SPACE: AN EASTWARD SHIFT | 99not to have to venture beyond the Mediterranean paradigm.^26 It was not that
some previous unity was now violently ruptured with disastrous results, as
Pirenne held.^27 East- West communications and trade in the Mediterranean
had already been battered by the Vandal fleet installed in North Africa and
the Slav invasions of the Balkans. And then to a substantial degree the Ca-
liphate actually resuscitated the single Mediterranean by engrossing not only
the Levant but the whole African coast and the Iberian too, while persis-
tently harassing and partly annexing the still Christian northern coast (Crete,
Sicily; and note the mid- ninth- century Emirate of Bari). The Latin and Slavic
worlds were significant to the Muslim world as a source of slaves, while trade
networks based in the lands of Islam—Cairo, most notably—were active
throughout the entire Mediterranean.^28 It was just that the Mediterranean
could not be the epicenter of a Caliphate whose eastern frontiers lay in Sog-
dia and Afghanistan and on the Indus.^29 The new world’s emergent power
centers, Aachen as well as Baghdad, lay far from the inland sea, its peripher-
alization sealed by the Umayyads’ destruction of the Visigothic kingdom in
the Iberian Peninsula in 711, and Charlemagne’s elimination of the powerful
Lombard kingdom in Italy in 774.
The Qurʾān too, by repeatedly calling upon earlier prophetic traditions,
provokes us to reread Judaism and Christianity and appreciate non-
Mediterranean strands of their story that were intimately relevant to the
seventh- century Hijāz—for example the rabbinic Judaism of Mesopotamia
as well as Palestine,^30 or Syriac Christianity. Islam’s maturation, incomplete
but well under way by c. 1000, was brought about by a constellation of theo-
logians, legal scholars, philosophers, and indeed artists and architects, that
shone especially brightly in Iraq—above all Baghdad—and Iran, however
great the contribution made by Mediterranean lands such as Eg ypt or Spain.
26 Or they rebaptize Iraq and Iran as the Mediterranean, e.g., Netz, Transformation of mathematics
[3:25], much of which concerns mathematicians active in those regions. Cf. S. Stroumsa, Maimonides
[4:14], on a thinker steeped in the Babylonian as well as the Palestinian Talmud, and in the Khurasanian
Ibn Sīnā.
27 Cf. above, pp. 38–39.
28 S. D. Goitein, A Mediterranean society (Berkeley 1967–93) 1.59–70; Abulafia, Great Sea [4:15]
246–70.
29 Note Carl Becker’s debate with Ernst Troeltsch about whether Islam belongs to Asia or Europe:
Becker, Islamstudien [2:74] 1.24–32.
30 See, e.g., the contributions by D. Hartwig and R. Leicht to Hartwig and others (eds), “Im vollen
Licht der Geschichte” [1:6], 191–221; also T. Power, The Red Sea from Byzantium to the Caliphate AD
500–1000 (Cairo 2012) 27–28. Traditional accounts saw the Jews of Himyar as descendants of refugees
from the destruction of Jerusalem by Titus: Martyrdom of Arethas, Ethiopic version [ed. and tr. (Italian)
A. Bausi and A. Gori, Tradizioni orientali del “Martirio di Areta” (Florence 2006)] p. 121; S. Krauss,
“Talmudische Nachrichten über Arabien,” Zeitschrift der Deutschen Morgenländischen Gesellschaft 70
(1916) 330–31. Archaeolog y offers some support to links with Palestine: Gajda, Royaume de Himyar
[3:76] 245–47. Palestinian origins are also favored by C. Robin, “Quel judaïsme en Arabie?” (forthcom-
ing ), §K. 4 ad fin.