Philanthropy, Sufism and Legitimacy in the Medieval Islamic West: The Study of Zawiyas as a Socio-Religious Institution

This proposal aims to approach the social, political and architectural dimension of the zawiya.

This is to say an Islamic institution linked to Sufism that has largely determined the religious life of the Islamic West since the Middle Ages.

However, its study has not been sufficiently developed so far and it has only been approached on a few occasions from stagnant perspectives, which has limited the potential to advance in the knowledge of the medieval Muslim society.In this respect, after some previous attempts, I have observed two relevant issues that require special attention.

On the one hand, the concept of zawiya, unlike other institutions, has undergone an evolution throughout history and its current meaning cannot be extrapolated to past times.

On the other hand, it seems to me that there is no single idea of zawiya and thereby we can reckon at least two different types that coexisted in the same space-time and whose purposes differ significantly from each other due to their sponsor (ruler/shaykh).

Nevertheless, there are several inconveniences that may have limited the visibility of both issues up to now, representing thus a research challenge.

In the first place, the semantic permeability of the term zawiya; secondly, the disappearance of the oldest examples; thirdly, the lack of coordination between documentary and material sources; and, finally, the absence of accurate planimetric documentation.In short, this project suggests an interdisciplinary study on a group of examples that have been strategically selected to shed light on the above questions.

To this end, after an in-depth architectural survey, various types of analysis and a confrontation with similar models and phenomena in the Middle East will be implemented. As host institutions, the UCM (Spain), the INSAP (Morocco) and the OUI (Israel) will provide an excellent framework.

Likewise, it is expected a positive impact on the future conservation of some zawiyas of great historical-artistic value