious orthodoxy, the parallel rise of counter-movements (popular, messianic, and spiritual), and the inception of pan-Maghribi-Andalusi artistic, literary, and architectural styles.
Studies in the History and Society of the Maghrib, Brill, 2014
Law and the Islamization of Morocco under the Almoravids. The Fatwās of Ibn Rushd al-Jadd to the ... more Law and the Islamization of Morocco under the Almoravids. The Fatwās of Ibn Rushd al-Jadd to the Far Maghrib investigates the development of legal institutions in the Far Maghrib during its unification with al-Andalus under the Almoravids (434-530/1042-1147). A major contribution to our understanding of the twelfth-century Maghrib and the foundational role played by the Almoravids, it posits that political unification occurred alongside urban transformation and argues that legal institutions developed in response to the social needs of the growing urban spaces as well as to the administrative needs of the state. Such social needs included the regulation of market exchange, the settlement of commercial disputes, and the privatization and individualization of property.
Spanning the Strait: Studies in Unity in the Western Mediterranean brings together a multidiscipl... more Spanning the Strait: Studies in Unity in the Western Mediterranean brings together a multidisciplinary collection of essays that examines the deep connections that bound together the Iberian Peninsula and the Maghrib in the medieval and early modern periods. Six articles on topics ranging from the eighth-century slave trade to sixteenth-century apocalypticism trace and analyze movement, mutual influence and patterns shared in the face of political, religious, and cultural difference.
By transcending traditional disciplinary and temporal divisions, this collection of essays highlights the long history of contact and exchange that united the two sides of the Strait of Gibraltar. A comprehensive introduction by the editors contextualizes the articles within the last half-century of scholarship and salient contemporary trends.
Contributors are Adam Gaiser, Linda G. Jones, Hussein Fancy, S.J. Pearce, David Coleman, and Marya T. Green-Mercado.
Papers by Camilo Gómez-Rivas
The Routledge Handbook of Medieval Iberia, 2020
The Almoravids (al-Murābiṭūn 434-530/1042-1147) were a Saharan Berber tribal federation who conqu... more The Almoravids (al-Murābiṭūn 434-530/1042-1147) were a Saharan Berber tribal federation who conquered the western Maghrib and most of al-Andalus in the second half of the fifth/eleventh century. They were the first indigenous group to unify this part of the Maghrib and the first Maghrib-based empire to conquer al-Andalus. They revolutionized the political structures of both regions through a novel combination of local elements with others adopted from the broader Islamic world. Their strategies for political legitimation, which included the concept of ʿAbbāsid investitutre, illustrate this novel combination.
Oxford Research Encyclopedia of African History, 2018
Arabic-speaking Muslim polities existed in medieval Spain and Portugal where they were superseded... more Arabic-speaking Muslim polities existed in medieval Spain and Portugal where they were superseded by Christian empires that gradually disavowed cultural connections to this past. Hebrew and Arabic were largely expurgated from homes and libraries. Jews and Muslims who refused to convert were expelled. And while an incipient study of that past existed, echoed even in popular literary forms, the need to disavow kinship prevailed, at least publicly and officially. The Maghrib, for its part, separated by a mere fourteen kilometers of sea from the southern tip of Spain, experienced Portuguese and Spanish imperial expansion firsthand, receiving the bulk of the displaced and interacting with fortified settlements and encroachments along the Atlantic and Mediterranean coasts. Later European colonization of North Africa completed the galvanization of a Maghribi culture of resistance to and disavowal of European, Latin, and Christian cultural forms and connections. Spain and North Africa came to be conceived as separate worlds; domains of inimical faiths; divided by culture, language, religion, and a history of mutual hostility. This sense of separateness is deceptive, however, as the Iberian Peninsula and North Africa are bound by deep and extensive commercial, material, and cultural contacts. They share inextricable histories in which alternating movements of commerce, conflict, and migration have played fundamental roles in shaping recognizably Western Mediterranean societies. They should be thought of as areas of a unified region with a common culture, or at the very least, as areas sharing a common region, in which they interact regularly, creating extensive ties and parallel forms of cultural and social organization.
Empire and Exceptionalism: The Requerimiento and Claims of Sovereignty in the Early Modern Mediterranean and Atlantic, a forum of Republics of Letters: A Journal for the Study of Knowledge, Politics, and the Arts, 2018
This article argues that the shape of the Requerimiento and of similar institutional practices is... more This article argues that the shape of the Requerimiento and of similar institutional practices is both borrowed and synthesized, not from an eighth-century culture that valued religion in a way that was strange and different from that of northern Europe, but rather from a shared Mediterranean space that was characterized by a culture of intelligibility when confronted with difference. The culture and space of the Mediterranean are more important to understanding early modern Spain’s difference or distinction than are the principles of Islamic theology or Islamic traditions of Qurʾānic interpretation. The article focuses on the nature and dynamics of this shared culture that allows for creative borrowings and successful transactions and interactions between cultures (such as the legal traditions, which so often describe themselves as isolated, evolving purely through the dynamics of their own inner logic). It takes up three disparate aspects: One concerns the way in which a system is able to incorporate foreign objects (objects not originating in the system, legalizing them, legitimating them). A second reinforces the idea of intelligibility and reciprocity in a context of sharp conflict and competition. The third deals with late medieval diplomacy as evidence for patterns of practices of losing and gaining possession, through speech acts and textual exchanges with interlocutors. This understanding of the origins of the Requerimiento, of a practice or performance transplanted to a different context, with a hopelessly uncomprehending, supposed or ostensible interlocutor, leads to the final point that the real interlocutor for the text of the Requerimiento—whether we imagine it as performative or historiographical—is the performer himself (not its fictive audience).
Medieval Encounters, 2014
This article explores how Ibn al-Khaṭīb’s historiographical perspective informed an Andalusī v... more This article explores how Ibn al-Khaṭīb’s historiographical perspective informed an Andalusī vision of the history of the western Mediterranean and how it articulated an Andalusī identity vis-à-vis the Maghrib, where it became deeply rooted. Through an examination of Ibn al-Khaṭīb’s historiographical and geographical work, and consider- ing his own experience of exile and encounter in the Maghrib, I argue that Ibn al-Khaṭīb was both illustrative of a larger trend whereby Andalusīs argued for their cultural value as a displaced community in the Maghrib and a crucial actor in articulating and inform- ing the long-term historiographical perspective on the history of the Islamic West and al-Andalus’s place in it.
The Articulation of Power in Medieval Iberia and the Maghrib, edited by Amira K. Bennison. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014
This article argues for establishing a connection between the ransoming of captives and the hosti... more This article argues for establishing a connection between the ransoming of captives and the hosting of refugees as a politically legitimising practise. The article considers twelfth-century military and demographic changes that led to an increase in capture and ransom, the legal framework and social response to the ransoming industry, and leaders’ involvement in the release of captives as a high concern of state. An example of large-scale conquest, enslavement, and ransom in the thirteenth century illustrates how ransom and refuge were causally related and predicated upon the reciprocal social expectations of frontier societies.
Islamic Legal Thought: A Compendium of Muslim Jurists
ʿIyāḍ b. Mūsā—better known as Qāḍī ʿIyāḍ—was an eminent jurist whose career coincided with the 6t... more ʿIyāḍ b. Mūsā—better known as Qāḍī ʿIyāḍ—was an eminent jurist whose career coincided with the 6th/12th-century expansion and consolidation of Mālikism into the Far Maghrib or Islamic West. This was especially significant in the region south of the historically more settled Mediterranean coast. Until the end of his life, ʿIyāḍ remained fiercely loyal to the Almoravid dynasty (al-murābiṭūn, 445–544/1054–1149), a Berber tribal confederation from the Saharan south, which, as the first major non-Arab Islamic power of the region, made use of Mālikī jurists as both legitimiz- ing and administrative agents. A prolific author, ʿIyāḍ’s most influential surviving works include the first major biographical dictionary of the Mālikī school (the dominant legal school in al-Andalus, the Maghrib, and West Africa), a bio-bibliographical work on his teachers and transmitters, and a treatise—famous far beyond the boundaries of his legal school— describing the life, attributes, miracles, and ritual and religious law surrounding the figure of the Prophet Muḥammad.
Journal of Medieval Iberian Studies, 2013 Vol. 5, No. 2, 129–133
María Rosa Menocal argued for the hybrid origins and development of medieval Romance literature. ... more María Rosa Menocal argued for the hybrid origins and development of medieval Romance literature. She explored the cultural and social context of this hybridity as well as the reasons for its occlusion in modern scholarship. While her most popular work explored the “culture of tolerance” of medieval Iberia, I argue that her main contribution lay in her appreciation of the medieval love lyric (as well as other similar cultural artifacts), the exploration of their hybrid or “mongrel” origins, and their enduring importance and impact in the present. Menocal’s style has a lyricism of its own, indivisible from its subject, which serves as a critique of the objectivist scholarship responsible for the occlusion of the lyric’s origins and as an argument for a continuity of practice between the lyric and its appreciation.
Medieval Encounters 19, 2013
The battle of Las Navas de Tolosa occurred in the context of a major transformation of the Iberia... more The battle of Las Navas de Tolosa occurred in the context of a major transformation of the Iberian Peninsula and the Maghrib. This article foregrounds the urban transformation of the Far Maghrib, with the emergence of large-scale state formation, and argues that the displacement of Muslim political and military power from the peninsula to the Far Maghrib was a key reason for the marginalization and territorial decline of al-Andalus during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Viewed in this context, the loss at Las Navas de Tolosa was but one of the results of larger socio-historical processes. These included the intensification of commercial contacts – across the Sahara, the Strait of Gibraltar, and the Christian– Muslim frontier – the militarization and solidification of the frontier in the social imagination of Muslim and Christian societies, and the appearance of new popular religious movements.
Middle East Institute Viewpoints: Revolution and Political Transformation in the Middle East: Outcomes and Prospects Vol. III, Oct 2011
A snapshot of the preoccupations concerning family law reform in the aftermath of Egypt's January... more A snapshot of the preoccupations concerning family law reform in the aftermath of Egypt's January 25, 2011 revolution.
Middle East Research and Information Project 247 (2008)
Assessment of impact of Morocco's 2004 personal status law reforms three years after its promulga... more Assessment of impact of Morocco's 2004 personal status law reforms three years after its promulgation, including understanding some of the principle challenges to its implementation.
Book Reviews by Camilo Gómez-Rivas
The Turkish Historical Review, 2021
Slavery in the early modern Mediterranean was not of one type. There wasn’t a simple cross-cultur... more Slavery in the early modern Mediterranean was not of one type. There wasn’t a simple cross-cultural distinction between free and unfree. Multiple regimes of servitude and captivity coexisted, some of which were particular to the Mediterranean as a place of networked exchange and as a religious and linguistic boundary between societies who enslaved, captured, and ransomed members of each other’s communities. This is perhaps the first take-away from Daniel Hershenzon’s rich and engrossing study of Mediterranean captivity: There were different regimes of bondage; those taken from distant places were locked into a form of servitude that was qualitatively different from those captured from neighboring communities with which communication was possible. A second point emerges from this notion (of the possibility of communication), and comes to provide the central conceptual framework for the book, which is that networks of communication (whether actual or potential, transparent or opaque), even between the nominally unfree, exerted force and shaped Mediterranean communities in powerful and concrete ways.
Islamic Law and Society, 2020
Although several seminal studies have used documentary sources to analyze Muslim-Christian commer... more Although several seminal studies have used documentary sources to analyze Muslim-Christian commercial zones in e.g. the Italian Mediterranean, the general understanding of Islamic financial and commercial practices and doctrines and their historical development leaves much to be desired. On this point alone, Adday Hernández López’s El valor del tiempo: Doctrina jurídica y práctica de la usura (ribā) en el Occidente islámico medieval, a study of Islamic legal doctrine and practice relating to the concept of ribā, is a major contribution. Hernández López catalogues and surveys all of the significant textual sources (or the most common locations or passages across several legal genres) on ribā in the broad corpus of Mālikī law (the predominant legal school of the Islamic West).
Journal of African History, 2019
No single work in English has ventured a history of these empires, and studies on the individual ... more No single work in English has ventured a history of these empires, and studies on the individual dynasties are likewise scarce. Bennison commandingly fills this void with the first English-language history of these two imperial domains, which appeared as the region came into its own as a major political and cultural player in the Mediterranean and broader Muslim community. She writes a lively and detailed account of two eventful centuries (c. 1050-1250) over eight chapters, progressing from a basic narrative of main actors and events to the finer texture of religion, social movements and institutions, and textual and material culture. The later chapters are exemplary in the way that they fill out the historical narrative without recourse to painting an artificially generic version of daily life; they bring fine detail to broad areas of the Maghrib’s social and cultural worlds. Bennison, moreover, distinguishes clearly between these two empires, their different origins, and near-opposite theological positions, while she also draws out their important parallels, which justify bringing them together into one book.
Islamic Law and Society, 2016
This volume provides a cutting-edge view of the complexity of the subject of the legal status of ... more This volume provides a cutting-edge view of the complexity of the subject of the legal status of dhimmīs and uses a richer collection of sources than previously available. Its focus on the Islamic West and the Mālikī madhhab gives the volume a degree of cohesion. Some of the key arguments put forth (if a multi-authored collection may be said to advance an argument) include the following: (1) that the treatment of dhimmīs is not limited to a specialized field of the law but rather is dispersed across several fields and must therefore be studied in a comprehensive manner; (2) that dhimmī status and the laws regulating it were at first highly variable and evolved substantially over time; (3) that, in important ways, the laws of dhimmīs themselves, meaning the legal traditions cultivated by tributary Jews and Christians living within Muslim polities, were not separate from the dominant legal system, but symbiotically connected, mutually interactive, and integral to the larger system; e.g., Jewish law interacted with and was facilitated by Muslim administration and society; and (4) that the dynamics of dhimmī status cannot be known from a single genre of legal writing or from Islamic legal writings alone, but rather should be studied and analysed using other kinds of texts and documents pertaining to social negotiation and administration (e.g., those produced by muḥtaṣibs or market inspectors and maẓālim courts, i.e., courts of redress presided over by rulers, not qāḍīs).
The Medieval Review, 2015
Law and Piety in Medieval Islam examines what was one of the most important distinctions of any i... more Law and Piety in Medieval Islam examines what was one of the most important distinctions of any individual in early and medieval Islam: piety. Few characteristics proved more important for lending one authority among contemporaries or across generations. Reid argues that pious devotional practices preexisted and survived the rise of Sufism without being altogether absorbed (there were other options). She also argues that these devotional practices as well as the concepts undergirding them shifted over time. Delineating a few of these changes is one of the book's strengths. Medieval devotional practices are available to the religious historian through the prism of texts whose nature is not exactly ethnographic. This is at least one way in which the "Law" component of the title is relevant. Reid mines a rich variety of textual sources which are mostly associated with the legal establishment of Ayyubid and Mamluk Egypt and Syria (11711260 & 12601517). The informality, complexity, and interconnectedness of this establishment with broader social practices makes it into a subculture of broad social implications. Reid thus looks at the development of certain aspects of devotional piety as can be traced in these sources, which include biographical dictionaries, manuals, fatwā or responsa collections, hortatory treatises and chronicles. The resulting study is an examination of the intersection of personal piety and Islamic legal culture of the late medieval period through the lens of the narratives of exemplary individuals. Instead of delivering a typology or concordance to the vocabulary of piety, Reid has focused on a series of narratives and descriptions of exemplars, on how these narratives change over a few key centuries, and on what these personalities and their actions may have meant in the context of Ayyubid and Mamluk religious and political life.
American Academy of Research Historians of Medieval Spain, 2013
The Making of a Mediterranean Emirate: Ifrīqiyā and Its Andalusis, 1200-1400 makes two important ... more The Making of a Mediterranean Emirate: Ifrīqiyā and Its Andalusis, 1200-1400 makes two important contributions by presenting a complex picture of the development of the socioeconomic and institutional bases of Ḥafṣid power, legitimacy, and cultural production, and by critiquing a historical understanding of North Africa (Ifriqīyā in particular) inherited from colonial practices, which included an uncritical reliance on a select group of medieval sources. Two of the most compelling secondary themes of the study (which also serve to bring the main points together) concern the role elite Andalusis played in Ḥafṣid courts and administration, and the sociohistorical context of Ibn Khaldun's work, reception, and lasting influence in framing our understanding (and misunderstanding) of the history of the Maghrib.
Uploads
Books by Camilo Gómez-Rivas
By transcending traditional disciplinary and temporal divisions, this collection of essays highlights the long history of contact and exchange that united the two sides of the Strait of Gibraltar. A comprehensive introduction by the editors contextualizes the articles within the last half-century of scholarship and salient contemporary trends.
Contributors are Adam Gaiser, Linda G. Jones, Hussein Fancy, S.J. Pearce, David Coleman, and Marya T. Green-Mercado.
Papers by Camilo Gómez-Rivas
Book Reviews by Camilo Gómez-Rivas
By transcending traditional disciplinary and temporal divisions, this collection of essays highlights the long history of contact and exchange that united the two sides of the Strait of Gibraltar. A comprehensive introduction by the editors contextualizes the articles within the last half-century of scholarship and salient contemporary trends.
Contributors are Adam Gaiser, Linda G. Jones, Hussein Fancy, S.J. Pearce, David Coleman, and Marya T. Green-Mercado.