Right: The seven earths and the seven heavens surrounded by the mansions of the moon, in profile. Left: The seven earths and seven heavens transformed to the “earth of the Day of Resurrection.” MS Istanbul TIEM 1845, fol 91b - 92a.
Arabic Cosmographical Maps: Reworking Ancient Traditions
Ali Karjoo-Ravary
Columbia University
This lecture is part of the ISAW Library events series and will take place in person at ISAW.
Registration is required at THIS LINK.
Prof. Karjoo-Ravary will briefly introduce how the Arabic and Islamic manuscript tradition inherited and adapted images of the late antique cosmos. He will then focus on a series of cosmographical maps from the 12th century Andalusian Sufi thinker, Ibn al-ʾArabi (d. 1240), who split his depiction of the layered cosmos into nine separate folios to criticize the limits and “tightness” of the received cosmological tradition of the philosophers. After considering the complex text-image-medium relations at work in that sequence, he will conclude by considering the reception of these images in the visual history of the Islamic world and how we perceive this aspect of the past in our modern context today.
Ali Karjoo-Ravary is a historian of medieval Islam and the Richard W. Bulliet Assistant Professor of Islamic History at Columbia University. His research examines the late medieval intellectual, political, and social history of Islam. His first book, The Alchemy of Kingship: Politics and Cosmology in Medieval Islam, is forthcoming with Yale University Press.
The lecture will be followed by a reception.
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Contact
David M. Ratzan, dr128@nyu.edu.