Per una storia del pensiero pre-archeologico nell'Islam medievale

For specialists in the history of the Muslim world to recall that the destruction of archaeological heritage by the criminal masterminds of ISIS or the Taliban is in open contradiction to the wide range of attitudes and behaviors that the culture of historical Islam has expressed in relation to antiquities, understood in the double sense of ancient sites and ancient legacies, seems to be a lost game. Also in the academic field, there is a widespread belief that the scientific interest in the archaeological heritage (from the Islamic era and above all from the pre-Islamic era) in Islamic countries is a product of modernity imported from the West. In this paper I would like to present the first results of a research that seeks to overcome a poorly posed question – that is, whether there has been an interest in the past in classical Islamic culture – and instead aims to explore the multiform ways in which classical and pre-modern Islamic thought imagined and narrated the past, and wanted to understand it, entering into a dialogic relationship with its questioning nature, developing an intellectual and interpretative attitude of the past from different points of view – literary, historical, philological, political, religious, or at the level of the collective imagination – and articulating a complex discourse on antiquity, its memory and its persistence in the cultural and geographical context of the Muslim Near East.