Locating the Lost Islamic Archive | Marina Rustow

Ottoman History Podcast

E522 | State archives that function as a site of history scholarship are generally a modern creation. But in this episode, we discuss how past Islamic empires, while not necessarily leaving behind an organized archive used by scholars today, had much more sophisticated documentary practices than often assumed. As our guest Marina Rustow has recently shown in a new book entitled The Lost Archive, the relative absence of extant documentation, in the case of the Fatimid Caliphate of Cairo, belies a long paper trail. Using fragments of Fatimid documents surviving in the storeroom (genizah) of a Cairo synagogue, Rustow has identified traces of a lost Fatimid archive. In part one of this two-part interview with Professor Rustow, we explore how she followed a trail of scrap paper and scholarship to locate the lost archive of a medieval Islamic dynasty. More at https://www.ottomanhistorypodcast.com/2022/03/rustow1.html Marina Rustow is a social historian of the medieval Middle East at Princeton University. She has worked extensively on the documents of the Cairo Genizah, and her published works include Heresy and the Politics of Community: The Jews of the Fatimid Caliphate (2008) and The Lost Archive: Traces of a Caliphate in a Medieval Synagogue (2020). Rustow was a 2015 recipient of the MacArthur Fellowship. Chris Gratien is Assistant Professor of History at University of Virginia, where he teaches classes on global environmental history and the Middle East. His first book, The Unsettled Plain: An Environmental History of the Late Ottoman Frontier, explores the social and environmental transformation of Adana region of Southern Turkey during the 19th and 20th century. CREDITS Episode No. 522 Release Date: 1 March 2022 Recording Location: New York, NY / Charlottesville, VA Sound production by Chris Gratien Music: via Free Music Archive - A.A. Aalto - Canyon; Chad Crouch - Pacing