Lecture | LUCIS What's New?! Series
The Historical Topography of Medina: Faith, Power, and Memory in Early Islamic Arabia
- Aila Santi
- Date
- Thursday 3 April 2025
- Time
- Serie
- What's New?! Spring Lecture Series 2025
- Address
-
Lipsius
Cleveringaplaats 1
2311 BD Leiden - Room
- 0.30
The city of Medina, the seat of the Prophet Muḥammad’s polity, holds a paramount place in the history of Islamic urbanism. In the Muslim community’s historical perception, it is regarded as the first archetypal “Islamic City”—the perfect Prophetic urban mould from which all other cities in the dār al-Islām are viewed as imperfect casts. Despite this significance, virtually nothing is known about Medina’s urban layout during the first crucial years of Islamic history. Its special status as one of the two Ḥaramayn (sacred precincts) of Arabia, coupled with the extensive building activity it has undergone over the past few decades, has resulted in a near-complete absence of archaeological evidence pertaining to its historical landscape, a situation that significantly hinders our understanding of early Islamic urban culture in Arabia.
Drawing on a systematic study of the most ancient local histories of the city—alongside the application of Computer-Aided Design technology to historical cartographic sources and pre-modern visual material related to Medina and the Prophet’s Mosque— this lecture presents a source-based reconstruction of the central area of the city (known as al-Sāfila) with a special focus on the Mosque of the Prophet and its immediate environs. This approach offers a platform to explore the material and spatial expressions of devotion, élite authority, and sectarian identity in the urban space during the first 150 years after the hijra. Moreover, by moving beyond a simple fact-fiction dichotomy, it highlights how Medina’s Prophetic topography was deliberately manipulated by the Umayyad dynasty and other sectarian groups to stake their claims to legitimacy.
Ultimately, this lecture aims to demonstrate that a close topographical analysis—grounded in the post-medieval material record of the Prophet’s Mosque—can indeed recover portions of the city’s historical layout. In so doing, it reveals the significant processes of memorialisation and keen antiquarian interest that marked the decades following the Prophet’s death, enabling us to sift out genuine early layers from the chaos of outright inventions, misrepresentations, and anachronistic back projections that often colour narratives of early Islamic Medina.
About the speaker
Aila Santi is an archaeologist and historian of early Islam, currently working as a Postdoctoral Researcher for the ERC-funded project, “Embodied Imamate: Mapping the Development of the Early Shiʿi Community 700–900 CE,” at Leiden University. From 2023 to 2024, she was a Postdoctoral Research Associate at SOAS University of London, where she worked on the manuscript for her first monograph, provisionally titled The Mosque of the Prophet and the Palace: Topographies of Faith and Power in Early Islamic Medina.
Before this, she held a Newton International Postdoctoral Fellowship at SOAS (2021–2023) and a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship at the American University of Beirut (2019–2020), focusing on the urbanism and architecture of early Islamic Medina and ʿAnjar, respectively. She earned her BA (2012) and MA (2015) in Islamic Archaeology and History of Art from Sapienza University of Rome, where she also completed a PhD in Archaeology in 2019. Her dissertation, The Relationship Between Mosque and Dār al-Imāra in the Early Islamic Period: The Case Studies of Madīna, Kūfa, and ʿAnjar in Light of a Reassessment of the Urbanism of the Origins, explored the interplay between religious and administrative architecture in early Islamic cities.
Santi’s main research interest lies in the development of the monumental and visual language of the early Muslim elite, with a particular focus on how architecture, ceremonial practice, and the notion of caliphal authority converged at the Umayyad court. Her current work explores the role of space, architecture, and material culture in shaping Imami communal identity and mediating the representation of Imamic charisma. Her broader interests include antiquarian trends in early Islam, the rise of sacred topographies and related devotional iconographies, and the representation of early Islamic urbanism in historical sources.
Registration
Interested in joining? Please sign up via the registration form (available via the button below).
Register for this event