Living on the Edge: The Minorities of the Muslim Caliphate’s Borderlands

The project portrays the frontiers and borderlands of the Muslim Caliphate in the period between 650-950 CE (under the later Rashidun and the Umayyad and Abbasid dynasties). The lengthy frontiers were, on the one hand, a central arena for commerce and military activity and, on the other hand, a peripheral zone that drew minorities to settle in these regions. Among the communities that inhabited them were the Jews, Armenians, Assyrians, Berbers, and many more; in the project, we focus on the Jewish community. 

The first stage of the project deals with characterizing the structure of the frontiers of the Caliphate, as described in the classical Muslim geography. We created a database containing the following criteria: place names, locations, place types, administrative hierarchy, place descriptions, and references. We reconciled the data with Wikidata and al-Ṯurayyā project. The Gazetteer (index of places) is profoundly based on Muʿjam al-buldān of Yāqūt al-Hamawi (1179–1229) which was made digitally available in the contribution of the Shamela, Kitab, and OpenITI projects. The OpenITI affords a machine-actionable corpus of premodern texts in Arabic by developing and using OCR (automatic text recognition) and structuring the resulting digital editions using a designated markdown format. This stage also includes digital mapping of the database and an analysis of geographical similarities in terms of military deployment, minority distribution, settlement densities, administrative division, and network relations of settlements and activities.  

 

The second stage of the project analyses the particular attributes of the Jewish community in the borderlands, assessing its demography, lifestyle, and activities. For that purpose, we will use information extraction and NER (Named Entity Recognition) methods from available premodern texts in Arabic, Hebrew, and English. 

For More Info

Our Team

מורן
Dr. Moran Zaga - Head Of Project
Researcher of historical borders in the Middle East, post-doctoral fellow in the Department of Civilizations of the Near East at the University of Chicago (supervised by Prof. David Shalon) and Eliyahu Laboratory at the University of Haifa (supervised by Prof. Ephraim Lev). Moran comes from the geographic discipline and specializes in geographic information systems (GIS). She has previously researched the creation of the borders of the United Arab Emirates and is currently engaged in analyzing the borders of the Arab-Muslim caliphate, with an emphasis on minorities living in these areas. Moran joined the digital humanities in 2018 and in her projects she explores the question of boundaries through Muslim geographical literature and using digital tools.
efraiml
Prof. Efraim Lev - Supervisor
Full professor in the Department of Israeli Studies and Dean of the Faculty of Humanities at the University of Haifa. His training as a historian, biologist and his archaeological background assisted him in his research on the herbal nutrition of ancient man in our region, the medicinal substances used in the Middle Ages, and the history of medicine and pharmacy in the Middle East from the Middle Ages to the early modern period. Prof. Lev makes extensive use of the Cairo Genizah and the Arab historical sources in his research and is a partner and facilitator of several research projects in the digital humanities carried out at Eliyahu Lab.
osama
Osama Abo Hariri - Tech Lead
Student (final semester) in information systems. Programmer in a caliphate mapping project.