Dhimmis and Muslims – Analyzing Multi-Religious Spaces in the Medieval Muslim World (DhiMu)

Abstract:

For centuries, specific groups of non-Muslims living in regions under Muslim rule were tolerated and, in turn, forced to accept a lower legal status called the Dhimmi status. This legal construction and political pragmatism resulted in great religious diversity in medieval Muslim cities. However, the bias of the medieval writers, who faded out the existence of the other religious communities and the traditional historical narratives have so far inhibited an empirically grounded view of the diachronic and synchronic complexity of these multi-religious populations. This project aims to collect information from primary and secondary sources on religious groups in the urban centres of the Middle East. This information must be stored digitally to aid historians in conducting interactive visual analyses. Historians study the data of religious constellations and compare regions and time periods. By recording the level of confidence together with the data, they can consider the uncertainty of data during visual analysis to improve their judgment of collected historical evidence.