Response to Noreña: Comments from a Historian of Islamic Iberia JANINA SAFRAN Penn State University
[email protected] Carlos Noreña describes how Segobriga, a town in central Spain, an im- perial backwater, became Romanized in the first century of the Common Era—some two centuries after central Spain was incorporated into the Roman empire. Evidence for this Romanization includes monumental construction and public space (forum, theater, amphitheater, temples, bath complex), increasingly Roman coinage, and adoption of the Roman “epigraphic habit.” Noreña argues that the material transformation of Segobriga marked and informed the development of a Roman political- cultural habitus. Romanization did not simply coincide with the shift from republican to monarchic government in Rome but was defined by it; indeed, similar changes occurred in other provincial regions. The Ro- man shift to a monarchic system wrought significant cultural change for two reasons: the motivation of local elites to adopt the “Roman cultural package” in order to promote their own status, prestige, and authority; and monarchy’s symbolic “glue.” I have been invited to address Noreña’s essay from the perspective of my field: Islamic History. My research area is al-Andalus (Islamic Iberia) and the Maghrib (western North Africa). There are a number of ways to engage with this conceptually exciting argument. To begin, as a way to facilitate comparative discussion, I would like to first draw attention to three parallels: between the concept of the “Roman city” and the “Islamic city,” between concepts of Romanization and Islamization, and between Noreña’s analysis of Segobriga and Chase Robinson’s analysis of Mosul.