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INTRODUCTION

Orientations

Any book about medieval North Africa, and this one is no exception, confronts at least two sets of related problems from the outset. First, the prevailing modes of scholarly interpretation incorporate multiple layers of conceptual difficulties. Second, so do the historical sources. In both cases, the issues are often connected but not always in the same way, with the same effect, or for the same reasons. All historians who confront the relationship between their own notions and those of the sources they seek to elucidate share these two problems. However, when it comes to the study of medieval North Africa, modern history has engendered such entanglements that it has become very difficult to explain all the intricacies and complexities involved. Even specialists, who have studied the matter closely, may find that with all the critiques and the counter-critiques it has become difficult to trust one’s bearings. My starting point in this book is that it is simply not possible to discuss medieval North Africa without also discussing its representations in both medieval and modern writings, and throughout this book, I will shuttle back and forth between them. Where, however, does one begin?

A convenient entry point into medieval North African history and its problems is the notion of region, which draws together empirical and conceptual questions. The notion of region combines both because it is at once a context, a container for meaning, and a means by which contextualization becomes possible. Consequently, a study of the making of a region involves paying attention simultaneously to social relations and ideas about them.

Consider, for instance, the notion of North Africa itself. Ostensibly, it is a neutral spatial category, a geographic entity, the area situated between the Sahara desert, the Mediterranean Sea, and the Atlantic Ocean. Yet it is also a specifically modern category, remade in the process of imposing French colonial domination. The French never colonized Egypt and so naturally their North Africa, which became everyone’s North Africa, mostly refers to what is today Tunisia, Algeria, and Morocco.¹ This North Africa is definitely not the same as the north of the continent of Africa.

The idea that North Africa represented a region did not correspond to actual political or economic circumstances. Politically, French North Africa included areas that were technically part of France (departments), others that were territories, and yet others that were French protectorates. There were distinct laws and regulations that differentiated between them. But this colonial North Africa was not an economically integrated region. The French oversaw the uneven development of a number of economic zones, and then brought them together, most visibly through infrastructural investments, into an economy centered on Paris. All the roads of colonial North Africa led to Paris—or to the colonial capitals that maintained settlers as agents of colonial economic integration. Colonial administration and supervision combined with economic extraction to produce not an integrated North African region but a system of colonial domination in northwest Africa. If anything, North Africa’s status as a region in most people’s minds demonstrates that an idea need not correspond to material or sociohistorical conditions in order to prevail. Thus, the question is how it continues to be possible for so many to think of North Africa as a region in spite of the obvious technical difficulties entailed in doing so.

In the past, North Africa was a region because it was one of the pillars of colonial discourse. The active and institutionalized degradation of the sociopolitical and economic standing of the natives (autochtones) under French colonial rule came to constitute the empirical basis for a discussion of their characteristics, some of which pertained to the geographical or natural setting.² North Africa was crucial to the amalgamation and conflation that sustained colonial confabulations about the race, culture, civilization, traditions, and religion of the natives.³ These, rather than the activities of the colonizers, were used to explain the wretchedness of the North Africans.⁴

One of the consequences of the reification of North Africa was its universal appearance in scholarship as an acceptable category that supported scholarly generalizations. The situation continues today. One need only look for the prevalence of references to “Roman” or “ancient” North Africa which, more than the anachronistic proclivities of some historians, demonstrate the adaptation and accommodation of colonial knowledge to post- or neocolonial conditions.⁵ What is at stake here is not the historians’ use of a colonial category, but rather the fact that in following this convention they risk designing their research in ways that incorporate ideas they might not necessarily agree with.

The refitting of the terms of colonial knowledge, which has been ongoing since the 1960s, has toned down what scholars now consider derogatory statements about the natives. The way to convey respect for the natives has been to replace North Africa with a native category, the Maghrib, though doing so merely maintains the pretense of the colonial body of knowledge.⁶ As it happens, the Maghrib too is an ideological construct produced and reproduced in the process of supporting the domination of a number of pre-modern elites.⁷ In other words, like modern North Africa, the medieval term Maghrib was a construct that served amalgamation and conflation, not elucidation and clarification. However, unlike North Africa, it has been in use for centuries, incorporated into a number of discourses, not always for the same reasons or with the same consequences. Consequently, using the Maghrib, or one of its subregions, as a container within which to fit history does more than support colonial discourse. It gives credence to the dominant discourses of the successive medieval dynasties that utilized the category to prop up their rule. Neither option is particularly attractive.

This book proposes an alternative perspective focusing on Ifrīqiyā. It examines how intellectuals associated with the Ḥafṣid dynasty (1229–1574) represented the dynasty’s rule over specific groups and areas as its rule “in” or “of” Ifrīqiyā. It analyzes the ways their writings have served as the empirical basis upon which modern historians have transformed Ifrīqiyā into the easternmost region of the Maghrib. The book argues that the perspective of these texts gains significance in relation to political struggles that led to the elimination of the political autonomy of urban emirates in Ifrīqiyā and the imposition of rule from Tunis at the end of the fourteenth century. Intellectuals of the era described the ruler (emir) of Tunis as ruling over all of Ifrīqiyā because he had eliminated what they saw as political fragmentation—not because he actually controlled the entire “territory” of Ifrīqiyā or all those who inhabited it. In order to establish this, the book will bring into focus the evolution of the city of Bijāya, the main city under Ḥafṣid rule, beside Tunis. It will show that Bijāya was not always under the rule of Tunis or the Ḥafṣids, that it was not dependent on its integration into an Ifrīqiyā-wide economy, and that the range of activities of its elite demonstrate the Tunis-centric bias of the sources.

Arguing that contemporary writers partook of an ideology that became increasingly dominant after the end of the fourteenth century requires a careful examination of the evidence. It involves using the descriptions of sociohistorical processes found in the texts to demonstrate that claims about the extent of the emir’s influence were politically motivated embellishments. The conceptual tools with which scholars have understood such processes make the articulation of this argument a complex task. While the notion of region figures prominently because of the specific claims of Ḥafṣid intellectuals, it is not the only issue this study tackles. Scholarly ideas about regions and regionalization are part of a broader discourse sustained by a nexus of related conceptions and approaches. A discussion of some of these will shed light on the scope of the challenge ahead.

How Ifrīqiyā Was Made

Maghrib specialists have not analyzed the evolution of the category Ifrīqiyā over time in relation to sociohistorical and intellectual changes. Instead, they have tried to define it, or ascertain the most reliable description of it, by cataloguing references in Arabic texts written over seven or eight centuries, from al-Andalus to Baghdad. This approach collapses chronology and ignores the conditions within which various authors produced those references. Unsurprisingly, it has also yielded conflicting bits of information. This is what the historian Mohamed Talbi discovered: “The details given by the various Arabo-Muslim geographers and historians do not always agree,” he wrote. Apparently, these authors did not precisely understand “the exact frontiers of Ifrīḳiya.” Talbi’s challenge was therefore to explain their confusion.

It may be said that the geographical Ifrīḳiya consisted essentially of the ancient (Numidia) Proconsularis and Byzacena, which formed the nucleus of it, to which were later added Tripolitania, the Numidia of the Aurès, and even a part of Sitifian Numidia. Upon this geographical concept was superimposed an administrative concept. Because of this, Ifrīḳiya tended to be confused, in the writings of the chroniclers, with the territory that, in the Middle Ages, was ruled in turn from Qayrawān, from Mahdiyya or from Tunis—a territory which expanded or contracted according to the vicissitudes of history.⁸

In order to eliminate this confusion, Talbi proposed that late antique Roman categories be used instead of medieval ones.⁹ This unsatisfactory position rests on the unexplained and not obvious distinction between a late antique “geographic” conception and a medieval “administrative” one, the former assumed to be more accurate than the latter. In addition to fostering anachronism, this interpretation implies that geographical notions develop independently of politics, an idea that deserves, if not demonstration, at least explanation.

Moreover, if in the medieval period Ifrīqiyā was a territory that expanded and contracted, then medieval authors were not necessarily confused when they disagreed about its frontiers. For instance, the “divergence” over whether the city of Bijāya belonged to western Ifrīqiyā or was the capital of the central Maghrib was not necessarily due to confusion. The city only became important in the second half of the eleventh century when it became the capital of the Ḥammādids (1015–1152). As such, it became the capital of the central Maghrib, a region associated with that dynasty. This explains why the great geographer al-Idrīsī (d. 1166) considered Bijāya to belong to the central Maghrib.¹⁰ Later, when the Ḥafṣids claimed Bijāya, it was reasonable for the Mamlūk official and author Ibn Faḍl Allāh al-‘Umarī (d. 1349) to believe it belonged to Ifrīqiyā.¹¹ But when the Bijāyan judge al-Ghubrīnī (d. 1304) wrote of “our central Maghrib” including Bijāya in it, he was expressing thoughts supportive of the autonomy of the Ḥafṣid emirate of Bijāya from Tunis and its standing as the capital of the central Maghrib.¹² Deciding where the borders of Ifrīqiyā were had political implications and learned contemporaries seem to have understood that.

Recently, Dominique Valérian has suggested that, “in spite of the vagueness of the sources, [historians] must preserve the political and administrative sense that [Ifrīqiyā] had in the early years of the Islamic Maghrib and that it retained in many later texts,” namely, that “Bijāya actually belonged to Ifrīqiyā, which experienced a real political unity in the Ḥafṣid period.”¹³ Valérian did not explain why he believed that historians should preserve earlier notions or why the fact that later authors reproduced earlier notions made those notions more valid. Nevertheless, he gave weight to political considerations in deciding the frontiers of Ifrīqiyā. Although he also noted the importance of narrative practices in producing what he described as a blurry and vague conception of Ifrīqiyā, he argued that the political unification imposed by the Ḥafṣids warranted that Bijāya should be included in it. The problem is that Ifrīqiyā was not always politically unified and was certainly not always under the control of the Ḥafṣids. Why the Ḥafṣid period should become the standard rather than the Ḥammādid period is also not self-evident.

In spite of these difficulties, Valérian’s original insight connecting region and politics is critical because it enables the notion of “Ifrīqiyā” to become the object of historical analysis rather than to be taken for granted. Instead of using a particular historical period or political circumstance as a measuring rod against which to compare others, it is preferable to imagine that Ifrīqiyā underwent a number of articulations each of which corresponded to specific sociohistorical and intellectual conditions.¹⁴ Clearly, intellectuals associated with the Ḥafṣids were not alone in producing notions of what Ifrīqiyā meant. However, by focusing on them, this book seeks to account for an important source of the inconsistencies behind both the historical and historiographic records.

Map 1. The medieval Maghrib.

State, Territory, and Region

Historians who have studied Ḥafṣid politics have assessed the power of the Ḥafṣid state by analyzing its control over its territory, the region of Ifrīqiyā. In this transposition of modern notions of state and territory, the natural expression of Ḥafṣid domination is assumed to be the homogeneous territory that fell between primarily political borders. For specialists such as Talbi, the Ḥafṣids ruled that territory from Tunis, their capital. This dynastic or state-centric perspective has the benefit of agreeing with the perspective of the sources. But it rests on one fundamental assumption, and that is the equivalence of the modern concept of “state” and the medieval Arabic term dawla.

The medieval word dawla is commonly translated it in English as “state” or “dynasty.” But dawla is attested in the earliest Arabic chronicles, and thus centuries before a notion of “the state” became established in European languages.¹⁵ Its meanings accrued and evolved in relation to widely different sociohistorical conditions and conceptions, and by the time Ḥafṣid chroniclers used the term, they were attributing to it meanings not all found in modern notions of the state.¹⁶

Certainly, Ḥafṣid authors applied the term dawla to the ruling family or dynasty. For example, in his Kitāb al-‘ibar (Book of Examples), Ibn Khaldūn (1332–1406) entitled the section on the Ḥafṣids “the dawla of the descendants of Abū Ḥafṣ” (dawlat Banī Abī Ḥafṣ).¹⁷ This usage suggests that the dawla was something the Ḥafṣids possessed or embodied collectively. In another example, the dawla was depicted as “Ḥafṣid,” as in “the Ḥafṣid dawla” (al-dawla al-ḥafṣiya). In this sense, “Ḥafṣid” was a quality the dawla possessed.¹⁸ This conception of dawla is, however, not the one most commonly found in the sources. Most frequently, dawla was applied to an individual ruler. This dawla began with the reception of the oath of allegiance and ended when the ruler died—or when he abdicated or was deposed. It is such a conception that the historian Ibn Qunfudh (d. 1407) applied when he wrote that the “dawla [of the Ḥafṣid al-Mustanṣir (r. 1249–77)] lasted twenty-nine and and a half years.”¹⁹ In this sense, dawla was a regnal period (mudda), not a kinship group or dynasty.²⁰

While the “collective” dawla could continue to exist, in rare cases, without a Ḥafṣid emir, the more “personal” dawla could become extinct (inqaraḍat) while he was nominally in charge—although the end of the regnal period (dawla) had to await his actual death. This was the case of the dawla of Abū Ḥafṣ ‘Umar (r. 1284–95). “[His dawla] became extinct with the disappearance of its pillars (arkān).²¹ The first who died among its pillars was Abū Zayd ‘Īsa al-Fāzāzī—his family had means, leadership, and knowledge (‘ilm).”²² The conception of the dawla assumed here by the pro-Ḥafṣid historian Ibn Qunfudh differs from the aforementioned ones and refers neither to a dynasty nor to a regnal period. This dawla was imagined as a structure with weight-bearing walls or pillars. Significantly, this perspective envisaged a broader notion that included elite individuals outside the Ḥafṣid dynasty. Ibn Qunfudh also used the term dawla to describe an entity similar to the family. As the head of his dawla, the ruler was portrayed as keeping it in order, as a father would.²³ This familial (dynastic) dawla was run like a business. When the ruler managed his dawla properly, peace extended beyond his narrow circle, benefiting the people (al-nās). Conversely, when the dawla was not in order (murattaba), everyone suffered. Interestingly, in spite of the multiplicity of meanings they lent a dawla, Ḥafṣid intellectuals never personified the concept. Their dawla did not raise taxes, build roads, or purchase goods. Moreover, it did not engage in relations with abstract entities such as tribes and cities. In this sense, it was not like the reified modern state.

Map 2. The tripartite division of the Maghrib.

Scholars have disagreed about whether the sources associate dynastic rule with a territory. Historian Mohamed Kably argued that the absence of personal names (nisab, sing. nisba) tied to a specific territory rather than a kinship group or a town suggests that the notion is simply an anachronistic imposition.²⁴ In contrast, Dominique Valérian thought that the existence of terms pertaining to fiscal and administrative units “around” cities implied that such an association truly existed—in spite of the absence of an Arabic term that would have expressed that exact relation.²⁵ Whether political authority and territory were associated can be debated, but the sources clearly do not make the connection through their use of the notion of dawla.

In his Histoire de l’Afrique du Nord, Charles-André Julien took the equivalence between dawla and state for granted. His map of North Africa in the thirteenth century illustrates the transformation of the rule of three dynasties into that of three states, each within a territory. Julien translated the tripartite political division of the Maghrib between the Ḥafṣids, ‘Abd al-Wādids (1236–1555), and Marīnids (1217–1465) into Ḥafṣid rule in Ifrīqiyā, ‘Abd al-Wādid rule in the central Maghrib, and Marīnid rule in the western Maghrib. As the title of his book states, this view establishes the modern nation-states of Tunisia, Algeria, and Morocco in the pre-modern past—the modern national territory of Tunisia being the successor of Ifrīqiyā.²⁶ Unfounded and tenuous as it certainly is, this vision has enabled the wholesale nationalization of history.

The inattentive use of the modern notion of the state to interpret pre-modern texts has led historians such as Robert Brunschvig to conceive political history in terms of the changing power of the Ḥafṣid state. When he discussed the period that saw a number of Ḥafṣid emirs rule independently from the ruler of Tunis, Brunschvig naturally thought of it as a period of “fragmentation” and “disintegration.”²⁷ He was not troubled by the fact that his point of view matched that of ideologues who favored a particularly Tunis-centric configuration of dynastic domination. Rather than account for them, Brunschvig dismissed the ideas of those who preferred autonomy as illegitimate, and presented the perspective of those who supported a strong ruler of Tunis as neutral and natural. Effectively, his state-centric approach depoliticized politics by cherrypicking types of change, and limited his analysis to the fluctuation between strength and weakness in the same Ḥafṣid state.²⁸ This is a fundamental point that brings state-centric colonial scholarship and nation-state-based nationalist historiography in line with the staunchly pro-Tunis Ḥafṣid authors writing at the end of the fourteenth and in the fifteenth century.

In part, these difficulties arise because historians do not always, or fully, take stock of the changing composition of the ruling group, or do so but then take sides with one of the parties. That is why it is preferable to think of an oscillation of Ḥafṣid domination from a “regional” mode centered on Tunis to a “local” configuration with a multiplicity of autonomous Ḥafṣid capitals such as Bijāya. A change in perspective away from strength and weakness of a state is in keeping with this book’s lack of predilection for either of the two modes of domination. This approach also identifies the victory of the regional mode at the end of the fourteenth century as a political phenomenon that requires elucidation.

Characterizing a specific political configuration as regional explains why this book does not develop a theory of regionalization and then test whether it applied to Ifrīqiyā by mustering evidence. Its primary goal is not to use empirical evidence to demonstrate the nonexistence of a region—however one may define it;²⁹ rather, it is to explain what is involved in conceiving of medieval regions in the first place.³⁰

Tribes, Bedouins, and Pastureland

Like the state, the notion of tribe is mostly a source of confusion. On the one hand, a tribe can refer to a small group of nomads with a few goats and maybe a dog. On the other, the term is used to describe a great number of groups who may share elaborate ideas of collective genealogy. In a few cases, tribes founded urban dynasties and even empires.³¹ The notion has thus no analytical power and lumps together groups with widely different livelihoods, organization, and senses of collective identity. In addition to being an impediment to reasoned explanation of sociohistorical and cultural differences, the term carries with it a heavy ideological baggage, from biblical to colonial tribes.

Although the term appears in the sources (qabīla, pl. qabā’il), it is generally used without special care for analytical precision. Like modern references to biblical tribes, it expresses ideological preconceptions that are not always negative. The term qabīla did not imply an associated territory, although when medieval authors used it to refer to pastoralists, they assumed that the latter moved across a geographic space and that some of these tribes claimed that space as theirs. Medieval authors did not systematically identify each tribe as a tribe, but simply noted the common names of various groups. Modern historians routinely append the moniker “tribe” to these names presumably to help identify them to nonspecialists. When they do so, they make it seem as though they are distinguishing between tribes and states on solid analytical grounds. They are not.

The written record includes only those tribes whose actions made them noteworthy. In general, these groups had political relations with the Ḥafṣids. In contrast, there is very little information about groups that lived outside the dynastic spotlight. For instance, from the narrative of a raid by Abū Fāris ‘Abd al-‘Azīz (r. 1394–1434) into the Awrās Mountains southeast of Bijāya, it is clear that many groups lived there outside of Ḥafṣid rule.³² Even in the case of politically prominent tribes, authors did not mention the borders of their territory, but only that they lived near a city, a river, or a mountain range. This makes situating tribes in Ifrīqiyā in more than very general terms a very difficult proposition.

The Ḥafṣids did not always control the main highways, and bands of roving bandits made land travel a hazardous proposition for much of the fourteenth century and well into the fifteenth.³³ In some areas, villages banded together to defend themselves and to share the losses they caused.³⁴ The sources often refer to these outlaws as Bedouins or a‘rāb, another vague term that does not allow us to identify them with any degree of precision.³⁵ While it is common today to use Bedouin to refer to nomadic groups, the term was applied less specifically to all those who did not live in cities. For city-dwellers, settled agriculturalists who lived in villages and nomadic pastoralists were Bedouins. The term was almost an adjective that described non-urban groups, and jurists used it mostly in a derogatory sense. The predominantly urban character of the sources—and their utilization of categories that fit the prejudices of modern colonial and postcolonial historians—make the task of historicizing the perspective of urbanites a necessity.

The City and Its Autonomy

From the 1280s to the 1370s, the rulers of Tunis had a hard time quashing the independence of the Ḥafṣid emirates of Bijāya, Qasanṭīna (Constantine), and Ṭarāblus (Tripoli). Their inability to do so was, according to supporters of the regional configuration of Ḥafṣid domination such as Ibn Khaldūn, the result of weakness.³⁶ Scholars have approached autonomous cities in Ifrīqiyā from a number of perspectives. In the 1940s, Brunschvig saw them as the result of the weakness of the state and petty infighting between cousins. While this would not distinguish him from Ibn Khaldūn, he insisted that their autonomy be distinguished from the popular, communal, and republican character of western European city-states. He reasoned that “in Islam,” legal prescriptions and institutional limitations made a commune inconceivable and thus impossible. Not everyone agreed. Other historians analyzed examples that challenged this view based on prescriptive texts, and sought to develop an alternative approach to the Islamic city.³⁷

In a seminal article that took the comparison with European city-states a step further, Michael Brett focused on the involvement of the Tripolitan elite in bringing about Tripoli’s autonomy from Tunis.³⁸ He argued that seeing Tripoli as a Mediterranean city-state was preferable to understanding it as an Islamic city, and made better sense of its autonomy. Although he did not develop this idea further, his essay pointed to the possibility of developing comparisons with southern Europe that went beyond stating what Islam prevented and what Muslims lacked. Arguing from a different standpoint, Muḥammad Ḥasan thought that, even if urban institutional arrangements in Ifrīqiyā were different from those of European city-states, they performed similar functions.³⁹ He also discussed the involvement of the non-elite mass (al-‘āmma) in politics, but did not argue that there were urban republics in Ifrīqiyā.⁴⁰ More recently, Valérian abstained from making claims about the participation of the “population” in politics, given the character of the sources. Although he was sure that Bijāya was never an “urban republic,” he was not as confident about the existence of political structures that would have allowed Bijāyans to express themselves collectively.⁴¹ While it is not certain whether these structures existed or not, comparisons with European republics and Islamic cities have not helped decide the question. Instead, they have tended to serve as a distraction and perpetuate the discourse of absences and lacks.

Though it pays special attention to Bijāya, this book is not an urban history. It does not try to account for the functioning of the city, its infrastructure, or its history. Instead, it uses the politics of city-centered autonomy—specifically, the autonomy of Bijāya—as a way to illuminate the ideology behind the making of Ifrīqiyā. Since this ideology was not specific to Bijāya or its elite, it incorporates the perspectives of elites in other cities and assesses their participation in support of the regional emirate. The focus on Bijāya sheds light on the socioeconomic and political conditions that enabled urban elites to challenge the dominance of Tunis and points to the process that ultimately led to the political and ideological defeat of the local configuration. In this vein, an event such as the irruption of the “populace” in politics gains full significance in relation to an argument about the realignment of urban elites around the ruler of Tunis. Emphasizing the importance of this event, especially given the paucity of available information, is meant to draw attention to the tendency of the sources to downplay the political role of non-elite groups and, therefore, to the depoliticizing character of the extant chronicles.

An important goal of this work, especially as it tries to explain why scholars have imagined the Maghrib and Ifrīqiyā as “regions,” is to bring an awareness of the limited number of historical studies, many of which are now dated, that have served as the basis of scholarly generalizations. Even when these studies do not share the a priori assumption that the Maghrib constitutes a unit with some degree of ethnic, institutional, and intellectual homogeneity, others have used them to support discussions that did so. The question of the homogeneity of the Maghrib and the similarity of developments within it remains open and in need of serious study. This, rather than any resistance to generalization or comparison per se, explains my reticence to making too many claims about neighboring dynasties, even when their ideologies appear to be similar.

Recognizing the confluence of problems raised in medieval and modern texts, this book develops an approach that takes on the challenge of writing medieval political history using historiographic narrative sources, which are our most important source of information. It does so by foregrounding the past and its representations both in the medieval period and in the present all at the same time.

Framing the Masses

Information about non-elite groups, the urban populace among them, is rare because the writers from whom we get our information about politics tended to equate politics with intra-elite struggles. Historicizing the perspective of the sources, and thus showing their partiality, begins with the realization that their analysis of their societies was often inaccurate, limited, and misleading, although not necessarily self-consciously so. Those who authored the texts we use as evidence did not believe that subordinate groups could contribute anything to history and so mentioned them only when their actions shed light on those of the elite. Central to the deployment of this elite perspective were the twin notions of khāṣṣa and ‘āmma.

The entourage and highest-ranking members of a ruler’s court were known as his khāṣṣa. The literal meaning of khāṣṣ is private and particular. Its negative double is ‘ām which means general and common. The khāṣṣa constituted the core of the ruling elite and played an active role in politics, performing crucial functions such as determining heirs-apparent and taking the oath of allegiance. They were pillars of the dawla. Members of the khāṣṣa of Ḥafṣid emirs were not necessarily the same as his chief officials—although that was generally the case. They belonged to a group that was privy to the ruler’s secrets such as the location of his treasure, the terms of negotiations and agreements with enemies and allies, and his military plans. The composition of the khāṣṣa of a particular emir was subject to change. It depended on solidarity between members and the loyalty they demonstrated their leader. It is important to note in this regard that although most of those who were part of a ruler’s khāṣṣa were members of the upper classes of society, not everyone who belonged to the social elite was automatically a member of the khāṣṣa.

Whereas the term khāṣṣa described a specific group of individuals with ties to the ruler and each other, ‘āmma (also kāffa) was a generic term that lumped together a number of very distinct groups, from notable scholars and wealthy merchants, to craftsmen and petty officials. Members of the ‘āmma were subjects of the ruler who were not part of his khāṣṣa, and thus not part of the dawla. In fact, the term does not correspond to any actual sociopolitical group and has very little descriptive or analytical value. It simply distinguished those who were part of the ruler’s circle from everyone else. Revolts against the ruler that were not led by recognized political factions of elites were automatically attributed to the ‘āmma as a whole, even if it was clearly a mere portion of the ‘āmma that was involved. Interestingly, Bedouin “tribes” belonged neither with the ‘āmma nor the khāṣṣa, even when they were allied or tributary. They stood as separate and distinct entities. The urban emir may have secured the allegiance of individual Bedouin leaders, but the latter did not become members of the khāṣṣa, and their fellow tribesmen were not part of the ‘āmma.

The political imaginary suggested by the concepts of khāṣṣa and ‘āmma poses the question of the bias of the sources in a way that goes beyond the political activities of individual authors. Tying political conceptions to the politics of regionalization allows us to delineate the contours of political discourse in Ifrīqiyā and thus move beyond the issue of the objectivity, reliability, and representativeness of individual sources and statements.

The Learned and the Evidence

The category “intellectual” is a modern one and using it to describe educated men and women in medieval Ifrīqiyā can be anachronistic.⁴² One of the problems associated with using the concept is that historians might project onto the past the modern idea that intellectual activity is socially differentiated or autonomous. Yet, the idea that it is easy to situate intellectual activity, and thus intellectuals, in modern societies is itself problematic. Clearly, identifying some individuals as intellectuals and excluding others is itself a political act that, some might say, serves to legitimize the prevailing social order.

In medieval Ifrīqiyā, the notions of knowledge or science (‘ilm) and of the learned man who practiced it ‘ālim (pl. ‘ulamā’) had similar effects. They delineated the form and content of acceptable thought and served to legitimize a social order, especially by establishing a hierarchy of knowledge. The ulama’s writings not only constitute most of the historical archive, they present the historian with a particular ordering of it.

Moreover, medieval ulama did not always agree on who could be considered an ‘ālim or the criteria that identified one as such. When the Chief Judge of Tunis, Ibn ‘Arafa (d. 1401), heard that the historian Ibn Khaldūn held a position as judge in Cairo, he scoffed. For him, Ibn Khaldūn was not a ‘ālim because his knowledge of Mālikī jurisprudence was too poor to qualify him as one. The modern historian’s decision to identify some individuals as ulama risks taking sides and reproducing the judgments of medieval authors. One must somehow find a way to acknowledge Ibn Khaldūn’s involvement at the Ḥafṣid court, his authorship of an important historical narrative, and the opposition he inspired in some of Ifrīqiyā’s most prominent learned men.

As if this were not enough, the activities of the ulama, and the established forms of knowledge that they maintained, systematically marginalized the ideas of many in their societies—so many, in fact, that historians have a hard time recovering the contingency of the social hierarchy that they represented in ways that made them seem part of the natural order. For the ulama, an individual whose ideas rallied hundreds and opposed the power of elites by organizing armed resistance was not a thinking individual. Their habit of denigrating this type of person may seem perfectly justified in retrospect since often they were barely literate. But for modern historians, the actions of these illiterati are quite relevant. Without them, the particular institutional arrangements that prevailed in Ifrīqiyā may appear as having descended from the heavens.

We have a choice: we can use the nomenclature of the medieval ulama and thus reproduce their biases, or we can use modern terms such as “intellectual.” Though the latter path equally risks bias, I have chosen it. In this book, I use the term intellectual to apply universally to all those who articulated political ideas, and not merely to those designated as ulama in the sources. Doing so has the benefit of recalling the political partiality of the historical evidence and its bias against certain social groups. In the absence of neutral terms, medieval or modern, it might have been helpful to use a completely different concept or to invent one to serve my purposes. My sense is that doing so would not be necessarily more fruitful. Instead, “misusing” the notion of intellectual in the particular sense I propose maintains an awareness of the conceptual work involved when historians take into account medieval and modern ideologies simultaneously.

The Mediterranean

The Mediterranean encapsulates a set of connected historical problems related to the categories that frame research and the character of the archive. Following Peregrine Horden and Nicholas Purcell’s distinction between “history in the Mediterranean” and “history of the Mediterranean,” this study of Ifrīqiyā is primarily a study of history in the Mediterranean.⁴³ Its argument about the multiplicity of economic arrangements and the integration of some, but not all of them, agrees with Horden and Purcell’s view of the prevalence of microregions in the Mediterranean.

Map 3. The western Mediterranean.

Whether their work is a history in or of the Mediterranean, however, Mediterraneanists have tended to reinforce the idea that North Africa was a single region by framing their research in terms of relations between a European city, kingdom, or region, and all of North Africa or the Maghrib.⁴⁴ This routine act of lumping and generalizing has weakened the degree of specificity and nuance that some Mediterraneanists want to enshrine. By challenging the habit of assuming that Ifrīqiyā, and by extension North Africa or the Maghrib, should be understood as regions, this book hopes to contribute to the development of new habits based on the ongoing rethinking of historical knowledge about the Mediterranean.

Another common scholarly shorthand that requires some attention is the “Islamic Mediterranean” which, as far as one is able to tell, stands for the “lands of Islam” that have a Mediterranean coast.⁴⁵ Although it is rarely meant as a serious analytical category, this epithet lends credence to the practice of understanding history through the prism of religion. Merely stating that some societies were Islamic does little to illuminate why understanding them as such improves our interpretation of their histories. Unfortunately, this practice is as common as it is problematic. It is thus necessary to resist the sirens that call for a greater inclusion of the “Islamic Mediterranean” into the Mediterranean field—at least under this rubric.

Al-Andalus and the Role of Andalusis in Ifrīqiyā

In the first half of the thirteenth century, the rulers of al-Andalus lost control of a great number of cities to Aragon and Castile. The defeat of the Almohad armies, which controlled most of al-Andalus, at the battle of Las Navas de Tolosa (mawqi‘at al-‘uqāb) in 1212 accelerated the process of reorganizing politics in both al-Andalus and the Maghrib. In the following decades, the Andalusis lost a number of major cities: Cordoba in 1236, Valencia in 1238, and Játiva in 1248, followed soon after by Seville. In 1268 Murcia fell. Andalusis left their towns and cities in droves. Andalusi exiles sought refuge and livelihood in nearby cities still under Muslim control or else crossed the sea and settled in the larger cities of the Maghrib, Tunis and Bijāya prominent among them.

The Ḥafṣids (1229–1574) saw in the plight of al-Andalus a political opportunity. They encouraged elite Andalusis to join their court and appointed them to prominent official positions. New to Ifrīqiyā, these Andalusis had no attachments to any other group but the Ḥafṣid dynasty on whom they relied for their livelihood. As they became an important component of the elite, Andalusis participated fully in politics, playing an active role in bringing about the independence of Bijāya and other local Ḥafṣid emirates. However, by the end of the fourteenth century, prominent Andalusis grumbled that their local emirs lacked power and became ardent supporters of the regional emirate.

When they first joined the Ḥafṣid court in the thirteenth century, elite Andalusis brought with them a particular form of political expertise and cultural refinement.⁴⁶ They also used their forced exile to elicit the sympathy of the Ḥafṣids and others. The great number of learned Andalusis sponsored by the Ḥafṣids overwhelmed, by their very presence, the intellectual scene. As it happens, their writings have also shaped modern historical interpretations of the period. The expertise and sophistication of Andalusis and their victimization at the hands of Christians were ideas full of political significance, and were neither arbitrary nor neutral. The notion of al-Andalus’s greatness has had an exceptionally long half-life in historiography, and modern scholars have tended to interpret the sources as accurate representations of the civilizing mission that elite Andalusis took up in Ifrīqiyā. These preconceptions relayed familiar sentiments about Europe’s relations with Africa. As one historian put it,

As the long-standing struggle between Islam and Christian Spain drew to a close, the successful intensification of Christian militance gave increasing impetus to the emigration of Spanish Muslims. It did, in fact, mark the beginning of what was to prove a veritable diaspora, of which Africa experienced appreciable effects.⁴⁷

A focus on the politics of regionalization better situates the articulation of ideas such as the greatness of al-Andalus by relating them to particular political agendas. It eschews the difficulties inherent in deploying modern racial ideology and the burden of civilizing Africa without having to dwell on their problematic character. That said, the migration of elite Andalusis from Iberia to Ifrīqiyā is not itself the primary focus of this book. Instead of analyzing the causes or workings of this trans-Mediterranean migration, the book seeks to assess its effects on elite politics and the articulation of Emirist ideology.

Ibn Khaldūn

Historical chronicles (tawārīkh) are an important source of information in establishing a chronology of political events and identifying the individuals and groups involved. Most of the information we have about thirteenth-and fourteenth-century politics in Ifrīqiyā comes from dynastic histories by four authors: Ibn Khaldūn, Ibn Qunfudh, al-Zarkashī (fl. 1482), and Ibn al-Shammā‘ (fl. 1457).⁴⁸ These men’s backgrounds, experiences, and trajectories were dissimilar in many ways, but their chronicles share a basic dynastic vision of politics, one that shaped the stories they saw fit to tell, retell, or omit. Since all were involved, directly or not, in the very processes their chronicles describe, it is important to situate their political views in relation to the politics of regionalization.

Ibn Khaldūn’s Book of Examples (Kitāb al-‘ibar) is not as concise as the other three and includes information not found in any of them. It is our sole source on a number of critical events such as the rule of the non-elite in Bijāya in the 1360s.⁴⁹ This makes it a very important source for the types of arguments this book makes about regionalization. Moreover, this author’s theoretical reflections about politics in the introductory volume (muqaddima) of that work make it special in yet another respect. He argued that a new science of civilization (‘ilm al-‘umrān) was necessary to make sense of history. This theoretical move and the way he implemented it have gained him fame as father of sociology and the Muslim Machiavelli.⁵⁰

But Ibn Khaldūn’s concerns were firmly grounded in the politics of his time.⁵¹ His ideas were steeped in the intellectual traditions that formed the basis of political strategy in Ifrīqiyā, and need to be analyzed in relation to the emergence of Emirism. However, since he was far more consistent than other authors in his attempt to make sense of politics, his views require even greater attention. This is not to say that the other authors were less political or intellectually deficient. Rather, they described politics as they saw them but did not try to formulate a theory about the rise and fall of dynasties.

Ibn Khaldūn was an enormously original thinker. Many have asked to what extent his originality was specific to him, to his historical context, or to Islamic civilization.⁵² This line of questioning explains, at least in part, Ibn Khaldūn’s immense popularity beyond the relatively small field of Maghrib studies and the fourteenth century. The availability of translations of his works in a number of languages has meant that scholars with little or no familiarity with either the Maghrib or the fourteenth century can use him to support all sorts of arguments. In a similar vein, interpretations of Ibn Khaldūn’s work exhibit an oddly consistent confidence in the very few, and often dated, historical studies that support their understanding of the context in which the author lived.

In this book, Ibn Khaldūn’s ideas are used to identify and characterize a specific political ideology—Emirism. This does not mean that they are reduced to his family’s association with the Ḥafṣids or even his own friendship with a Ḥafṣid emir. Rather, the book argues that they fit within an ideology that supported a particular version of Ḥafṣid dynastic rule. Doing so does not preclude historians from finding other ways of employing them. For instance, Maya Shatzmiller made a compelling case for thinking of Ibn Khaldūn in relation to Marīnid historiography. Describing him as a Ḥafṣid ideologue here does not contradict that argument. But it does open up new interpretative possibilities, including a rethinking of differences between dynasties in the Maghrib and al-Andalus.⁵³ In any case, the use made of his text is self-consciously partial: to the extent that the arguments are about Ibn Khaldūn and his work, they situate both in relation to a specific politics.

Organization

This book’s organization supports its dual goal of ascertaining the extent of regional political and economic integration in Ifrīqiyā and linking it to the victory of the regional emirate at the end of the fourteenth century. Together, these two aspects account for the making of a Mediterranean emirate.

The book begins with a political narrative that focuses on the emergence of two political visions of Ifrīqiyā in the fourteenth century: one “local,” which emphasized the autonomy of the emir and thus supported an independent emirate, the other “regional,” which supported the unification of Ifrīqiyā under the ruler of Tunis. The first chapter shows that the immigration of elite Andalusis precipitated the reorganization of Ḥafṣid domination and led to the emergence of independent emirates in cities such as Bijāya. By the end of the fourteenth century, the regional configuration became a possibility, then a reality under the rule of Abū Fāris.

The following two chapters evaluate the notion that Ifrīqiyā was an economic region. Chapter 2 analyzes the transformation of land tenure and agricultural production beginning with the Almohads and continuing with the Ḥafṣids. Utilizing collections of legal opinions, chronicles, and travelogues, the chapter examines the fiscal system put in place by these two dynasties and the extent to which it fostered the homogenization of practices and conditions in Ifrīqiyā. Chapter 3 examines the organization and evolution of manufacturing, commerce, and piracy in Bijāya. It builds on studies such as those of Dominique Valérian and María Dolores López Pérez, which draw upon European commercial sources, and uses them to test whether Ifrīqiyā can be meaningfully understood as a region. The chapter identifies the main commodities traded in the city’s markets, and evaluates the importance of piracy in order to assess the degree of economic integration.

The next three chapters analyze the making of Ifrīqiyā by intellectuals. They pay special attention to judges and chroniclers whose writings form the bulk of the evidence supporting the arguments of this book. Chapter 4 argues that the defeat of autonomous emirates was supported by a specific political ideology I call “Emirism.” Examining how this ideology became dominant after the accession of Abū Fāris to the throne in 1394, the chapter discusses its impact on the ways contemporary historians came to conceive of the entire fourteenth century. The writings of intellectuals at the Ḥafṣid court will be the particular focus of this chapter. Chapter 5 argues that the Ḥafṣid dynasty was able to exert a remarkable degree of control over what intellectuals said and wrote. Through an analysis of institutions of learning, it explains the cultural effects of the politics of regionalization and, most importantly, the influence of Andalusi intellectuals on consolidating Ḥafṣid power. Paying special attention to judges and Sufis, the chapter utilizes biographical dictionaries and other literary sources to establish the dynasty’s involvement in favoring particular intellectual expressions. Since biographical dictionaries focus primarily on the urban elite, their utilization for this purpose can be particularly useful. Chapter 6 analyzes the work of Ḥafṣid historians who framed the political history of Ifrīqiyā in terms of Emirist ideology. These three chapters use the career and oeuvre of Ibn Khaldūn to illustrate the relationship between the politics of regionalization, official ideology, and historical writing. The book concludes with a discussion of the impact of this fourteenth-century ideology on our understanding of the medieval Maghrib, and explores the possibility that the entire medieval period has been seen through the prism of the fourteenth century.