The above passage is from the twenty-eighth assembly by Al-Hariri, part of a series of fifty entertaining stories written in Basra in the eleventh and twelfth centuries CE. Basra at the time was the crucial port on the Gulf linking Baghdad, the capital of the Abbasids, with the Indian Ocean, Africa, even China. It had a striking, cosmopolitan ethos, as this poem suggested. Abu Zayd, the protagonist of this story, rejected any notion of rootedness or singular identity. In fact, he actively uprooted and challenged the past. He used the form of the qasida, or the classical Arabic ode, to proclaim a new and surprisingly global sentiment. Instead of the classic nasib, the nostalgic ‘weeping for the abode’ which is the opening used by almost every other Arab poet and is used to display pride in tribe and family, Abu Zayd said here in his poem to ‘weep not’ for the loss of any one particular place. Rather, he called on his listeners to consider humanity, regardless of creed or race or dwelling place, and see the world as their ‘home’. This sentiment even went beyond the well-established Islamic notion of the ‘complete person’ or the ‘perfect human’ (al-insan al-kamil) elaborated by Sufis such as ‘Abd al Karim al Jili (d. 1424 CE) and Muhyi al-Din ibn ‘Arabi (d. 1240 CE). Abu Zayd's speech implored his audience to ask not simply about universalism within an Islamic context, but also about a universal notion of humanity, beyond a religious world view.

In the Gulf, as in other parts of the world that the Gulf brought together, was it so surprising that, at certain extraordinary moments, questions went beyond ‘What does it mean to be Muslim, Christian or Hindu?’ to ask what it meant to be human? On the Gulf, in the close quarters of the ship, one often simply slept outside in the elements with one's passengers from many parts of the world, speaking a Babel of tongues. The ports were filled with people from a great variety and diversity of creeds, languages and cultures, far surpassing the three main faiths of the Mediterranean.

This book tells a story of interaction between Berbers, Arabs, Latins, Muslims, Christians and Jews in North Africa and Latin Europe and across the Western Mediterranean. The book proposes medieval Western European and North African history were part of a common Western Mediterranean culture. It tells the history of North Africa and Europe through the eyes of Christian kings and Muslim merchants, emirs and popes, Sufis, friars and rabbis. It argues North Africa and Europe together experienced the Twelfth-Century Renaissance and the Commercial Revolution. When Europe was highly divided during the twelfth century, North Africa was enjoying the peak of its power, united under the Berber, Almohad Empire. In the midst of a commercial growth throughout the medieval period, North Africa and Europe also shared in a burst of spirituality and mysticism. Indeed, parallel developments in intellectual, religious and economic history in North Africa and Europe were so common, they cannot be considered purely accidental. This growth of spirituality occurred as representatives of Judaism, Christianity and Islam debated and defended their faiths, dreaming of conversion even as they shared the same rational methods. Growth of organized mysticism instigated a Second Axial Age in the history of religion. Sufis and Franciscans, followers of voluntary poverty, rubbed shoulders in the bustling markets of Tunis, Marrakech and Bèjaïa. Challenging the idea of a Mediterranean split between Islam and Christianity, the book shows how the Maghrib (North Africa) was not a Muslim-Arab monolith, nor an extension of an exotic Orient. North Africa, not the Holy Land to the Far East, was the first place where Latin Europeans encountered the Muslim other and vice versa. At the same time, medieval North Africa was as diverse and complex as Latin Europe. North Africa was, in fact, an integral part of Western history.

Paradox of Sources

A mystery within a paradox is written into this book. It is a paradox of the book's sources. Due to the nature of our evidence, two very different, but parallel, histories of the relationship between medieval North Africa and Latin Europe could be written. One history, based on a superficial reading of some of the writings of Jewish, Christian and Muslim chroniclers and legists, monks and religious scholars, would tell a story of conquest, a story of conflict. It would tell the story in apocalyptic proportions of the dream of conversion.

In 1091 a humbled prisoner in the town of Aghmat wrote a poem. Yet, this was not just any prisoner.

After a long and healthy reign, Mu‘tamid, King of Seville, and his family, a noble dynasty that had risen from rough warlords to cultured gardens of splendor and luxury, was captured, taken across the straits and hundreds of miles deep into Almoravid territory. The Almoravids reduced this poet king to prisoner at Aghmat, the old capital of the Almoravids located about half a day's journey from the new and growing city of Marrakech. It was here where this cultured king, enslaved by his own desperate act to save his kingdom, spoke “to his chains.” There was one child Mu‘tamid did not speak of in his lines: a daughter, named Saida, who had converted to Christianity and married Alfonso VI of Castile. According to a mix of legend and history, she brought with her a dowry gift, the fortified city of Cuenca, and bore Alfonso a son named Sancho.

From Seville to Marrakech

Returning in his mind to the splendid pleasure gardens of his Alcazar, he must have recalled often the golden colored city of Seville on the Guadalquivir River. Muslim trade and commerce in the Mediterranean was increasingly threatened by Christian ships including the Pisans and Genoese. One poet from Sicily, explaining the difficulty of traveling to Seville, wrote to Al-Mu‘tamid saying, “The Sea is of the Christians; vessels do not traverse it except at great risk; while the Arabs have the solid ground.” Yet despite some setbacks at sea, Seville was still a great port. Seville was a place of irresistible pleasures. Mu‘tamid assembled poets, epicureans and writers from around the Mediterranean, including the mercurial Ibn Hamdis, the itinerant poet who connected Mu‘tamid to Tunisia and the Zirid Berber court at Kairouan.