Mapping Territories, Old and New
Featuring our new YouTube initiative and a conversation with Dr. Karen C. Pinto.
NBN Book of the Day on YouTube
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Here is one great Book of the Day interview to get you started. Hussein Mohsen speaks with Rob Dunn about Delicious: The Evolution of Flavor and How It Made Us Human, co-written with Monica Sanchez.
King: A Life
Jonathan Eig’s massive new biography of Martin Luther King Jr. is, in the words of host Tom Discenna, “a rich and layered biography of this extraordinarily complex person.” Eig digs into the familial and personal relationships of Dr. King, and the depth and brilliance of his thoughts.
Scholarly Sources
Dr. Karen C. Pinto is an Associate Scholar in Religious Studies at the University of Colorado-Boulder and the author of Medieval Islamic Maps: An Exploration.
Q: You study maps and the history of geography. Do you have any favorite maps or compilations?
A: The 3-folio map of the Mediterranean in an 11th century copy of Ibn Ḥawqal’s manuscript from 1086 CE is by far the earliest mimetic image of the Mediterranean. It may even have influenced the development of the European portolan chart!
Another favorite is the earliest extant example of a KMMS map of the world dated to 1193 that was probably the personal copy of one of the most famous Holy Roman Emperors and King of Sicily, the peripatetic Frederick II (r. 1198–50), referred to as ‘Stupor Mundi’ and known for his desire for universal power.
Q: What are you reading right now?
A: Ramzi Rouighi’s Inventing the Berbers. I am reading it for online digital work on a medieval European T-O map that is annotated in Arabic. I am completing an interactive study of the map for DigitalMappa.
Q: What is your favorite book or essay to assign to give to people and why?
A: Richard Bulliet’s 1975 classic: The Camel and the Wheel.
In order to understand the pre-modern world, especially the pre-modern, route-based maps that I love so much and have devoted more than 30 years of my life to understanding, we need to remember that before the Renaissance age of tall ships, navigation, and the development of maritime mapping, long distance travel was an intense overland journey through unforgiving terrain ranging from China on one extreme to Europe and Africa on the other. The intrepid camel and the invention of a new ‘North Arabian’ saddle made this far-flung world trade possible. Bulliet’s book lays out the development of the camel saddle and the revolution in trade and transportation that the new saddle wrought from the first century AD onwards. The Arab owners of camels got such a boost from the rise in camel caravan trade that in the third century the Roman emperor Phillipus (r. 244-249) was an Arab. The camel played a crucial role in the rise of Islam, too. Bulliet lays out the details in his seminal book that deserves to be much better known (Also see this journal article for more).
Q: Is there a book you read as a student that had a particularly profound impact on your trajectory as a scholar?
A: Chicago’s History of Cartography series, edited by J. B. Harley and David Woodward, in particular Vol. 2 about Islamic and Indian cartography that was guest edited by Ahmet Karamustafa and came out in 1991 just as I was completing my MA essay on the “Surat Bahr al-Rum: The Mediterranean in the Muslim Cartographical Imagination,” which went on to win SSRC’s Ibn Khaldun prize. It is also the first book that I wrote a book review on. This volume led me to the inspirational work of David King on Islamic sacred geography, Qibla maps, and astrolabes.
Q: Which deceased writer would you most like to meet and why?
A: Abūʾl-Qāsim ʿAlī al-Naṣībī Ibn Ḥawqal (better known as Ibn Ḥawqal) who lived in the second half of the tenth century. He came from the Jazira region of Iraq and traveled widely in the Islamic world. He produced the most unusual set of 21 maps for his carto-geographical manuscript appropriately titled Kitāb Ṣūrat al-Arḍ (Book of the Picture of the World). I have devoted more than 3 decades to understanding the maps in copies of Ibn Ḥawqal’s manuscript and that of his mentor, al-Iṣṭakhrī’s Kitāb al-Masālik wa-al-Mamālik (Book of Routes and Kingdoms).
Their maps contain many mysterious places and spaces that are hard to decode. I would love an opportunity to resolve some of the mysteries by meeting with the original tenth century authors in person to end the guessing games about some the hard to identify places as well as to discuss their vision behind the forms that they used for their cartographic visions of the world.
Q: What's the best book you've read in the past year?
A: Simon O’Meara’s The Ka’aba Orientations: Readings in Islam’s Ancient House. Aside from being one of the best and most delicately written books on Islamic religious material culture that I have read in a long time, this book is also a crucial resource for the book that I am working on these days that explores “What is Islamic about Islamic Maps?”
Q: Have you seen any films, documentaries, or museum exhibitions that left an impression on you recently?
A: BBC podcast about Mamadou Barry who got on his bike in Guinea with one change of clothes and a piece of paper with a basic route map made up solely of the names of the main cities he needed to pass in order to reach his dream destination of the University of al-Azhar in Cairo thousands of miles away.
It goes to show that we humans move from place to place along the pathway of simple route-based maps. I am fascinated by pre-modern maps, in particular the route maps of the KMMS series so I found especially compelling the story of Barry’s striking route-map based journey in our day and age of fancy GPS maps that we can call up so easily on our phones.
Q: What do you plan on reading next?
A: Adam Bursi’s Traces of the Prophets: Relics and Spaces in Early Islam.
I am working to complete a new book on “What is Islamic about Islamic Maps?” and I am keen to read this new contribution as I contemplate and pen my new book.
For my other in process book on the Islamic maps of the Maghrib and the Mediterranean, I plan to study the recent volume by Thomas Burman, Brian Catlos, and Mark Meyerson on The Sea in the Middle: The Mediterranean World, 650-1650.
Dr. Karen C. Pinto on the New Books Network
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