© Copyrighted Material © Copyrighted Material www.ashgate.com www.ashgate.com www.ashgate.com www.ashgate.com www.ashgate.com www.ashgate.com www.ashgate.com www.ashgate.com Chapter 7 Byzantine Appropriation of the Orient: notes on its Principles and Patterns rustam shukurov Byzantium and the Muslim world coexisted for more than eight centuries as rivals and partners. The emergence and subsequent evolution of the Islamic world can hardly be correctly understood without taking account of the Byzantine legacy there, as well as subsequent constant low of cultural information from Byzantium to the East. Likewise, it is impossible to imagine Byzantine culture after the 630s without the constant presence of the Muslim world on its political, cultural and economic horizons. Moreover, for most of its history, Byzantium stood facing the Persian and arab east, which retained and increased its high cultural potential, with its back to the poor and barbarised west. It is true that Byzantium adopted relatively little from the Muslim world, especially in comparison with the Byzantine contribution to Islamic cultures. Byzantium contributed more to other cultures than it took from them. nonetheless, some of the literary, scientiic, occult, economic and technological achievements of the Muslim world were transferred to Byzantium, as will be discussed later in this chapter. Therefore we must consider whether we can deine these eastern inluences upon Byzantine culture as speciically Islamic ones; or, to put the question more provocatively, can we talk of a sort of latent ‘Islamisation of Byzantium’ in the course of Byzantine–Oriental interchange? To address this question, we must irstly consider what we mean by the terms ‘Islamic’ and ‘Oriental’. Strictly speaking, in scholarly discourse ‘Islamic’ refers to the artefacts, practices or concepts directly pertaining to the faith of Islam with its speciic dogmas and rituals. However, in practice we often use expressions such as ‘Islamic culture’, ‘Islamic art’, ‘Islamic manuscripts’, ‘Islamic metalwork’, even sometimes ‘Islamic literature’ and the like to refer to the intellectual and material production of the muslim peoples. such a usage risks being somewhat misleading. while such ideas, texts and artefacts were certainly produced by those who identiied themselves as Muslim or lived under the rule of Muslim political power, they may have been shaped by secular and even pre-Islamic intellectual and artistic concepts. 1 ‘Orient’, on the other hand, is meant here to refer more broadly to the world not just of Islam but more generally to the Near and Middle 1 Following a similar logic, Marshall G.S. Hodgson has suggested the term ‘Islamicate’, which ‘… would refer not directly to the religion, Islam, itself, but to the social and cultural complex historically associated with Islam and the muslims, both among muslims themselves and non- Muslims living in the Islamic world’ (Marshall G. S. Hodgson, The Venture of Islam: Conscience and History in a World Civilization, vol. 1 (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1974), 57–60 and especially 59). From A.C.S. Peacock, Bruno De Nicola and Sara Nur Yıldız (eds), Islam and Christianity in Medieval Anatolia, published by Ashgate Publishing. See: http://www.ashgate.com/isbn/9781472448637 © Rustam Shukurov (2015)