Abstract
In the early eleventh century Muslim Sicily was plunged in a catastrophic civil war (fitna) that would determine its end. The Normans invaded Sicily in the midst of this struggle, eventually conquering the entire island.
Sicilian Muslim poets were witnesses to these events, which they immortalized in their verses. This chapter focuses on two of these poets, analyzing how they chose to frame the Norman invasion of Sicily within narratives of the Sicilian fitna. By portraying the downfall of their homelands as the logical outcome of fitna—a term charged with moral and eschatological implications—these Sicilian poets sounded a last appeal for Maghribī Islam to rally together, and in so doing carved a space for their own voice as active shapers of their community.
This chapter will refer to fitna in its widely accepted meaning of “civil unrest” and more precisely “to a notion of fitna defined as disturbances, or even civil war, involving the adoption of doctrinal attitudes which endanger the purity of the Muslim faith” (“Fitna” in Encylopaedia of Islam). It will also explore the usage of the term in Arabic historiography and in the Qurʾān.
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03 December 2022
This book was inadvertently published with the incorrect Arabic text. This has now been amended throughout the book to the correct Arabic text.
Notes
- 1.
William Granara, Narrating Muslim Sicily: War and Peace in the Medieval Mediterranean World (London: I.B. Tauris, 2019), 9.
- 2.
Alex Metcalfe, The Muslims of Medieval Italy (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009), 2. Granara, Narrating Muslim Sicily, 4.
- 3.
Annliese Nef, “La fitna sicilienne: une fitna inachevée?” Médiévales 60, (2011): 103–16. Giuseppe Mandalà, “Una nueva fuente para la historia de la Sicilia islámica. La revuelta de Aḥmad Ibn Qarhab (300–304/913–916) en un pasaje de al-Muqtabis V de Ibn Ḥayyān” Al-Qanṭara, 33, no, 2 (2012): 349.
- 4.
For recent insights on Siculo-Arabic historical narratives see Granara, Narrating Muslim Sicily, 34–41.
- 5.
Ibn al-Athīr, Kitaˉb al-Kaˉmil f ı‐ al-Taˉrı‐kh, vol. 8 (Beirut: Dār al-Kutub al-ʿilmiyya, 2003), 471.
- 6.
“kabı‐ru-hum wa-ṣaghı‐ru-hum”: Ibn Athīr, al-Kaˉmil, 47.
- 7.
“Thumma al-ṣiqilliyyı‐n rajaʿa baʿḍu-hum ʿalaˉ baʿḍ”: ibid.
- 8.
Ibn al-Athīr. al-Kaˉmil, 472–3.
- 9.
Michele Amari, Biblioteca Arabo-Sicula (Turin and Rome: E. Loescher, 1880), 141.
- 10.
Historians have already underscored the derivative character of Arabic chronicles on Muslim Sicily, all possibly drawing on the lost chronicle of ʿIzz al-Dīn Abū Muḥammad ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz Ibn Shaddād (twelfth c.)—see Mandalà, Una nueva fuente para la historia de la Sicilia islámica, 347 and—, Review of Narrating Muslim Sicily. War and Peace in the Medieval Mediterranean World, written by William Granara. Medieval Encounters, 29, no, 4 (2020): 507–511, esp. 507.
- 11.
Amari, Biblioteca Arabo-Sicula, 290.
- 12.
Amari, Biblioteca Arabo-Sicula, 97.
- 13.
Ibn Khaldūn identifies him as “lord of Sicily;” see Amari, Biblioteca Arabo-Sicula, 201. Ibn al-Jūzī has Ibn al-Baʿbāʿ, governor in Palermo, summoning the Normans, instead of Ibn al-Thumna; see Amari, Biblioteca Arabo-Sicula, 524.
- 14.
Metcalfe, The Muslims of Medieval Italy, 93.
- 15.
Metcalfe, The Muslims of Medieval Italy, 95.
- 16.
Annliese Nef, “La fitna sicilienne: une fitna inachevée?” Médiévales 60, (2011): 104.
- 17.
Ibid., 103.
- 18.
Louis Gardet, “Fitna” in Encyclopaedia of Islam 2nd. edition (Leiden: Brill, 1991), 930.
- 19.
Interestingly the Andalusian traveler Ibn Jubayr, during his visit to Sicily, would use fitna to describe the allure of Norman holy buildings in Palermo, see Granara, Narrating Muslim Sicily, 148–54.
- 20.
Tr. Yusuf Ali.
- 21.
Edward William Lane, An Arabic-English Lexicon (London and Edinburgh: Williams and Norgate, 1873), khaˉlafa.
- 22.
Anna A. Akasoy, “Al-Andalus in Exile: Identity and diversity in Islamic Intellectual History.” In Christlicher Norden-Muslimischer Süden Ansprüche und Wirklichkeiten von Christen, Juden und Muslimen auf der Iberischen Halbinsel im Hoch- und Spätmittelalter, edited by Matthias M. Tischler and Alexander Fidora, (Münster: Aschendorff, 2013), 329–34.
- 23.
Roberta Denaro, “‘And God Dispersed Their Unity’: Historiographical Patterns in Accounts of the End of Muslim Rule in Sicily and al-Andalus.” Writing in Times of Turmoil: Sicily, al-Andalus, and the Maghrib, edited by Nicola Carpentieri and Carol Symes, special issue of The Medieval Globe 5, no. 2 (2019): 105–26.
- 24.
On “Ifranjiyyaˉt” see: Nizar F. Hermes, “The Poet(ry) of Frankish enchantment: the Ifranjiyyāt of Ibn Qaysarānī.” Middle Eastern Literatures, 20, no. 3 (2011): 267–28.
- 25.
Beatrice Gruendler, Medieval Arabic Praise Poetry: Ibn Al-Rumi and the Patron’s Redemption (London: Routledge. 2013), 6.
- 26.
Ibn al-Qaṭṭāʿ, Al-Durra al-Khaṭı‐ra ƒı‐ Shuʿaraˉʾ al-Jazı‐ra, edited by Bashir al-Bakush, (Beirut: Dār al-Gharb al-Islāmī, 1995), 159.
- 27.
Alexander Elinson, “Loss Written in Stone: Ibn Shuhayd’s Rithāʾ for Cordoba and Its Place in the Arabic Elegiac Tradition,” in Transforming Loss into Beauty: Essays on Arabic Literature and Culture in Honor of Magda Al-Nowaihi, edited by Marlé Hammond and Dana Sajdi (Cairo: American University in Cairo Press, 2008), 79–114.
- 28.
See Denaro, And God Dispersed Their Unity, 105–26.
- 29.
Nile Green, “Ostrich Eggs and Peacock Feathers: Sacred Objects as Cultural Exchange between Christianity and Islam.” Masaq, 18, no. 1 (2006), 27–66.
- 30.
Granara, Narrating Muslim Sicily, 16.
- 31.
Ibn Ḥawqal. Kitaˉb ṣu‐rat al-Arḍ, edited by J. H. Kramers (Leiden: Brill, 1938), 118–31.
- 32.
Ibn Ḥamdīs. Dı‐waˉn, edited by Ihsan Abbas (Beirut: Dār Ṣādir, 1960), 31.
- 33.
On the usage of ʿilj/ʿulūj in Ifranjiyyaˉt see Hermes, The Poet(ry) of Frankish Enchantment, 267–87.
- 34.
See Metcalfe, The Muslims of Medieval Italy, 44–5, Granara, Narrating Muslim Sicily, 79–82.
- 35.
See Denaro, And God Dispersed Their Unity, 105–26.
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Carpentieri, N. (2022). The End of Muslim Sicily: A Poetics of Fitna. In: Sohmer Tai, E., Reyerson, K.L. (eds) Mapping Pre-Modern Sicily. Mediterranean Perspectives. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-04915-6_10
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