Medieval Islamic craft guilds never existed as scholars once claimed.
Evidence
Subsequently scholars have challenged Massignon’s ideas of Isma‘ilism, demonstrating that there were no such things as guilds in medieval Islam and querying the essentialist notion of the ‘Islamic city’. His belief in esoterically motivated medieval craft guilds was of a piece with the twentieth-century French obsession with secret societies and sinister heterodoxies (Cathars, Templars, Illuminists, Freemasons and so on). As for the ‘Islamic city’, this had been conjured up by French historians and archaeologists on the basis of their knowledge of cities in French-controlled North Africa, but with little reference to cities further east in the Persian-and Turkish-speaking lands. — Robert Irwin, For Lust of Knowing, 408
Categorization
- SEED: An essay angle: how a scholarly phantom — the ‘Islamic city’ or ‘medieval guild’ — gets conjured from scholars’ own home context (French secret-society obsessions, colonized North African cities) and then treated as historical fact.