The Near West: Medieval North Africa, Latin Europe and the Mediterranean in the Second Axial Age By Allen James Fromherz

Abstract

Allen Fromherz has already written a very useful book on the Almohads, and he now attempts to set his work on their remarkable empire within a much wider setting, from the seventh century, when Islam reached the Maghreb, all the way to the fifteenth century, and in the entire western Mediterranean. His thesis is that we should think of western Mediterranean civilization in the Middle Ages as a shared culture and experience, embracing the much-ignored history of what are now Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia alongside the study of Spanish, Italian and other histories, predominantly Christian. Close attention to the Christian shores of the western Mediterranean has, he avers, created a narrative of worlds apart: Christians on the northern flanks who had little in common with the Muslims on the southern flanks, though they knew them fairly well through their wars. He wants to move beyond a history of undoubted engagement at that level to a history of interwoven cultures, religions and economies. Engagement was expressed, as he admits, in violent acts, such as the Pisan and Genoese raid on al-Mahdiyyah in Tunisia in 1087, which is often seen as a precursor of the crusades directed towards the eastern Mediterranean. But Europe also brought ideas from North Africa, most importantly through the arithmetical writings of Leonardo Fibonacci, who had spent part of his youth in Bougie (Bejaïa) before he composed his Liber Abaci, introducing the Latin world to the Hindu-Arabic system of numbering—easier to cope with in calculations, not least because of the invention (or should one say discovery?) of the zero. Fromherz makes the interesting point that the French word for a candle, bougie, is derived from the name of this important port from which top-quality wax was exported. No one would deny that there were fruitful contacts between Christians, Muslims and Jews within this broad space in the arcane realms of mysticism, so that Islamic theology and Jewish kabbalah were brought to bear on the ideas of such Christian luminaries as Ramon Llull of Majorca (d. 1316). His account of Llull is facile, and does not engage at all with Llull’s complex algebra, while his account of Anselm Turmeda, the fourteenth-century convert to Islam, does not address the puzzle that he appears to have been writing defences of Islam and Christianity separately but at the same time. He might well have explored the influence of Islamic ideas on Maimonides (d. 1204), the Jewish philosopher whose ideas, even at quite a basic level, reveal the influence of current thinking in the Almohad lands in the age of Ibn Rushd.