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  • The Making of a Mediterranean Emirate: Ifrīqiyā and Its Andalusis, 1200–1400
  • Edgar Francis
Ramzi Rouighi, The Making of a Mediterranean Emirate: Ifrīqiyā and Its Andalusis, 1200–1400 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press 2011) 238 pp.

As the title suggests, this is a book about the “making” of the Ḥafsid Emirate of Ifrīqiyā (1229–1574) and, more broadly, the making of Ifrīqiyā itself. It is not, however, a political or military history. Certainly, Ramzi Rouighi does explain the rise of the Ḥafsids and their emirate, but that is not the purpose of this book. Instead, Rouighi seeks to prove that in creating their emirate the Ḥafsids also created the idea of Ifrīqiyā as a broad geographic region, and that idea was deliberately constructed to define an area that “naturally” was to be ruled by the Ḥafsids. Furthermore, Rouighi argues that this Ḥafsid definition of Ifrīqiyā has been mistakenly adopted without question by later scholars for a variety of reasons.

There is no denying that since the Islamic conquests of North Africa in the seventh century CE there was a region in the eastern part of North Africa called Ifrīqiyā. The question is, what did “Ifrīqiyā” mean? Over the centuries, Muslim historians and geographers clearly differed regarding the precise boundaries of this region. Different modern scholars have sought to explain away what appear [End Page 264] to be inconsistencies or errors, analyzing the history of the region in terms of some sort of universal, unchanging, “natural” geographic designation—as opposed to the varying, perhaps even confused definitions of the Muslim historians and geographers.

Rouighi contends that differences in the precise boundaries of Ifrīqiyā do not reflect errors on the part of the Muslim geographers or historians. Instead, he argues, those historians and geographers defined the region in terms that were meaningful in their own historical context. In addition, he argues that the expansive definition of “Ifrīqiyā” endorsed by modern scholars was not a natural or ideologically neutral concept. Instead, this definition was articulated by Arab intellectuals with close connections to the Ḥafsid dynasty in such a way as to present the rule of that dynasty over “Ifrīqiyā” as a good, right, and natural thing.

Specifically, Rouighi explains how the idea of a broad understanding of Ifrīqiyā emerged out of different conflicts within the Ḥafsid state. In particular, tensions between the Ḥafsid capital of Tunis and more distant cities under Ḥafsid rule like Bijāya led to different theories of Ḥafsid rule which Rouighi characterizes as “regional” and “local.” This has implications far beyond the restricted question of the Ḥafsid dynasty itself. The idea of Ifrīqiyā promulgated by the dynasty and its supporters has had a long life in later scholarship, including Western scholarship. This is due, in part, to the popularity of one particularly famous historian with close connections to the Ḥafsids (and to particular factions within the dynasty)—namely, Ibn Khaldūn (d. 1406).

Ibn Khaldūn’s Muqaddimah (Prolegomena) is well known and frequently cited in Western scholarship, but many forget that Ibn Khaldūn wrote as a prologue to his history of the rise of the Ḥafsid dynasty. Furthermore, Rouighi points out that Ibn Khaldūn was not an impartial observer of North African or Ḥafsid history. On the contrary, Ibh Khaldūn and his family came from a group with specific commitments to the Ḥafsid dynasty; that group was the “Andalusis” referred to in the book’s title. In the first half of the thirteenth century, the Christian kingdoms of Aragon and Castille conquered a number of important Muslim cities in the Iberian Peninsula (known in Arabic as “al-Andalus”). Following these conquests, large numbers of Andalusi Muslims fled to neighboring Muslim kingdoms. These Andalusi refugees and their descendants formed a distinct group in different North African states, including the Ḥafsid emirate, and many Andalusis found employment in the courts of these dynasts. Ibn Khaldūn himself held high government offices under the Ḥafsids, as members of his family had done for several generations.

Rouighi...

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