William Granara is Gordon Gray Professor of Arabic and Comparative Literature at Harvard University, where he is also the Director of the Center for Middle Eastern Studies. He has published widely on medieval Arabic literature and translated several novels from Arabic to English.

Woven together from historical, geographical, literary, and legal sources, Narrating Muslim Sicily is an intricate and fascinating account of a medieval civilization lying on the frontier between Islam and Christendom. William Granara brilliantly teases out the different ways that Arabs and Muslims viewed the island – from eyewitnesses of the golden years of Sicily’s Islamic period, to later poets and scholars who reimagined its history. At the heart of Granara’s groundbreaking book is a subtle argument: that while all of these sources collectively constituted a “zone of contradiction”, they nevertheless consistently appealed to the concept of jihad as a tool to extract meaning from Muslim Sicily’s unique experiences.

William Granara is Gordon Gray Professor of Arabic and Comparative Literature at Harvard University, where he is also the Director of the Center for Middle Eastern Studies. He has published widely on medieval Arabic literature and translated several novels from Arabic to English.

Woven together from historical, geographical, literary, and legal sources, Narrating Muslim Sicily is an intricate and fascinating account of a medieval civilization lying on the frontier between Islam and Christendom. William Granara brilliantly teases out the different ways that Arabs and Muslims viewed the island – from eyewitnesses of the golden years of Sicily’s Islamic period, to later poets and scholars who reimagined its history. At the heart of Granara’s groundbreaking book is a subtle argument: that while all of these sources collectively constituted a “zone of contradiction”, they nevertheless consistently appealed to the concept of jihad as a tool to extract meaning from Muslim Sicily’s unique experiences.

William Granara is Gordon Gray Professor of Arabic and Comparative Literature at Harvard University, where he is also the Director of the Center for Middle Eastern Studies. He has published widely on medieval Arabic literature and translated several novels from Arabic to English.

Woven together from historical, geographical, literary, and legal sources, Narrating Muslim Sicily is an intricate and fascinating account of a medieval civilization lying on the frontier between Islam and Christendom. William Granara brilliantly teases out the different ways that Arabs and Muslims viewed the island – from eyewitnesses of the golden years of Sicily’s Islamic period, to later poets and scholars who reimagined its history. At the heart of Granara’s groundbreaking book is a subtle argument: that while all of these sources collectively constituted a “zone of contradiction”, they nevertheless consistently appealed to the concept of jihad as a tool to extract meaning from Muslim Sicily’s unique experiences.