1st Edition
The Muslim Conquest of Iberia Medieval Arabic Narratives
Introduction 1. The Late Antique Historiographical Backdrop 2. Successors, Jurists, and Propagandists: Reconstructing the Transmission History of Spanish Conquest Narratives 3. Accommodating Outsiders, Obeying Stereotypes: mawālī and muwalladūn in Narratives of the Conquest 4. To the Ends of the Earth: Extremes of East and West in Arabic Geographical and Ajaib Writings 5. The Table of Soloman: A Historiographical Motif and its Functions 6. Excusing and Explaining Conquest: Traitors and Collaborators in Muslim and Christian Sources 7. On the Other Side of the World: Comparing Narratives of Contemporary Islamic Conquests in the East. Conclusion: History on the Margins
Biography
Nicola Clarke is a Junior Research Fellow at Wolfson College, Oxford, UK, and teaches in the history department at Lancaster University, UK.
"The Muslim conquest of Iberia contains seven ripping chapters and an excellent conclusion... This carefully balanced monograph is certainly destined to become the standard text on the subject of the causation, contextualization and evolution of traditional Arab accounts of the Andalusian conquest into later tropes, formats and formulae for differing audiences. It is probably one of the best accounts of its kind since Stanley Lane-Poole’s The story of the Moors in Spain (1886) and will appeal to quite a broad audience... Clarke has produced something fairly new and exciting here – not yet another discussion of the 711 conquest but rather more precisely a history of medieval historians at work. Above all else, perhaps, Clarke’s engaging enthusiasm for her subject – and her sense of humour – resonate through the text and make this book a true pleasure to read." - Abdullah Drury; Islam and Christian–Muslim Relations, 23:4, 543-545 (2012).
