Professor Kristina L. Richardson is a distinguished historian of the medieval Islamic world and the John L. Nau III Professor of History and the Principles of Democracy at the University of Virginia, where she teaches history as well as Middle Eastern and South Asian languages and cultures. Her research focuses on the history of marginalized groups in the premodern Arab world — including people with disabilities, sign language users, artisans, enslaved individuals, and Romani communities (Ghurabāʾ). She is the author of two influential books: Difference and Disability in the Medieval Islamic World: Blighted Bodies (2012) and Roma in the Medieval Islamic World: Literacy, Culture, and Migration (2021), for which she received the prestigious Dan David Prize (2022) and the Monica H. Green Prize.
In her work, Professor Richardson explores themes of mobility, literacy, race, slavery, and cultural exchange in the medieval Islamic context, revealing new perspectives on the roles that Roma and other itinerant communities played in global history. This interview is dedicated to her book Roma in the Medieval Islamic World: Literacy, Culture, and Migration, which innovatively restores the Roma to the historical narrative from which they have long been excluded.
What first drew you to explore the history of Roma communities in the medieval Islamic world, a topic often overlooked in both Middle Eastern and European historiography?
My research has always centered on people without power — those living on the margins of society. Interestingly, my interest in the Roma communities of the medieval Islamic world began somewhat by accident. I hadn’t originally planned to write about the Roma in particular. At the time, I was editing an Arabic manuscript from 16th-century Aleppo, in which the author describes walking through the city and meeting a man who spoke seven languages — one of them being the language of traveling people. That brief mention sparked my curiosity and drew me deeper into their culture. Coincidentally, I was living in Münster, in northwest Germany, while working on this research. What struck me there was how openly people expressed racist attitudes toward Roma communities. Coming from the United States, I was accustomed to racism being more veiled or indirect, but in Germany, it was startlingly open. That experience made me think more deeply about the persistence of such prejudices.
So, my engagement with the topic came from two directions, a social awareness shaped by my environment, and a scholarly interest that emerged from medieval texts. In the end, these threads came together in unexpected but meaningful ways.
Popular narratives often trace Roma migrations primarily into Europe. What does your research reveal about their presence and mobility across the Middle East and North Africa during the medieval period?
There are probably two main reasons why the Roma’s presence and mobility across the Middle East and North Africa have been so overlooked. One reason, which I discuss in my book, is linguistic. For a long time, we didn’t know the classical Arabic term used for Roma or for traveling peoples — such as the Dom or the Lom, or other related groups. In Arabic, the word for them literally means “strangers.” Because Arabic, Persian, and Ottoman Turkish do not use capital letters, it can be difficult to tell whether a term refers to a proper group or simply a descriptive word. For example, in Arabic, “Arab” refers to an ethnic group, and “Hebrew” refers to a language — but neither is capitalized. So when the term “strangers” appeared in classical texts, it was often misread or dismissed, as it didn’t seem to fit contextually. In other words, scholars didn’t know where, or even how, to look for these communities in the historical record. The second reason is more structural. The field of medieval Islamic or Middle Eastern studies developed primarily in Europe, where, as you mentioned, there has long been a degree of conscious racism toward Roma people. This likely contributed to the perception that they were not “important” enough to be part of history, so there was little incentive to seek them out in the sources. Together, these factors rendered them almost completely invisible for a very long time. There was some early scholarly interest, particularly among German researchers in the early 1900s, and their work was admirable — but it remained isolated and never gained wider traction.
If I can add one more point, which I also discuss in my introduction, and which some found controversial, I believe that the way Holocaust memory has been constructed has contributed to depicting Romani people as historically isolated. They are often portrayed as if they existed apart from everyone else, and as though any interactions they had with other groups were necessarily negative. This framing places them outside of history itself. Even if this was not intentional, it has been deeply influential. But of course, no group truly exists outside of history or without interaction. This perception has been not only false but also quite damaging in how it shapes the broader understanding of Roma history.
Your work emphasizes multilingualism and cultural exchange. Do you see traces of lughat al-sīn in modern Romani or Domari languages?
That’s a very good question and one that also highlights the limits of my own expertise, as well as the need for more collaborative research. I don’t actually speak Romani or Domari myself, though I do have a strong grounding in lughat al-sīn. What I was able to demonstrate in my research is that the Arabic term Ghurabāʾ — meaning “strangers”, which referred to traveling peoples in the Middle East, seems to have persisted in some form among Roma communities. For instance, it survives as part of the name of a Romani dialect known as Gurbet Romani. Even though I can’t confirm specific linguistic traces in Romani or Domari, it appears that the term itself carried significance, functioning as an ethnic or kinship identifier not only for the Roma but also for the Dom and Lom groups. This is an area that would benefit greatly from further research.
How were Roma represented in medieval Islamic texts? Did these depictions differ from their portrayals in contemporary European Christian sources?
Their portrayals were very, very different. In the medieval Islamic context, the Roma and other traveling groups didn’t stand out as much as they did in medieval Europe. This is largely because mobility itself was not unusual in the Islamic world. There were Bedouin tribes, nomadic and pastoralist peoples who moved with their animals, and communities that lived semi-permanently on the outskirts of towns. The Ghurabāʾ, the traveling peoples, might not have traveled with animals, but living in tents or on the edge of a city was not considered strange or remarkable. It was simply part of the social landscape. From what we know, in the central Islamic lands their occupations tended to be public-facing but not self-sustaining, meaning they relied on settled communities for food and income. They were entertainers who performed acrobatics, magic tricks, and fortune-telling, or sold printed texts while performing. Their work was viewed as amusing rather than threatening. People enjoyed their presence; there was little of the anxiety or hostility that often accompanied Roma depictions in Europe. In both contexts, however, these groups appear to have mastered local languages quite well. Even the earliest European sources never mention that Roma people were unable to speak German, Italian, or other local tongues, they circulated easily and communicated effectively.
One factor that might explain the different receptions is that the Middle East was less urbanized than Europe at the time. There was simply more space, physically and socially, for people to move around and live on their own terms. Interestingly, some traits that European sources fixated on, such as children having pierced ears or women wearing turbans, would have gone largely unnoticed in the Islamic world. Those details were not out of the ordinary in Middle Eastern societies. In short, the Roma blended in more naturally there; they fit into the broader fabric of life rather than standing apart from it.
Do you think there was mutual influnce between the Ghurabāʾ guilds and sufi orders ?
I didn’t explore that question directly in my research, but there are certainly some interesting correlations. For one, there’s the well-known hadith about the Ghurabāʾ, the “strangers”, which says that in the end times, it will be the strange ones who uphold and revive the true faith. In broader Islamic thought, and especially within Sufi traditions, to be a gharīb, a stranger, came to be regarded as an honor. Now, I don’t believe the Ghurabāʾ guilds chose their name out of a direct appreciation for that hadith, but the overlap in terminology is striking. What is more evident is that Sufis often drew inspiration from people on the margins of society. Some of the Ghurabāʾ communities I discuss in my book lived in humble conditions outside cities such as Cairo. Their way of life, marked by poverty, mobility, and ascetic simplicity, may have influenced certain Sufi practices or ideals. Sufis also found spiritual inspiration in other marginalized groups, such as enslaved people, whose involuntary deprivation — eating little, wearing few clothes, sleeping outdoors, or working through the night, embodied a kind of enforced asceticism. Sufi practices like staying awake through the night or rejecting material comforts may have echoed these lived experiences.
So while we can’t say there was direct interaction between Ghurabāʾ guilds and Sufi orders, it does seem that Sufis were inspired, at least in part, by the lives and endurance of those on society’s margins — and perhaps by the Ghurabāʾamong them.
What are some of the most persistent misconceptions among scholars about the Roma’s role in global history?
That’s a long list. But I think the most pernicious misconception and the one I most wanted to challenge in my book is the idea that the Roma have had no relationship with literacy anywhere in the world. They’ve often been described, in quotation marks, as “a people without a history,” supposedly because they neither read nor wrote and had no written culture or learning. This assumption has effectively placed Roma communities outside of history — as if they existed beyond human development or intellectual life. That’s one of the reasons I was so determined to demonstrate that Sīn is a real language. The few scholars who had studied it before tended to dismiss it as mere slang. But slang doesn’t survive for a thousand years with the same vocabulary. Languages like Sīn show us that these were real, complex communities living ordinary human lives, leaving traces that deserve to be read and studied like anyone else’s. So this link — or rather the false disconnection between Roma culture and literacy needs to be completely overturned. Roma groups were highly mobile, linguistically skilled, and remarkably adaptable. In Europe, for example, people didn’t even realize that Roma communities spoke local languages until around the 1500s, when closer contact revealed how multilingual they were.
Another major misconception is the idea that discrimination against Roma is somehow inevitable, that they can never be seen as fully belonging to Europe. But the evidence contradicts this. The Ghurabāʾ, for instance, were not exclusively Indo-Aryan migrants; they also included indigenous Middle Eastern groups who lived itinerant lives. And just as in Scotland or Ireland, where there are native traveling communities, these ways of life are not foreign or exceptional. They’re part of a much broader and very human pattern of mobility.
Based on your findings, are there particular technologies or artistic practices Roma travelers helped transmit from East to West — beyond their role in developing the printing press?
Yes, I suggested toward the end of my work, though I didn’t have enough evidence to develop it fully, that certain practices of fortune-telling, such as the use of tarot cards, may have originated in Mamluk Egypt. It’s an area I think would be interesting to explore further in future research. As for other technologies or artistic practices, I can’t say definitively. But the role of Roma travelers in the development and transmission of printing was, without question, a major one.
How did you feel upon discovering a new language and witnessing a breakthrough that revolutionized the history of the printing press?
It was during the pandemic that the realization really crystallized for me. I was living in New York City at the time, and like everyone else in 2020 and 2021, I was at home, everything was shut down. I spent my days with my child, and when I made the discovery, I was so excited that I went to tell my neighbors, since there was no one else around to share it with. I just couldn’t believe it hadn’t been noticed before. It completely changed how I thought about the question of whether the Roma had always been isolated from the rest of history. The idea that Gutenberg might have been studying at the University of Erfurt around 1419, just as Roma groups were traveling northward from Constance in 1417 and passing through Erfurt, was astonishing. Even if they never met, the possibility that their paths could have crossed shows how intertwined these histories really are. The Roma are, quite literally, part of German history. I was completely blown away by that realization and, honestly, I still am. The book came out in 2022, and I’m still being invited to speak about it. Just last week, I gave a talk in Toronto. The continued interest has been amazing, and I’m very happy that people are still engaging with this work.
How was your research received in academic circles? And have you been contacted by Roma or Domari communities interested in your work?
The reception in the academic community has mostly been very positive. Of course, sometimes people have quibbles with parts of the work, which is normal, but I haven’t even heard the specifics yet. I’d love to get some detailed feedback. The book did win the biggest history prize in the world in 2022, shortly after it was published, which was a real shock. Since then, it has won two more prizes. I’m still being invited to speak almost every two weeks, often on topics related to the Roma. I feel a sense of responsibility to keep writing about them. Even recently, about two weeks ago, I gave a lecture in D.C. While it wasn’t specifically about the Roma, I spoke about the books they made. As for Roma and Domari communities — Phralipen might actually be the first Roma outlet to reach out to me!
Given ongoing struggles for recognition and inclusion, what role should historians and cultural institutions play in promoting a more accurate and respectful representation of Roma history?
I’ve thought a lot about this, and I think a great start would be in places with real concentrations of Romani people. For example, when I lived in Germany for three and a half years, I realized it was past time to start teaching Romani, perhaps not in high schools, but certainly at universities. It wouldn’t be difficult to situate it under a European languages department or within Middle Eastern history programs, giving students a well-rounded perspective. There needs to be a basic commitment to including Romani history in curricula. This goes beyond Holocaust recognition, which is important, but deeper engagement is needed. Even in Germany, the state curriculum only offers a small section on the Roma for high schools. Expanding this would be a significant step forward.
Understanding Romani contributions, like their role in the history of printing, challenges conventional narratives of European modernity, which are often constructed as achievements of “pure” European genius without Asian, African, or Romani influence. It will take time to shift these perceptions, but the first step is simply to start integrating Romani history into education and cultural discourse.
If you were to continue this line of research, where would your work take you next? And what advice would you give to young Roma researchers or cultural workers who wish to study their own history from within?
I would definitely love to see this work continue, and for myself, I’m interested in exploring more about the religious traditions of the Roma, particularly in the medieval Islamic context. I’d like to look further into the astrology they seemed to engage with and believe in. This doesn’t contradict their other beliefs—they could be Muslim or Christian but they clearly had a strong interest in astrology. I’m reluctant to focus on music, even though many expect me to, because I like to go against expectations. There were elements I could write about, and perhaps I will in an article, but I aim to go beyond what people expect from history. I would also love to train Romani scholars—whether in Europe, America, or Egypt. The challenge revolves mostly around finding the right people: entering fields like medieval Islamic history requires specific training, including Arabic, Persian, or even Amharic. I admire the work Romani researchers and cultural workers are already doing. Creating their own spaces—magazines, social clubs, or other platforms, is vital. Even when these efforts provoke anxiety in majority groups, it underscores the importance of finding a voice within the community.
My advice to young Romani researchers is to embrace their own history and biography without shame. Do not let others dictate how you express your culture. It’s important to find peace with your personal and collective history, challenge negative stereotypes, and uplift your community in ways that feel authentic.
