ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Iberian Globalities Through Ṣāʿid al-Andalusī’s Tabaqāt al-Umam

• In Event: The Long-longue Durée of Iberian Science and Medicine

English Abstract

The Middle Ages have traditionally been conceived as a period of “convergence” inherited from Antiquity, that precipitated a process of “divergence” or ethnoformation, eventually constituting broad social categories like “Western” and “Islamic”. Global frameworks deconstruct the “divergent” Middle Ages, exploring processes of social formation as result of interaction and exchange, rather than departure.

This paper examines Ṣāʿid al-Andalusī’s 11th-century Categories of Nations, or Tabaqāt (كِتاب طبَقات الاُمَم), that narrates the Andalusi scientific world in one of the first “universal” histories of science. The author understood Arabic and Andalusi scientific projects as inheritors of a broader world, spanning the Greek, Persian, and Indian scientific traditions, while mobilizing models of Afroeurasian scientific vocation.

The Tabaqāt also shows the limitation of the Global frameworks. The discursive universalism of its history is paradoxical, cementing the exceptionalism of al-Andalus from the rest of the Islamicate world, while elevating its cultural prominence. I analyze the Tabaqāt locally, within al-Andalus’ political and geographical rivalry with the Maghreb during Umayyad expansionism; and broadly, as al-Andalus attempted to establish itself as a cultural capital of the Islamic world.

Ultimately, I argue that the Tabaqāt expresses strengths and weaknesses of Global frameworks, deconstructing Medieval societies as isolated while also showing that “global” narratives are relative to the community at their center: the globe encompassed as far as the Andalusi perspective could reach, a perspective invested in distinguishing itself. Assertions of exceptionalism, once meant to justify universality, ultimately contributed to Iberia’s isolation and the waning of Islamicate science in the Peninsula.

Author

• Juan Bosco Garcia Rodriguez, University of California, San Diego