In the early period, Medina was the destination of most Andalusis who travelled to the East in their search of knowledge. Medina was associated with the Maliki legal school that prevailed in Muslim Iberia and eventually also in North Africa. The centrality of Malikism favoured different attempts at spreading the conviction that Medina was somehow ‘re-located’ in Cordoba. This lecture deals with such attempts and with specific practices that through time maintained the special link between the Maghrib and Medina.
Maribel Fierro is Research Professor at the Centre of Human and Social Sciences
at the Higher Council for Scientific Research (CSIC-Spain). She has worked and
published on the political, religious and intellectual history of al-Andalus and the Islamic West, on Islamic law, on the construction of orthodoxy and on violence and its representation in Medieval Arabic sources. Among her publications: Abd al-Rahman III: The first Cordoban caliph (2005), The Almohad revolution. Politics and religion in The Islamic West during the twelfth-thirteenth centuries (2012).
The lecture is available online.
