Jabal al-Qilâl:

Unraveling the Mystery of the Mythical Mountain Island Guarding the Mouth of the Mediterranean in Premodern Islamic Maps

*Coincidental segway between previous SHD conference theme on mountains & forthcoming theme on islands*

Dominating the mouth of the Mediterranean, every medieval Islamic Istakhrian map of the Mediterranean, North Africa, and Spain from the 11th century onwards has a thus-far unidentified mythical mountain-island named Jabal al-Qilâl located between the straits that separate Spain and North Africa.  So mysterious is this island that scholars have to date not even been able to definitively translate the meaning of it's name, “Qilâl,” in Arabic.  Nor have we been able to identify the location of this key but enigmatic mountain-island that dominated the Straits of Gibralter in the pre-modern Muslim imaginaire of the Mediterranean. Could it be related to ancient and medieval European traditions of the mysterious "Pillars of Hercules”  also said to have guarded the mouth of the Mediterranean?   The Islamic maps depict the island of Jabal al-Qilâl in a dramatic  scalloped triangular form dominated by one single mountain decorated with a variety of scary colored dots, stars, crescents, and pillars.  It is named in bold, striking calligraphy.  In the Islamic maps of the Mediterranean the mountain clearly guards the mouth of the Mediterranean, whereas with the maps of the Maghrib (which show the lands of North Africa and Spanish Andalusia) the mountain of Jabal al-Qilâl slips back further into the Mediterranean, closer to the European shore.  Based on extensive in-depth research of more than three decades on Islamic cartographic images of the Mediterranean and the Maghrib, along with on-site research, this paper will present possibilities for identifying this enigmatic but endlessly mysterious mountain-island that served as a lock into and out of the Mediterranean.

Curated by Karen Pinto

Professor Karen Pinto has spent three decades at the forefront of the study of Islamic cartographic history. Her first book, Medieval Islamic Maps: An Exploration, came out in 2016, and she is currently working on a second, focusing on Islamic maps of the Mediterranean. Today, she is an Associate Scholar in the Religious Studies Department at the University of Colorado, Boulder.

"When I started graduate school in history at Columbia in 1990, my professor, the late but incredibly great Olivia Remie Constable (1961-2014), suggested that I write a seminar paper on the medieval Muslim geographers. That sent me to the dark recessed of the Islamic history and geography collection on the 11th floor of the Butler Library. There I, literally, tripped over Konrad Miller’s late 1920’s extensive 6 volume: Mappae Arabicae: Arabische Welt und Länderkarten des 9–13. Jahrunderts. (6 vols. Stuttgart, 1926–1931) black and white reprints of hundreds of medieval Islamic maps hidden in Oriental manuscripts hitherto little known in the western history of cartography world.

Miller’s dusty, crumbling black-and-white reprints of medieval Islamic maps of the Mediterranean, formed the basis of my first major work on the subject: “Ṣūrat Baḥr al-Rūm: The Mediterranean in the Medieval Muslim Cartographical Imagination,” my MA Essay at Columbia U that went on to win SSRC’s 1992 Ibn Khaldun Prize. That experience led, in turn, to a life-long obsession and hunt for maps scattered in Arabic, Persian, and Turkish manuscript libraries worldwide that resulted in her first book on Islamic maps of the world in “Medieval Islamic Maps: An Introduction” (Chicago, 2016) and a collection of some three thousand images of maps, many not reprinted.