HISTORY CRAFTER - THE REAL AND SIMULATED HISTORY

  'MEETING' (Copyright 2020 Salvatore Puleio) ARABS AND CHRISTIANITY IN THE LATE ANTIQUITY   During the IV and V centuries of the Vulgar Era, the Arabs came to a close contact with the Empire of the Romans; this way, the immense territory of Syria and Mesopotamia met a religious tradition which was strictly linked to the political issues of power and control. In fact, the ‘throne and the altar’ have always been connected; after Constantine, however, Christianity shaped and influenced in a significant way the history of the Empire of the Caesars. The religious sphere pervaded thus every issue of the public life, in Constantinople as well as in the periphery; as a matter of fact, Christianity was used as a tool to subject people to the imperial ideology. Although framed as a religious discourse, it came to be a process of cultural assimilation; however powerful, this mechanism was not always so easy to perform. In fact, we have to bear in mind the particularities of the religions

'Dancing Polygons' (copyright 2020 Puleio Salvatore) L’ARABIA PRIMA DELL’ISLAM   Questo articolo è già stato pubblicato dal sottoscritto in lingua inglese; tuttavia, considerando che la divulgazione di questo tema è pressoché nullo, specialmente in italiano, ho deciso di renderlo fruibile anche in italiano.   Effettivamente, quando si pensa alla Penisola Araba, e non solamente all’Arabia Saudita, la prima associazione che viene fatta è all’Islam; a quasi 14 secoli di distanza dalla comparsa ed ascesa del Puro Monoteismo, non stupisce che l’Islam sia diventato anche una cultura, e non semplicemente una religione.   La percezione generale, dunque, è che la situazione sia sempre stata la stessa; invece, la storia di questi luoghi e civiltà è molto lunga, e precede di millenni l’avvento dell’Islam. Tale aspetto, tuttavia, viene quasi taciuto, e quasi nulla viene divulgato; attualmente, in effetti, sembra che la storia dell’Arabia pre-islamica sia confinata ad un gruppetto di espert

THE  HARAM DECLARATION AND THE   MECCAN CONSTITUTION    In the previous posts, I discussed the presence and meaning of harams in pre-Islamic Hijaz, Madinah (or Medina) was the site of one of them, as we already know; now it seems interesting to see what happened after the advent of Islam. In this article, and eventually in the next ones, we’ll try to answer this question, in order to understand what happened and how the sacred spaces were configured in Islamic Madinah. As a matter of fact, Prophet Muhammad made use of the former haram after he fled to Madinah; the case of Medina is different from the others, as we have many information about this event. For Makkah (or Mecca) we cannot know how the site became an haram , since the Holy Quran does not provide any historical account, in the case of Medina we are luckier. The same goes for the site of Waji, as already noted in the previous article; in the case of Medina, on the contrary, the situation is different.   I am not denying that

MADINAH: A DIFFERENT CITY When we think at Madinah, the mind associates this place to the Prophet Muhammad, as he found refuge there, when his own people turned against him; today, Madinah is one of the two holy cities in Islam. Madinah is Muslim then, but it is not always been the case; in fact, Islam was revealed by Prophet Muhammad some 1,400 years ago. The history of Madinah, though, is much older, and bear witness to a history which is now almost forgotten and relegated to the realm of a few historians, experts and curious people who may wonder what was there before this city became one of the strongholds of Islam, before it came to be known as the ‘city of the Prophet’.   The religious landscape of the Pre-Islamic Hijaz   Before Islam changed forever the city and society of Madinah, of the Hijaz region, the rest of Arabia, and the world at large, the landscape was very different; in general terms, there were, in the region of Hijaz, where Madinah is located, many shrines where po