2025 - The Zīrids and the Islamic world in the 10th and 11th centuries, by Corisande Fenwick
The study of medieval North Africa is experiencing a renaissance. Recent scholarship has transformed our understanding of North Africa’s complex history in the early Islamic period. The Zīrids (972-1148), a Berber Sanhaja dynasty, were the first of the great Berber dynasties to rule North Africa with their reach extending from Morocco to Cyrenaica at times. Yet unlike the Almoravids and Almohads, Zīrid Ifrīqiya has not received sustained scholarly attention since Hady Roger Idris’s (1962) landmark history which notably overlooked material culture. This neglect is explained, in part, by the enduring power of the (much-contested) ‘Hilali myth’ and Ibn Khaldun’s vivid descriptions of widespread destruction of settlements, agriculture and trade networks by the Banū Hilāl tribes, and in part, by a tendency to view North Africa as a cultural backwater whose artistic production was derivative of Fatimid Cairo or Umayyad Cordoba. However, Zīrid Ifrīqiya was no periphery. At the crossroads of the Mediterranean and the Sahara, the region – and its peoples – played a central role in transregional political, economic, craft and scholarly networks in the fragmented but increasingly connected world of the 10th-12th centuries.
This project aims to bring scholars together to reassess Zīrid Ifrīqiya and its role in the Islamic world from the inside out through a major international conference at UCL’s Institute of Archaeology and state-of-the-field monograph.
Corisande Fenwick is Professor of Late Antique and Islamic Archaeology and Vice-Dean Research for the Faculty of Social and Historical Sciences at UCL. Her research focuses on empire and everyday life in the late antique and Islamic world, particularly North Africa.
Photo credits: Riad Hadjsadok, MMA 2007.191 (Bifolium from the Mushal al-Hadina, Zirid artwork)
