Early Islamic Monarchy in Comparative Perspective: How Different was the Caliphate?

  • Andrew Marsham (Speaker)

Activity: Academic talk or presentation types › Invited talk

Description

The idea of sacral monarchy--the ruler as in some sense God's deputy on earth--is taken as a starting point for a comparative assessment of the public articulation of monarchy in the early medieval world. From there, we can turn to the covenantal and promissory terms in which this status was often articulated, the audiences for such articulations and the causes of innovation and change. To adapt a question once posed by Janet Nelson: "Why within the common framework of the Late Antique monotheist inheritance, did accession rituals in early medieval Byzantium, in the early medieval western kingdoms, and in the early Caliphate diverge as they did? What has this divergence to tell us about the differences not just between different types of political power but between the three societies?"
Period9 Jun 2016
Held atUniv Hamburg, University of Hamburg, Germany

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