Three quarters of a million for Islamic maritime research

The project focuses on the maritime traditions of the peoples inhabiting and travelling on the two major sea routes of the Middle East.

Today, millions of barrels of oil a day pass along the Red Sea and the Arabian-Persian Gulf. Huge container vessels bring Asian manufactured goods to Middle Eastern markets and through the Suez Canal to European consumers and beyond. Strategic control of the Gulf is hotly contested both militarily and diplomatically. Even super-tankers are not immune to the attention of pirates targeting traffic using the Red Sea.

The commodities and merchandise passing along these seas may have been different in the past, but the Red Sea and the Gulf were no less important as strategic waterways. Along them passed Mamluk metalwork, Chinese porcelain, Egyptian grain, African slaves, Muslim and Christian pilgrims, incense, ideas, conflicts and religion. On a more local level, coastal communities made their lives from fishing, pearling, trading and sometimes piracy in an often demanding physical environment.

The MARES Project will draw on ethnography, anthropology, archaeology, history and linguistics in a bid to understand how people made their lives on and alongside these seas in late antiquity and the medieval period, and how they do so today.

Professor Dionisius Agius who is leading the project, said “For centuries, the Islamic lands stood at the centre of trading and communications networks that stretched across Africa, Asia and Europe. Seafaring was a vital medium in achieving that communication. The sea brought into contact people of diverse identities and traditions, carrying with them goods, technologies and ideas. The Red Sea and the Gulf were essential corridors in that process.”

Joining Professor Agius on the project are two research fellows, Dr Chiara Zazzaro and John Cooper, and two PhD candidates, Samson Bezabeh and Julian Jansen van Rensburg. Together the team will explore subjects including wooden boat-building traditions in Yemen, pre-modern navigation techniques on the Red Sea, maritime migration between Ethiopia and Yemen, the place of the island of Socotra in Indian Ocean seafaring, and the coastal archaeology of Yemen, Djibouti, Egypt and Iran.

Among the many activities of the project there will be regular public lecture programmes at the Institute of Arab and Islamic Studies at the University of Exeter, as well as seminars and workshops. They will also host a major exhibition on Arab Dhows in September 2010, coinciding with a conference on the Red Sea.