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North Africa, Islam and the Mediterranean World
Journal of Third World Studies, Spring 2004 by Abraham, A J
Clancy-Smith, julia (ed.). North Africa, Islam and the Mediterranean World. London: Frank case, 2000. 202 pp.
This book presents North Africa, from the Almoravids to the Algerian War, as a crossroads between western Europe and the Middle East. It deals with the Islamic West called al-Maghrib (the west), and it offers nine chapters by leading scholars on a wide variety of topics ranging from the twelfth century to the twentieth century.
Julia Clancy-Smith, a professor of North African History at the University of Arizona, ties these diverse studies together in her introduction emphasizing the need for North African studies in English to off-set the "preserve of French scholars." Indeed, she is correct; and, this work is a welcomed addition to our books in English on the Maghrib.
The product of an international conference held in Tunisia (p. 198), this study sheds some new thought on the Almoravids; the international trade of the Sijilmasa; the interconnections between the Islamic West and Egypt during the time of Napoleon; Mediterranean life through the nineteenth century; the French Moroccan Mauchamp affair; and, finally, the decolonization of the French Empire.
Of all the informative articles in this compendium, one stands out - Abdelhamid Largueche's "The City and The Sea: Evolving Forms of Mediterranean Cosmopolitanism in Tunis, 1700-1881." Largueche's study points to how Tunis, between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries, evolved into a highly sophisticated urban society through the incorporation of "renegades" and through "privateering" that produced communal autonomy and co-existance, resembling the Ottoman millet system. While I fully agree with her analysis, I would suggest that economically the situation more closely resembled Beirut and Lebanon, in the last few centuries. In both cases, the international evolution of both societies produced a highly tolerant and progressive culture.
This book is an excellent study with interesting articles for the specialist on North Africa.
A.J. Abraham John Jay College (CUNY)
Copyright Association of Third World Studies, Inc. Spring 2004
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