My book entitled Creating the Mediterranean: Maps and the Islamic Imagination treats the subject of the Islamic visual representations of the Mediterranean. The book tracks the history of the Islamic visualization of the sea from the time geography was created by Islamic state bureaucrats located mainly in the central Islamic lands to the later men of the field, specifically the sea captains located in the western Islamic lands. I begin with examples of medieval maps, like those of Ibn Ḥawqal and al-Idrīsī in the fourth/tenth and sixth/twelfth centuries, and end with the early modern cartographers such as al-Sharfī and Piri Reis in the tenth/sixteenth century. The samples I have studied, which are located mostly in Turkish, European, and North American collections, include a series of Maghribi maritime maps and much of the Ottoman cartographic production of the ninth/fifteenth and early tenth/sixteenth centuries. A narrative has emerged from this investigation, one that reveals that the identities of the authors and mapmakers seemed to change, or metamorphose along with the rest of the elements that constitute the maps: their readers or viewers, their style and structure, and their textual content.
By focusing on a corpus of sixty-three little- or never- studied cartographic works, I suggest that the dominant concept of the Mediterranean, the one espoused by the twentieth-century French historian Fernand Braudel, fails to account for the Muslims’ view of the sea, in spite of the fact that many, or most, inhabitants along its shores were Muslims. Rather than beginning with the European’s view of the Mediterranean, I use maps to reveal the Islamic perception of this important body of water. My research shows a Mediterranean that is essentially different from the pre-modern European perceptions emphasized by Braudel, which see it simply as a maritime space. In this work, I establish the existence, among pre-modern Muslims, of a Braudelean “historical Mediterranean,” an anthropogenic space extending beyond the shores. Whereas in Braudel’s narrative it was he who discovers such a broader space, in contrast, I show the precedence of a similarly perceived space in pre-modern Islamic representations. Thus, the Braudelean Mediterranean as we know it was first shaped in fourth-/tenth-century Islamic sources.
While I focus on the depiction of a specific region, my book directly confronts the issue of defining mapmaking from the perspective of Islamic visual culture. The cartographic sign possesses a hybrid nature not only throughout time, but also in the same historical context. Its definition, thus, could not have been isolated from the intentions of its makers or its audiences. The intentions of pre-modern cartographers and their audiences, including their contemporary narrators, reflect a certain non-graphic understanding of the cartographic work.
The absence of early works on the theory and history of Islamic art mandates micro-studies throughout and across the Islamic sources in order to locate any patterns of usage in relation to the perception and categorization of artworks. In my book, I pursue this approach by working through a large database not only of Islamic maps but also of texts that deal with maps or simply interact with maps, in a codicological context. This has proven to be a very rich source of new information by which we can understand vision and cognition in specific cultural and chronological contexts.
This book would not be possible without the constant support of Renata Holod, who assisted through the process of research and proof reading. I would like also to thank Ahmet Karamustafa who provided continuous help and mentoring regarding the analysis of maps in specific. I must also emphasize the very positive interaction I have had with scholars who contributed in major ways to the field of Islamic cartography, such as Emilie Savage-Smith, Yossef Rappoport, and Karen Pinto.
This work was also possible because of the help provided by the staff of major libraries such as the