Article of the Month - August 2023
 “This Is Your Mihrab:
Sacred Spaces and Power in Early Islamic North Africa
- Al-Qayrawan as a Case Study”
(Javier Albarrán: History, Universidad Autónoma de Madrid)

Albarrán, Javier, “This is Your Mihrab: Sacred Spaces and Power in Early Islamic North Africa—al-Qayrawān as a Case Study,” Religions, 14 (2023): [1-16

Read the article here.

Keywords: al-Qayrawān • sacred space • ‘Uqba b. Nāfi‘ • Ḥassān b. al-Nu‘mān • Islamization • Carthage • place of memory • Ifrīqiyya • miracle • futūḥ • Byzantine North Africa • translatio

Abstract:
Al-Qayrawān has long been figured, especially in the culture of the Islamic West, as the Islamic city par excellence, as the fourth sacred place after Mecca, Medina, and Jerusalem. The prominence of this garrison city—supposedly founded by ‘Uqba b. Nāfi‘ in the year 50/670–671—is undeniable in the traditional account of the Islamic conquest of Ifriqiyya. Through a case study of al-Qayrawān and an analysis of the sources recounting its miraculous foundation as well as the construction of its mosque, this article aims to study the process of sacralisation of space, how this is inserted into a given context and related to power and its consolidation, particularly in times of political, cultural, and religious transition, and how it uses, appropriates, or eliminates the previous reality. To this end, the article provides a context for the creation of al-Qayrawān as a sacred space, which relates directly to the region’s Christian past and the construction of a new Islamic identity.

Nomination Statement:
In this article, Javier Albarrán moves beyond the myths surrounding Qayrawan’s miracle-tinged foundation in the late seventh-century as a Muslim city par excellence, to reveal a complex history that cannot be disentangled from the Ifriqiya’s Roman and Christian past. It was not enough to establish a new sacred site ex nihilo, the new sacred landscape of Islam would need to integrate and transform the indigenous traditions it encountered. The medium for this was the creation of a myth in which ‘Uqba ibn Nafi’ – credited with the foundation pf the city and it mosque – miraculously cast out the unclean animals of the valley where the city would rise up by invoking Islam. Albarrán shows that it was likely a later governor, Hassan b. al-Numan, who was responsible for the final form of the mosque and its mihrab, the use of spolia from Carthaginian churches in which was to signal Islam’s superseding of Christianity here. With Qayrawan’s sacred status established, myths were reimagined in succeeding centuries in the light of contemporary agendas –  a process that can be observed with other sites across the Islamic world.

Authors’ Comment:
As a historian of al-Andalus and medieval Islam, my work has focused primarily on intercultural relations in the medieval Islamic West through the study of phenomena such as sacralized violence or different ways of religiosity. Likewise, the study of the memory associated to these processes has also been part of my research perspectives. In this sense, in 2020 I began, as part of my fellowship at “RomanIslam – Center for Comparative Empire and Transcultural Studies” (Universität Hamburg), a project entitled The Memory of Islamization: Ifriqiyya, the Maghreb and al-Andalus in comparative perspective. This project aimed to analyze the “narrative” memory of Islamization. That is, how narrative sources from different periods recount the conquest and, in particular, the process of Islamization related to it, understood more from the perspective of space – of the memory of place – than of demography. Another of the main objectives of this project was to study how this memory is related to the Roman (and pre-Islamic) past of the analyzed spaces. That is, how this past was appropriated, how a contested memory was generated or how it was integrated within the different post-conquest and post-Islamization identities. One of the narrative memories I set out to analyze was the founding of al-Qayrawan. Thus, this article is one of the first results of this project.

The article proposes a possible dating for the creation of this account, and demonstrates that this phenomenon is closely connected to the cultural milieu already existing in North Africa at the arrival of the Umayyad armies, while acting as a tool with which to negotiate the new identities that emerged after the conquest. The miraculous accounts of the founding of al-Qayrawan and its great mosque configured the city as a sacred space within the sacred topography of the Islamic world that was being generated, thus serving as a symbolic setting in which to generate and exercise power, display shifting identities and create social cohesion. After analyzing in detail the chain of transmission of the account in the different textual sources it appears in, it can be concluded that the narrative core of the episode was already in circulation in the first decades of the eighth century. Although it is impossible to know exactly when such a tradition emerged, it is possible to hypothesize when and in what context it would have been useful, at the socio-political level, if not to create, at least to reinforce and consolidate such a tradition: the rule of Hassan b. al-Nu‘man al-Ghassani (694-704), a crucial period for the establishment of Islamic rule in Ifriqiyya that has been mostly overlooked. Along with the conquest and destruction of Carthage, this ruler carried out an important architectural intervention in the mosque of al-Qayrawan, and some traditions even remember him as the founder of the temple, although most attribute it to ‘Uqba b. Nafi‘, the conqueror of the region. What is beyond doubt is that both events – the destruction of Carthage and the building project in the mosque – are directly linked, producing an appropriation of the importance and, above all, the sacredness that Carthage enjoyed in Byzantine times, which was transferred to al-Qayrawan, the latter becoming the nucleus of the new faith and the new power in North Africa. It is in this context that we must insert the creation or, at least, the circulation and reinforced diffusion of the miraculous episode of the foundation of al-Qayrawan, an account that ended up consolidating the city and its mosque, as well as defining it as a sacred space and acting as a tool of power. In this sense, it is not an isolated case, but something that was happening throughout the Umayyad territory since the late seventh and early eighth centuries, when it began to be filled with symbols of a distinctly Islamic character, such as the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem.

Would you like to discuss this article?
Start a thread on the Mediterranean Seminar list-server

See the other Articles of the Month here.