Breaking the Hermetic Seal: Eurasia and the Realm of Islam

R. Stephen Humphreys, University of California, Santa Barbara

The Muslim societies and cultures of the Middle Ages and early modern times (down to roughly 1700) are most commonly studied as an entity apart, as if they represented a relatively closed and self-sufficient complex. In this view, the world of Islam was hardly impervious to outside challenges and influences, but it was generally able to limit and control the terms on which it interacted with the outside world. One might picture Islam not as encased within a hard shell but, rather, as surrounded by a highly elastic, penetrable, but tough membrane. It must be stressed that this image does not simply represent an "Orientalist" construction in the Saidian sense; it is the way in which the mainstream of medieval Muslim writers (and of course many modern ones) thought about themselves.