عنوان

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

Number

TL48348

.Language of Text, Soundtrack etc

انگلیسی

Title Proper

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

General Material Designation

[Thesis]

First Statement of Responsibility

Gheorghe Gelu Pacurar

Subsequent Statement of Responsibility

Mikhail, Maged S. A.

Name of Publisher, Distributor, etc.

California State University, Fullerton

Date of Publication, Distribution, etc.

2015

Specific Material Designation and Extent of Item

45

Text of Note

Place of publication: United States, Ann Arbor; ISBN=978-1-339-05899-3

Dissertation or thesis details and type of degree

M.A.

Body granting the degree

California State University, Fullerton

Text preceding or following the note

2015

Text of Note

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 avant la lettre . However, a cultural reading of the geographical narrative of The Muqqaddimah 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 oikoumene. 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.

Middle Eastern history; History; Medieval history

Subject Term

Social sciences;Arab Historiography;Geographical Imagination;Ibn Khaldun;Muqqaddimah;Otherness;Perceptions of the World

Islam, Mohammad Faridul

Mikhail, Maged S. A.

California State University, Fullerton

Call Number

1708940017; 1526663

Electronic name

p

[Thesis]

276903

a

Y