‘Abd al-Jabbar ibn Hamdis (1055–1133) survives as the best-known figure from four centuries of Arab-Islamic civilisation on the island of Sicily. There he g

In 902 the last Byzantine stronghold in Sicily fell, and the island would remain under Muslim control until the arrival of the Normans in the eleventh century.

When Muslim invaders conquered Sicily in the ninth century, they took control of a weakened Greek state in cultural decadence. When, two centuries later, the No

Dynasties Intertwined traces the turbulent relationship between the Zirids of Ifriqiya and the Normans of Sicily during the eleventh and twelfth centuries. In d

The social and linguistic history of medieval Sicily is both intriguing and complex. Before the Muslim invasion of 827, the islanders spoke dialects of either G