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

This project outlines the fronts and border areas of the Muslim Caliphate in the period between 950-650 AD (under the rule of the late Chief Don, the Umayyad Dynasty and the Abbasid Dynasty). Peripherals that attracted minorities to settle in. Among these communities we can name the Armenian Jews, the Assyrians, the Berbers, etc. This project focuses on the Jewish community.

In the first phase, the project characterizes the structure of the different fronts of the Caliphate, as they are described in the classical literature of Muslim geography. We have created a database that includes the following criteria: place name, location, place type, administrative hierarchy, source description and source link. We combined our data with additional information available online, for example in Wikidata and the al-Ṯurayyā project. The gazetteer (index of places) we built is largely based on the Dictionary of the Countries (Muʿjam al-buldān) of the Muslim geographer Yaqat al-Hamawi (1179–1229) whose composition is available thanks to the contribution of projects such as Shamela, Kitab and OpenITI. The latest project (OpenITI) develops digital tools for automatic text recognition and text structure in Arabic from the pre-modern period in Markdown format.

This phase also includes the creation of a digital map based on the data base and a comparative geographic analysis of military and settlement layout, demographic layout with an emphasis on the minority communities, administrative division and connections of settlement networks and activities between the various fronts.

The second phase of the project deals with the main research question and analyzes the unique characteristics of the Jewish community in the border areas, while analyzing aspects of demography, lifestyle and occupation. For this purpose, we will use the tools of information extraction and entity recognition (Named Entity Recognition) in the text on texts available in Hebrew, Arabic and English, which deal with the description of the Jews in these areas.

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Our Team

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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.
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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.
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Osama Abo Hariri - Tech Lead
Student (final semester) in information systems. Programmer in a caliphate mapping project.