Centre and Periphery within the Borders of Islam

This volume contains the Proceedings of the 23rd Congress of L'Union Europeenne des Arabisants et Islamisants held in Sassari from Thursday 28th of September to Sunday 1st October 2006. The 26 articles contained in the volume, written by specialists from all over Europe (Russia, Finland, Poland, England, France, Italy, Spain, Germany, Portugal, Belgium and the Netherlands), deal with the following subjects: Islam, with contributions by scholars such as Roswitha Badry, Dimitry Frolov, Wilfred Madelung and Giuseppe Scatolin; History, Society and Archaeology, with papers by among others, Giuseppe Contu, Jaakko Hameen-Anttila, Paulina Lewicka and Bernadette Martel-Thoumian; Literature, with papers by, inter alios, Ewa Machut-Mendecka, Barbara Michalak-Pikulska, Arie Schippers, and Krystyna Skarzynska-Bochenska; and Arabic Language and Linguistics, with articles by Lale Behzadi, Michael G. Carter, and Ali Kalati.The central theme focuses on how the characteristics of Islam and Arabism are to be found in the periphery of the Arabic and Islamic world in relation to its center and the interchanges implied by the geographic distance between center and periphery.
The University of Sassari was the right ambiance for such a congress since there was in the past some Arabic presence in Sardinia, an island which was itself situated at the borders of the Islamic and Arabic Mediterranean.