Lecture | LUCIS What's New?! series
From the Maghrib to the Mashriq? The Sacrifice of She-Camels among the Fatimids and Safavids
- Date
- Thursday 4 November 2021
- Time
- Explanation
- Please register below
- Serie
- What's New?! Fall Lecture Series 2021
- Address
-
Lipsius
Cleveringaplaats 1
2311 BD Leiden - Room
- 1.48 and online
This lecture will also be streamed online. Please register below to receive the link to the online lecture.
This lecture – based on previous research to which new materials are now added – deals with a ritual first attested in the Maghrib under the Fatimids, when the third imam-caliph personally and publicly sacrificed a she-camel during the Festival of Sacrifice. The ritual arose in a very specific context, but it was continued even after the Fatimids moved to Egypt. Similar practices were later adopted by other rulers, most especially by the Safavids. Evocations of the Fatimid practice can also be found under the Cordoban Umayyads and the Normans of Sicily. My main interest lies in exploring the extent to which it is possible to establish a direct link between the Fatimid practice and the rest, and if so, why it has not been explored before.
About Maribel Fierro
Maribel Fierro (PhD, Madrid, 1985) is a Research Professor at the Instituto de Lenguas y Culturas del Mediterráneo y Oriente Próximo in Madrid, Spain. Her research focuses on the political, religious, and intellectual history of al-Andalus and the Islamic West. She has also worked on Islamic law, the construction of orthodoxy and the persecution of heresies, and violence and its representation in Medieval Arabic sources. Among her latest publications are The Routledge Handbook of Muslim Iberia, ‘Abd Al-Rahman III: The First Cordoban Caliph, and The Almohad Revolution: Politics and Religion in the Islamic West during the Twelfth-Thirteenth Centuries.