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