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Kristina Richardson
  • Nau Hall S295
    Corcoran Department of History
    University of Virginia
    Charlottesville, VA 22904
In Middle Eastern cities as early as the mid-8th century, the Sons of Sasan begged, trained animals, sold medicinal plants and potions, and told fortunes. They captivated the imagination of Arab writers and playwrights, who immortalized... more
In Middle Eastern cities as early as the mid-8th century, the Sons of Sasan begged, trained animals, sold medicinal plants and potions, and told fortunes. They captivated the imagination of Arab writers and playwrights, who immortalized their strange ways in poems, plays, and the Thousand and One Nights. Using a wide range of sources, Richardson investigates the lived experiences of these Sons of Sasan, who changed their name to Ghuraba' (Strangers) by the late 1200s. This name became the Arabic word for the Roma and Roma-affiliated groups also known under the pejorative term 'Gypsies'.

This book uses mostly Ghuraba'-authored works to understand their tribal organization and professional niches as well as providing a glossary of their language Sin. It also examines the urban homes, neighborhoods, and cemeteries that they constructed. Within these isolated communities they developed and nurtured a deep literary culture and astrological tradition, broadening our appreciation of the cultural contributions of medieval minority communities. Remarkably, the Ghuraba' began blockprinting textual amulets by the 10th century, centuries before printing on paper arrived in central Europe. When Roma tribes migrated from Ottoman territories into Bavaria and Bohemia in the 1410s, they may have carried this printing technology into the Holy Roman Empire.
At the end of the 10th / 16th century in Aleppo, a weaver, cloth merchant, and poet named Kamāl al-Dīn would regularly take his time to fill blank pages with his varied observations. But it was not a linear narrative he produced, nor was... more
At the end of the 10th / 16th century in Aleppo, a weaver, cloth merchant, and poet named Kamāl al-Dīn would regularly take his time to fill blank pages with his varied observations. But it was not a linear narrative he produced, nor was it a diary. Rather, he scribbled down accounts on the political and social life of his city and the region; the climate; economic developments; his craft; poetry, much of it his own; anecdotes; reading excerpts; obituaries of dignitaries and friends; history. In doing so, Kamāl al-Dīn upends assumptions about literary agency, faith, and class in the Ottoman Arab provinces and thus gives us insights rarely seen in other contemporary works.
Only a fragment of what once must have been a sizeable work survives, now preserved in the Forschungsbibliothek Schloss Friedenstein in Gotha under the shelfmark MS orient. A 114. It represents the earliest known Arabic notebook of an artisan or merchant.
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Introduction Chapter 1: 'Ahat in Islamic Thought Chapter 2: Literary Networks in Mamluk Cairo Chapter 3: Recollecting and Reconfiguring Afflicted Literary Bodies Chapter 4: Transgressive Bodies, Transgressive Hadith Chapter 5: Public... more
Introduction
Chapter 1: 'Ahat in Islamic Thought
Chapter 2: Literary Networks in Mamluk Cairo
Chapter 3: Recollecting and Reconfiguring Afflicted Literary Bodies
Chapter 4: Transgressive Bodies, Transgressive Hadith
Chapter 5: Public Insults and Undoing Shame: Censoring the Blighted Body
Research Interests:
The autograph corpus of the Damascene scholar Ibn Ṭūlūn is dispersed throughout collections in North America, Europe and West Asia. As an initial probe into these materials, I will describe, identify, and analyze two compendia in the... more
The autograph corpus of the Damascene scholar Ibn Ṭūlūn is dispersed throughout collections in North America, Europe and West Asia. As an initial probe into these materials, I will describe, identify, and analyze two compendia in the Princeton University collection: Garrett MSS 196B and 1011H. They contain, among other things, a portion of "al-Thaghr al-bassām", an autograph draft of his biographical dictionary of Damascene judges, which is later than the one edited and published in 1959, and a heretofore missing portion of "al-Qalāʿid al-jawhariyya", his topography of al-Ṣāliḥiyya. I will also positively identify an anonymous, untitled manuscript in the Bodleian Library (Pococke 26) and show its relationship to the "al-Thaghr al-bassām" autograph.
This essay proposes that the invisibility of so-called Gypsies in Middle Eastern and Central Asian historiography derives from two linked phenomena. First, the work of nineteenth- and twentieth-century European and North American... more
This essay proposes that the invisibility of so-called Gypsies in Middle Eastern and Central Asian historiography derives from two linked phenomena. First, the work of nineteenth- and twentieth-century European and North American philologists, medievalists, and ethnographers delegitimized the languages of the “Strangers,” along with the cultures and histories that these languages expressed. The erasure of Strangers from modern historiography was nearly total. Second, the category of Strangers was transformed in the wake of the Holocaust as Roma activists drew on Nazi racial categories to base Roma identity on linguistic criteria.
In this paper I will analyze and trace samples of a tribal dialect that thrived in medieval Islam and has survived into the modern period. It is a mixed language or para-language that takes the form of embedding a substitutive... more
In this paper I will analyze and trace samples of a tribal dialect that
thrived in medieval Islam and has survived into the modern period. It is a mixed
language or para-language that takes the form of embedding a substitutive
vocabulary into the grammatical structure of other languages and it has historically
been spoken within communities of peripatetics and commercial nomads,
or Gypsy 1 groups. In 10th-century Arabic sources produced in Būyid Iraq and
Iran, non-speakers named this language lughat al-mukaddīn (the language of the
beggars), another demonstration of an outsider’s perspective. However, speakers
of this language called it lughat Banī Sāsān (the language of the Sāsān clan)
or lughat al-shaykh Sāsān (the language of the Master Sāsān). The language, in
name and application, was not identified with a territory or an ethnicity, but
rather with a peripatetic tribal group, the Banū Sāsān, whose members worked
as beggars and entertainers. As early as the 13th century, speakers of this language
referred to it as al-sīn and non-speakers named it lughat/lisān al-ghurabāʾ
(the language of the Gypsies). Between the 13th and 15th centuries, Arabic and
Persian writers composed texts explaining various Sāsānī words to their Arabicand
Persian-speaking audiences. Texts also survive from this period with snippets
of sīn prose and poetry.
K. Richardson, "New Evidence for Early Modern Ottoman Arabic and Turkish Sign Systems,” in Sign Language Studies 17.2 (Winter 2017): 172-92.
Research Interests:
In pre-Islamic Arabia pale, shimmery eyes (zurq al-'uyūn) were overwhelmingly associated with negative character traits. In this paper I examine usages of classical Arabic words with the z-r-q root to understand how they are differently... more
In pre-Islamic Arabia pale, shimmery eyes (zurq al-'uyūn) were overwhelmingly associated with negative character traits. In this paper I examine usages of classical Arabic words with the z-r-q root to understand how they are differently mobilised in the Qur'ān, Qur'ānic commentaries, hadith, early medical treatises and words of adab. Z R Q could signify "ill-omened", "deceitful", "blind", and I will show how these definitions structured and reproduced rivalries between tribal groups (e.g. the Umayyads and the Abbasids), between Muslims and perceived Others (e.g. Muslims and Christians), and within local Muslim groups (e.g. supporters of Mu'āwiya and 'Alī, Sunnis and Shiis).
Research Interests:
Researchers of Islam and Islamic cultures and societies have approached the topic of the body from various theoretical positions, though work on disabled bodies is decidedly more rare. This de-emphasis can be attributed, in part, to the... more
Researchers of Islam and Islamic cultures and societies have approached the topic of the body from various theoretical positions, though work on disabled bodies is decidedly more rare. This de-emphasis can be attributed, in part, to the historical development of the field of disability studies. Critical disability studies only emerged as a field with a defined methodology in the 1970s in the United States and the United Kingdom. Initially, disability scholars focused primarily on histories of modern North America and the United Kingdom, and these areas are still heavily represented in such journals as Disability Studies Quarterly and Journal of Religion, Disability and Health. In other journals, such as Sign Language Studies, the representation of studies of non-Western societies is strong. As will be shown in this bibliography, sources in western European and Middle Eastern languages are emerging in the discipline, though there remains much more research to be undertaken.
Shihab al-Din al-Hijazi (1388-1471) was an unexceptional legal student in Mamluk Cairo, who, at the age of 24, overdosed on marking nut, a potent plant drug valued for its memory-enhancing properties. As a result of the overdose, boils... more
Shihab al-Din al-Hijazi (1388-1471) was an unexceptional legal student in Mamluk Cairo, who, at the age of 24, overdosed on marking nut, a potent plant drug valued for its memory-enhancing properties. As a result of the overdose, boils broke out all over al-Hijazi's body, he was unable to eat or sleep, and he lost significant cognitive power. After recovering from the overdose, he abandoned his legal studies and became a leading poet. Most interestingly, al-Hijazi wrote a letter to his dear friend Salah al-Din al-Asyuti (d. 1455) on the tenth night of overdose detailing his suffering, his social isolation and the solace he had found with an unidentified Turkish slave soldier who was suffering the same physical and social discomforts. The letter is an indictment of his fellow Cairenes who had ignored or mocked him in his illness, though the non-Arab, unfree soldier condemns most forcefully the social body of 15th-century Cairo and their misguided constructions of blighted bodies.
In the latest edition of Let's Talk Mediterranean, Brian Catlos and Sharon Kinoshita interview interview Kristina Richardson, whose article, "Tracing a Gypsy Mixed Language through Medieval and Early Modern Arabic and Persian Literature,"... more
In the latest edition of Let's Talk Mediterranean, Brian Catlos and Sharon Kinoshita interview interview Kristina Richardson, whose article, "Tracing a Gypsy Mixed Language through Medieval and Early Modern Arabic and Persian Literature," was our June 2021 Article of the Month. Listen here, [Regrets for uneven sound quality] This message is being sent to Associates of the Mediterranean Seminar (www.mediterraneanseminar.org); you may have received it as a forwarded message. Excuse duplicate and cross-postings. Please distribute widely.
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Find the article and the author's and committee's comments and see this and previous Articles of the Month here. This message is being sent to Associates of the Mediterranean Seminar (www.mediterraneanseminar.org); you may have received... more
Find the article and the author's and committee's comments and see this and previous Articles of the Month here. This message is being sent to Associates of the Mediterranean Seminar (www.mediterraneanseminar.org); you may have received it as a forwarded message. Excuse duplicate and cross-postings. Please distribute widely.
Research Interests: