Introduction: Interconnection and Comparisons

Abstract

It is this journal’s ambition to foster multidisciplinary scholarship on the world in the period 750-1600, to showcase innovative research and approaches to pedagogy beyond medieval and Renaissance Studies’ traditional areas of focus, and to provide a forum for the fruitful discussion of the interconnection of broad regions and of meaningful comparison across diverse sites and contexts. We are proud to present in this second issue a selection of articles, essays, and reviews that do this and more. The issue opens with Fred Astren’s “The Gibeonite Gambit: Ḥarrānians, Karaites, and Khaybarī Jews on the Margins of Medieval Islamic Society,” which invites us to reflect on the uses of the past in the creation and development of group identities and on the power of established narratives. It examines how three non-Muslim minority groups, the Sabians (or “pagans” of Ḥarrān), the Karaite Jews, and the Khaybarī Jews made use of stories of their pasts before Muslim authorities in order to pursue their interests. Despite being separated by time and geography, the three cases relied on what Astren identifies as a “Gibeonite Gambit”: the attempt by each group …