All posts tagged: medieval

Beyond Esoteric Muses

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“At moonset  I was born  Dawn leaned over the universe  And night’s breast  In rage tore its tunic.”  ~Malika al-Assimi   —  The women are for expansion. Sinuous, flexuous, their gentle force pervades through the motley Silk Road, at moonrise, at moonset, captured in the archaic record of the times and sealed in the arc of the human story. A woman’s story.  The archaic Muslim woman. Muse of orientalist writing: the literary cannon across time and distance; folk tales and oral traditions; beguiling the senses of male poets; and perplexing the ethnocentric gaze. Yet what was the lesser explored reality of the Muslim woman of the Medeival period and the Middle Ages, the woman who was infinitely more than a captivating and well-documented beauty and object of desire? Who were the woman merchants of Abbasid Baghdad; the caravan investors of Damascus; the property-owning widows of Cairo; and the brains behind marriage alliances through which salient and pivotal trade networks would proliferate and flourish? The powerful women from grasslands of Central Asia to the oscillating deserts of …

Arab Fashion from the Past and Present: An Under-represented Costume Tradition

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From soap making and cosmetics to costume in the Abbasid Caliphate, Nehal of the blog Lugatism explores the rich history of adornment through the Middle Ages. Read on to learn why she began an odyssey into Medieval Arabo-Islamic beauty practices and costume culture. Since I was a child, I was an avid consumer of American entertainment. If an average Jane like me wanted to find out how a certain culture dressed in a chosen epoch, they could look up a movie or a show about said culture. The popularity of Hollywood and other global entertainment industries made this effort easier.  The majority of Hollywood’s historical films or period-re-enactment dramas are notorious for their, let’s say, “white-centric” portrayal. They either tell the story of a white character in a historical setting or sometimes a story set in a historical period with a white protagonist.  The woefully problematic history of Hollywood’s negative portrayal of non-white minorities has accumulated quite a long rap sheet over the years, which has garnered the disparagement of various audiences. Alongside biased and prejudiced …