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Authority beyond Tribe and State in the “Middle Maghrib”

Authority beyond Tribe and State in the “Middle Maghrib” AL-MASĀQ 2021, VOL. 33, NO. 1, 1–13 https://doi.org/10.1080/09503110.2020.1865773 Introduction Corisande Fenwick and Andy Merrills ARTICLE HISTORY Received 15 November 2020; Accepted 15 December 2020 The history of ancient and medieval North Africa has all too often been written as the history of its conquerors. Accounts of Roman, Vandal, Byzantine or Islamic North Africa typically focus on the civilised heartland of Carthage or Kairouan and their envir- ons and neglect the upland regions, pre-desert and Sahara beyond as the undifferentiated world of the barbarians. These were the lands of al-Barbar (the Berbers) in the eyes of medieval Arab commentators, who were the first to group the peoples together under this universalising label; it was “L’Afrique oubliée” (“forgotten Africa”) to Christian Courtois in the last major work of colonial-period scholarship on the pre-Islamic Maghrib. His was the latest in a long line of colonial scholarship that commonly defined the inhabitants of such regions by what they were not: not Punic, not Roman, not Arab, and often not actors in history at all. As the Moroccan intellectual Abdallah Laroui argued in 1970 in one of the first works to disrupt this consensus, North Africans most often appear as “mere supernumeraries in a http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png Al-Masaq: Journal of the Medieval Mediterranean Taylor & Francis

Authority beyond Tribe and State in the “Middle Maghrib”

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Authority beyond Tribe and State in the “Middle Maghrib”

Abstract

AL-MASĀQ 2021, VOL. 33, NO. 1, 1–13 https://doi.org/10.1080/09503110.2020.1865773 Introduction Corisande Fenwick and Andy Merrills ARTICLE HISTORY Received 15 November 2020; Accepted 15 December 2020 The history of ancient and medieval North Africa has all too often been written as the history of its conquerors. Accounts of Roman, Vandal, Byzantine or Islamic North Africa typically focus on the civilised heartland of Carthage or Kairouan and their envir- ons and neglect the upland...
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Publisher
Taylor & Francis
Copyright
© 2021 Society for the Medieval Mediterranean
ISSN
1473-348X
eISSN
0950-3110
DOI
10.1080/09503110.2020.1865773
Publisher site
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Abstract

AL-MASĀQ 2021, VOL. 33, NO. 1, 1–13 https://doi.org/10.1080/09503110.2020.1865773 Introduction Corisande Fenwick and Andy Merrills ARTICLE HISTORY Received 15 November 2020; Accepted 15 December 2020 The history of ancient and medieval North Africa has all too often been written as the history of its conquerors. Accounts of Roman, Vandal, Byzantine or Islamic North Africa typically focus on the civilised heartland of Carthage or Kairouan and their envir- ons and neglect the upland regions, pre-desert and Sahara beyond as the undifferentiated world of the barbarians. These were the lands of al-Barbar (the Berbers) in the eyes of medieval Arab commentators, who were the first to group the peoples together under this universalising label; it was “L’Afrique oubliée” (“forgotten Africa”) to Christian Courtois in the last major work of colonial-period scholarship on the pre-Islamic Maghrib. His was the latest in a long line of colonial scholarship that commonly defined the inhabitants of such regions by what they were not: not Punic, not Roman, not Arab, and often not actors in history at all. As the Moroccan intellectual Abdallah Laroui argued in 1970 in one of the first works to disrupt this consensus, North Africans most often appear as “mere supernumeraries in a

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Al-Masaq: Journal of the Medieval Mediterranean – Taylor & Francis

Published: Jan 2, 2021

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