Nassima Neggaz et Vanessa Van Renterghem, « Medieval Baghdad: Where to from now? », Revue des mondes musulmans et de la Méditerranée, 158 2/2025), october 2025

DOI: https://doi.org/10.4000/14zmr

Abstract 

Drawing on the collective reflections of an international methodological workshop held in Paris in 2022, this article offers a critical assessment of the current state of historical scholarship on medieval Baghdad and proposes new directions for its future study. The workshop brought together scholars from diverse fields—urban, political, social, economic, literary, and intellectual history—to foreground methodological innovation in response to the challenges posed by fragmentary archival preservation. The article synthesizes recent advances across key domains, including environmental history, while underscoring persistent lacunae in our understanding of medieval Baghdad’s topography, administration, economy, and social fabric. It calls for a reassessment of conventional periodisation, a decentering of dynastic frameworks, and the adoption of multiscalar approaches, ranging from microhistory to global and connected histories. Emphasizing the value of interdisciplinary and digital methodologies, along with traditional textual approaches, the authors highlight the potential of tools such as aerial photography, numismatics, manuscript studies, network analysis, and digital humanities to reinvigorate the field. In critiquing Eurocentric historiographical models and advocating for more integrated analytical scales, the article urges a renewed, collaborative, and methodologically pluralistic approach to the study of medieval Baghdad—one that bridges linguistic, regional, and disciplinary divides. Ultimately, it repositions Baghdad not only as the political heart of the Abbasid caliphate, but as a generative locus for rethinking the urban and intellectual history of the premodern Islamicate world.

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