Routes and Realms: The Power of Place in the Early Islamic World by Zayde Antrim (review)

Routes and Realms analyzes how Muslim authors of the ninth through eleventh centuries thought about geography, both on its own terms and as a reflection of contemporaneous paradigms and discourses within their respective societies. To this end, Antrim defines a thematic category traversing several genres of early Islamic literature, “the discourse of place,” in which the representation of territory takes center stage, serving as “a powerful vehicle for articulating desire, claiming authority, and establishing belonging” (p. 1). The book is divided into three sections, which include analyses of themes pertaining to home, city, and region.

Part 1/chapter 1 focuses on the theme of homeland (watan), particularly nostalgia for one’s homeland as expressed in Arabic literary anthologies. Antrim cites a variety of poetry and short anecdotes from these sources that compare watan to a nurturing agent. For instance, separation from one’s homeland might be expressed metaphorically in terms of separation from one’s family, life source (like water), or one’s youth. Homelands were furthermore conceived as fluid to the extent that they were not always connected to one’s place of origin, as life circumstances might require one to find a new homeland, such as for patronage or for devotional purposes. Likewise, watan could refer to the vast tracts of land on which the Bedouin migrated, but might also be more specifically applied to cities and settled existence. The apparent dissonance between these latter two themes reflects a clash in world-view that was prevalent during the period under consideration between those authors who idealized the desert nomads as living a pristine existence versus a distinctively urban sensibility rooted in the tastes and refinement of the cities.

Part 2 is devoted to textual representations of the city. In chapter 2, Antrim examines portrayals of Mecca, Jerusalem, and Baghdad in fada’il (merits) literature and Arabic topographical histories. She argues that the foundational/conquest narratives of these cities serve to situate them in the broader scope of Islamic sacred history by providing them a place in the Abrahamic heritage. Such legitimizing narratives evince a capacity for negotiation and compromise with previous traditions in order to foster a sense of belonging for that city’s inhabitants within the larger Muslim community, rather than a total break with the past. Chapter 3 focuses on descriptions of urban “built environments” as a form of textual performance by which authors articulated, among other things, their admiration for a particular city from both a nativist and outsider perspective, nostalgia for a city’s past greatness, and loyalty/criticism of the city’s ruling regime. Furthermore, descriptions of cities often occur in a comparative context, reflecting both deep-seated intercity rivalries as well as competition on a personal level between urban intellectuals.

Part 3 examines how regions are conceptualized in early Islamic geographical literature. Chapter 4 approaches early Islamic schemes dividing the world into regions as reflective of a power process. Basing themselves on Hellenistic and Perso-Indian geographic models, Antrim demonstrates that Muslim authors who thought on a global scale tended to depict the areas and political-religious enterprises that they identified with as standing at the center of their world schemes. They also applied “climatic determinism” to both characterize and rank the various peoples of the world and their respective regions. Descriptions of regions found in early Islamic “roadmap” texts likewise reflect variant political contexts and authorial interests.

Chapter 5 focuses on Islamic geographical literature that deals more specifically with the mamlakat al-Islam (realm of Islam) itself. Antrim opens this chapter by analyzing the geographers of the “Balkhi school,” which included Ibn Hawqal, al-Istrakhri, and al-Muqaddassi. Antrim shows how these geographers’ descriptions of regions functioned in tandem with their illustrated maps as a textual performance, through which they made legible to a contemporaneous audience their contradistinctive conception of geography. On the one hand, the Balkhi school representatives drew conspicuous...