Journal of World History

What’s in a Name: Who Is Western Civilization?

The clichéd description of world history as a dichotomy of “the West and the rest” has resurfaced with a vengeance since 9/11.¹⁸ Understanding the Almohad Maghrib-West allows us to overcome the current [End Page 264] conservative ideology that anachronistically abuses the term “West,” Bentley suggests, in order to contrast an industrialized, democratic, scientifically enlightened European world system to its dialectical opposites. It corrects a political teleology that demotes medieval Islam to the status of a carrier and not creator of Western Civilization; in the extreme clash-of-civilizations version, this view pits the West to putative historical enemies, especially Islam.¹⁹

Historians regularly impose the category “Western” on the cultural traditions connecting a short list of symbolically important ancient cities, Athens, Jerusalem, and Rome. They then hop to Byzantium, skip through Arab-Islamic cultural and scientific transmissions of classical knowledge (occasionally acknowledging innovations), and finally jump to medieval and Renaissance Europe.²⁰ Even critics of today’s Western (i.e., European and neo-European) political and cultural arrogance accept this genealogy.²¹ But ibn Jubayr’s text indicates that such a genealogy is misleading, or at least incomplete. Almohad Marrakech and Seville, which propagandistically symbolized the ecumenical and transmaritime Maghrib-West straddling the “two pillars” of the Gibraltar Strait (the predecessor of today’s dollar sign [$])²² are serious contenders for top ranking in a “Western Civilization” lineage, especially considering ibn Jubayr’s use of the term in a politically precise self-ascriptive sense. No ancient Greco-Roman self-categorization of civilized “Westerners” versus barbaric “Easterners” constituted a Western political entity, and even Diocletian’s famous [End Page 265] third-century East-West demarcation was only an administrative, not political, delimitation.²³

True, medieval Christian writers used “Western” to refer to the Roman church (“nostra ecclesia occidentalis”)²⁴ in contradistinction to the Byzantine church, or to the non-Byzantine lands of Christendom²⁵ (as in Orderic Vitalis’s description of 1107 crusaders in the Holy Land as “the third expedition of westerners to Jerusalem”),²⁶ but such use was haphazard, nonpolitical, and not exclusive.²⁷ In fact Jacques de Vitry’s use of the term “occidental” in his 1220s Historia Hierosolimitana/Orientalis was quite ambivalent: from a geographical description of praiseworthy crusaders to a trope for how the West “marched in darkness.”²⁸ Some Christian Europeans in ibn Jubayr’s time preferred Latinitas as the name for their civilization, as did the first Northwestern European to translate the Qur’ān, the English visitor to Iberia during Almohad times, Robert of Ketton (fl. 1136–1157), and the Abbot of Cluny who commissioned him, Peter the Venerable (Peter also used “Europe” to contrast his society to the Almohad “whirlwind from Africa”).²⁹ Latin use of “West” was geo-relative, as in Pope Gregory VII’s instructions [End Page 266] to king Alfonso VI of Leon-Castile in 1074 that he outlaw the old Mozarabic rite of Arabized Christians living in newly conquered territories and enforce the Roman rite “like the other kingdoms of the west and north.”³⁰ In contrast, ibn Jubayr’s medieval use of the term “Maghrib” was clearly political. And although the specific Almohad ideology that spawned its origins has died, the term survives in the official name of a modern North African nation-state, the “Western [Maghribi] Sharifian Kingdom,” commonly called Maghrib for short in Arabic and “Morocco” in European languages (after the Italian for “Marrakech”).

There are clear historiographical benefits to interpreting ibn Jubayr’s Maghrib-West as integral to Western civilization, particularly as a necessary corrective to medieval Christian-Muslim boundary-making tactics that have persisted. World historians now accept that the period 1100–1300 is a critical global watershed, “an age of cross-cultural interaction” that “set the stage for the modern era,”³¹ but we still underestimate the politico-cultural role of the Maghrib-West in formulating the medieval Latin-West, and too often in the literature Islam seems a graft onto the tree of Occidentalism³² that temporarily fed its growth instead of being—as it should be—an integral and integrated root-and-branch element in the overall structure. Medieval Christians were quite conscious of how often their own science, philosophy, and even theology flowered on Arabic-language branches; they even feared how shared intellectual sap might doctrinally adulterate the fruits of their labor, or, worse, blur the lines demarcating the three “laws” of Moses, Jesus, and Muḥammad.³³ This explains why the Latin-West, as George Makdisi has noted, “borrowed from Islam”—Almohad Islam especially as we shall see—“without always acknowledging its debt.”³⁴ [End Page 267]

The mutual differentiation of Maghrib-West from Latin-West by their elites, beginning in earnest with a twelfth-century fear of their commonalities, also explains why it took hundreds of years for Braudel’s vision of the Strait of Gibraltar as a very real lived connector—instead of separator—to overcome its construction as a political boundary between Christendom and Islamdom (borrowing Marshall Hodgson’s neologism).³⁵ These commonalities’ survival into the early modern period have been described by many historians, among whom Khalīl al-Sāmarrā’ī, María Jesús Vigueras Molins, David Abulafia, Ross Dunn, Mercedes García-Arenal, Gerard Wiegers, and Eloy Martín Corrales deserve special mention.³⁶ As Andrew Hess has observed, “the Strait of Gibraltar was a convenient spot for two Mediterranean civilizations to bring to a conclusion a long and complex intercultural”—and we should add interpolitical—“history.”³⁷ Muslim Granada’s Christian erasure after 1492 was thus eminently an expedient political line drawn in the temporal-spatial sand.

The medieval Latin-West subsequently Orientalized the Maghrib-West in a Saidian way, and the Maghrib-West learned to de-prioritize its former Western European shores (and Morisco brethren),³⁸ obscuring these two environments’ co-trajectory until relatively recent scholarship revised the historical record. By answering Abdallah Laroui’s 1970 call “to trace the genesis of the concept of the Maghrib and to discover how it took on an objective definition,” we can respond to two accompanying questions: not just how this was “the ideal” place to start a history of this part of the world, as Laroui stated, but, more poignantly and ironically, how and why this part of Western civilization’s [End Page 268] Maghribi history was dropped from world history; how and why the twelfth-century dialectic of the Maghrib-Latin West was teased apart not just by contemporaries but more trenchantly by descendants.³⁹ This is not a mere chronological and spatial coincidence, but rather, in Marc Bloch’s original sense, a historical problem.⁴⁰ Appreciating ibn Jubayr’s Maghrib-West Weltanschauung advances Allen Fromherz’s recent call for a reassessment of the Almohads’ importance to Mediterranean, European, and world history,⁴¹ and it underscores the importance of Richard Bulliet’s thesis in The Case for Islamo-Christian Civilization that “neither the Muslim nor the Christian” historical trajectories “can be fully understood without relation to the other.”⁴²

The degree of interpretive separation between these “others” hinges on considering—beyond Laroui, Fromherz, and Bulliet—that the very term “Western” was a medieval Islamic neologism and overcoming dichotomous comparisons between an Islamic world and a Western one (Timur Kuran’s, Michael Cook’s, and Samuel Huntington’s come to mind, in descending order of convincingness).⁴³ This is the stuff of [End Page 269] the new World History that fulfills what Charles Dufourcq in 1966 called “the Eurafrican destiny” of certain historic Western Mediterranean polities.⁴⁴ The contextual analysis offered here aims to clarify self-ascriptive constructions of difference within the context of the Maghrib-West’s and Latin-West’s medieval “Eurafrican destiny,” confirming Aziz al-Azmeh’s anti-essentialist “reinstatement of history against culturist claims for abidance.”⁴⁵ In al-Azmeh’s sense, Almohad supporters like ibn Jubayr were the first to perform or announce a political West that, though not today’s West, contributed significantly to making it. Consequently this non-essentialist delineation of the Maghrib-West and its links to the Latin-West must reflect both geographical and chronological discontinuities as well as continuities but always analytically as species within the same genus.

From Maghrib and al-Andalus to Almohad Maghrib-West (711–1147)

The eleventh- and twelfth-century rise of a unified Maghrib-West changed the political-cultural history of the Western Mediterranean in three ways: it radically reoriented the mythic significance of Islam’s westward expansion; it set an agenda for a religious-philosophical debate with long-lasting consequences for Christendom and Islamdom; and it reconstructed the constitutional relationship between Jews, Christians, and Muslims, both internally under Islamic rule and externally through new diplomacy.

An indication of the first process can be seen in how North Africa and Iberia were first effectively united by the Almoravid movement between 1091 and 1147 (the earlier Islamic unity under the Umayyad and Abbasid caliphates from 711 to 750 was nominal), but the dynasty did not apparently create a political culture of unification. Islam’s western Mediterranean reaches continued to connote in Arabic culture a complex, mythical, disjointed space dominated by references to pagan [End Page 270] and biblical-Qur’ānic tales that exploited its peripheral distance from an Islamic center. A City of Copper reputedly built by “the Jinn . . . for Solomon, son of David” was located “in a deserted area of al-Andalus in the Far West near the Atlantic”;⁴⁶ King Solomon’s table was relocated to eighth-century Toledo; the “Fountain” or “Tree of Life” was placed where the two oceans met at Gibraltar;⁴⁷ and a long-lasting myth imagined that Africa and Europe had once been united by a bridge built by order of Alexander the Great, an inversion of an earlier one according to which he had had the Strait of Gibraltar dug specifically (said the anti-Almohad Arab geographer from Cordoba, al-Idrīsī, in 1154) to keep the people of the extreme western Maghrib (al-maghrib al-aqṣā) and “the Sūs” (ibn Tūmart’s birthplace, today in southern Morocco) from attacking “al-Andalus.”⁴⁸ When the Umayyad dynasty relocated from Syria to Cordoba in the mid 700s it inundated Andalusī consciousness with self-legitimizing parallels between its emigration and Muḥammad’s hijra from Mecca to Medina (Islam’s ur-moment). This political-rhetorical device, which played on the Arabic cognates gharīb, “foreign,” and gharb, “West,”⁴⁹ is most famously exhibited in the emir ‘Abd al-Raḥmān I’s poem equating his family’s exile to a date palm tree’s presence in Cordoba: “A palm tree stands in the middle of Rusafa, born in the West, far from the land of palms. / I said to it: How like me you are, far away and in exile, in long separation from family and friends. / You have sprung from soil in which you are a stranger; [End Page 271] and I, like you, am far from home. / May dawn’s clouds water you, streaming from the heavens in a grateful downpour!”⁵⁰

We do not know enough about how Almoravid propaganda used this Umayyad Arab self-image, but al-Andalus/Maghrib distinctions seem to have been actively reinforced, as in the way the Almoravid emir Yūsuf ibn Tashufin’s (r. 1061–1106) stressed Andalusi-Maghribi differences not just between Arabs and Berbers but even between Andalusī Berbers and Maghribī Berbers. As the Granadan emir ‘Abd Allāh ibn Buluggin—himself proudly Berber but Andalusī—recalled in his autobiography (written ca. 1090), ibn Tāshufīn responded to a query about his intentions by saying: “I am a man of the Maghrib . . . ; I have not come here motivated by either the desire to acquire territories or wealth . . . When Granada falls into my hands, I will not be able to retain it, lying as it does within the land of al-Andalus, far from the other shore [the normal Arabic term for the Mediterranean’s European or African coastlines] and will therefore hand it over to you.”⁵¹ After the collapse of the Umayyad Andalusī caliphate in 1031 and the Christian conquest of the great Islamic city of Toledo in 1085, representations of al-Andalus distanced it discursively from a strictly North African Maghrib by increasingly emphasizing the former’s status as an Islamic frontier full of fitnas or challenges, enshrined in influential ubi sunt poetic allusions to a lost golden age. In this vein Andalusi eschatologists posited the Iberian peninsula’s geographical placement—but not North Africa’s—at the extreme jihādī limit of Islam as a prophetic signal of its role in the end of history.⁵² Both interpretations of al-Andalus’s marginal status vis-à-vis Islam and North Africa fit the Almoravid message because they depicted the hegemony of the Maghrib as North Africa over and against the peninsula. The resultant Andalusī anxieties were reflected—again poetically—in the [End Page 272] oft-quoted poem of Seville’s last pre-Almoravid independent taifa king, the proudly Arab al-Mu‘tamid (1040–1095), jailed at Aghmāt near Marrakech by the new dynasty: “A stranger in the West,” he said of himself, “for whom pulpit and throne will weep!”⁵³

Al-Mu‘tamid’s trope became a staple nostalgic reference in Arabic literature and his tomb in Aghmāt a cultural pilgrimage site for the lachrymose vision of an Arab al-Andalus caught tragically between Berber arrivistes and Crusading barbarians. What has not been noted previously to my knowledge is that al-Mu‘tamid’s discourse displaced the axis of exile clockwise ninety degrees, away from an Umayyad dichotomy of East/Syria versus West/al-Andalus onto a new Almoravid one of al-Andalus/Arab versus Maghrib/Berber; this seriously hampered any attempt to de-hierarchize unification across the Strait of Gibraltar. The more the Arab elite of al-Andalus tried to rework tropes about the “West” to explore Arab-Berber Islamic community, the more the ethnic tensions imposed by Almoravid “Berberness” impinged on them, as in the Andalusī ibn Shuhaid’s famous mid-eleventh-century poem, in which the Arab glories of Umayyad Cordoba had turned into “its inhabitants’ blunders, for now they Berberize, Westernize, and Egyptianize,” a denunciation of Arab Andalusi kowtowing to North African Fatimid and Almoravid rulers.⁵⁴

The discursive shift to revalorize “Maghrib” as a positive self-ascriptive umbrella term for Arabs and Berbers on the two “shores” began in earnest with the Almohad conquests of Marrakech in 1146 and Seville in 1147. The Almohad project remade the Maghrib-West into a rubric denoting the unity of the two Mediterranean shores in theoretical balance. It supplanted the Almoravids’ frontier leitmotiv with the Maghrib-West’s Islamic centrality by infusing it with a muscular program of total internal-external revolution (discussed below). Even the virulently anti-Almohad al-Idrisi (exiled from Almohad Ceuta to Norman-ruled Sicily) begrudgingly accepted this new Maghrib-West’s inclusion of al-Andalus by awkwardly placing his 1154 description of the North African coastline from west of the Strait of Gibraltar up to the area east of Oran (at that point the Almohad state’s disputed frontier with Norman Sicily and Muslim Tunis) within Climate IV, Section 1’s description of the peninsula, a partial repetition of information contained in Climate III (Africa), which he himself admitted, [End Page 273] and probably a psychological inversion of the Almohad conquest of Iberia.⁵⁵ This fact, ignored by editors and translators, implicitly recognized the Almohad state’s political and ontological boundaries as geocultural, even climatic, realities.

The bipartite image of a united two-shores/Arab-Berber Maghrib-West was captured in many precise Almohad propaganda moves, including repeated use of the “two pillars” theme, for example, in the poet al-Ruṣāfī’s panegyric celebration of the Almohad caliph’s triumphal entry into al-Andalus and in the caliph’s later commissioning of matching Kutubīyya and Giralda minarets for mosques in Marrakech and Seville.⁵⁶ Heightened contact between the increasing number of Western Iberian and North African pilgrims to Eastern Islam after 1100 may have played into the Almohad advocacy of a Western unity.⁵⁷ Since Almohad sources seem to have distorted the Almoravid agenda to diminish the previous regime, comparisons must be tentative, but the evidence is that the latter shied away discursively from “Maghrib” as a term whereas the former promoted it aggressively.⁵⁸

Almohad ideologues succeeded in this because they presented Almohad Islam as the solution not just to North African and Iberian problems but also to all of Islam’s internal and external challenges. Ibn Jubayr’s Maghribī-Western chauvisnism vis-à-vis “Easterners” illustrates [End Page 274] just how deeply Almohad subjects internalized a policy that was also very much evident in the official history of the first two Almohad leaders, the founder ibn Tūmart and his “caliph” or successor, ‘Abd al-Mu’min (r. 1130–1163), written by their comrade-in-arms, al-Baydhaq. Ibn Tūmart appeared as the Mahdī, messianically saving Islam from corruption and external enemies, positioning the proudly Maghribī-Western Almohads at the geo-ideological center of Islam.⁵⁹ Another striking example of the Almohad displacement of Islam’s core was performed, according to Pascal Buresi and A. K. Bennison’s analysis, by Occidentalizing the mythical foundational fight against polytheism away from exclusively Arabian origins. ‘Abd al-Mu’min publicized that a lost Qur’ān dating back to the third caliph, ‘Uthmān (r. 644–656), had been “rediscovered” under Almohad patronage, an ideologically persuasive move that “inscribed their dynasty in a divine plan” through the textual removal of the “center of the Islamic universe” from seventh-century Arabia to the twelfth-century Maghrib-West.⁶⁰

The Almohad project also aimed to eradicate interethnic Arab and Berber tensions by emphasizing Muslim solidarity (‘Abd al-Mu’min was the first non-Arab caliph in Islamic history)⁶¹ and imagining a literal rebirth of Islam in the hijra of the movement’s founders among Arabs and Berbers in the Maghrib-West. The Andalusī poet ibn Ḥazm’s pre-Almohad confession that the “defect” of his cultural pride was that its orientation centered “on the Occident” became a badge of Maghribī-Western religious pride in the stories that ibn Jubayr and his contemporaries heard about ibn Tūmart’s first meeting sometime between 1118 and 1121 with the young ‘Abd al-Mu’min in Mallāla (modern Algeria). The story, as related by ibn Baydhaq and other Almohad-period texts such as al-Marrākushī’s chronicle and the anonymous al-Ḥulal al-mawshīyya, said that after ‘Abd al-Mu’min met ibn Tūmart the latter asked him where he was going: “East” to seek “science [‘ilm],” said ‘Abd al-Mu’min, to which ibn Tūmart responded brazenly, “The science you seek to acquire in the East [mashriq] you have already found in the West [maghrib].”⁶² The Mahdī’s rhetorical flourish reversed the old [End Page 275] trope of the Islamic East as invariable teacher to the West and in doing so made Maghrib-West into a toponymical synecdoche for a revived, purified Islam that might efface Arab-Berber differentiation—as we shall shortly see, however, at the cost of Muslims’ traditional toleration of Christians and Jews.

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Table 1.

Major Almohad campaigns plotted along the “two shores” of the Mediterranean (sieges often lasted into the following year, as with Fez, Marrakesh, and Cordoba, which fell respectively in 1146, 1147, and 1149).

This sustained Almohad ideological concern for Islamic trans-Mediterranean unity suggests that the chronology of their expansionism—through military conquest and voluntary declarations of loyalty—was not as haphazard or reactive as some historians have believed, especially from the 1140s onward. A zigzagging pattern emerges early on of alternate European and African campaigns, highlighting an ideologically driven military program aimed at stitching together the “two shores” of the Islamic Mediterranean into one Maghrib-West (Table 1), not just at reacting to frontier crises, as Huici Miranda thought in [End Page 276] 1957.⁶³ Right up to 16 July 1212, when they were massively defeated at Las Navas de Tolosa by an international crusade, Almohad hegemony on both shores, from the Sahara to Europe, seemed unstoppable and intentionally bicontinental. As late as the early 1200s equal pressure was being put on Muslim political resistance in Ifriqiya (under the former ibn Ghāniya dynasty that had ruled Mallorca until 1203) and Christendom: even just a few months before Las Navas, in September 1211, the Cistercian stronghold of Salvatierra was captured.⁶⁴ Further evidence of this may be that, unlike their predecessors and contemporaries, the Almohads were committed to creating and training an effective navy. As one caliph put it to his admiral, “the sea is an unknown which requires all of our vigilance; beyond this sea, there are numerous nations and countries who draw enormous profits from maritime activities; the sea is thus an asset [for you to watch closely].”⁶⁵

The Almohad Vision of Political Society as Amrun Allah or God’s Enterprise

The second significant consequence of the rise of the Almohad Maghrib-West was the religious-scientific debate it caused for both Islamdom and Christendom. But an understanding of how the Almohads’ evolving propaganda affected their subjects’ thinking in terms of religion and science—as well as Christendom’s—requires two preliminary investigations: first, an exploration of how ibn Tūmart and his successor caliphs revolutionized Islamic politics; and, second, an explanation of how Almohad authorities recruited philosophy and science into this project, especially under ‘Abd al-Mu’min and Abu Ya‘qūb Yūsuf’s leadership between 1130 and 1184. Only then can attention be turned to the final processes involved in the rise of the Maghrib-West, which were direct consequences of these political-philosophical goals: the way their implementation significantly restructured the internal and external constitutional relationship between Jews, Christians, and Muslims, most famously exemplified in how the Almohads abrogated the traditional Islamic toleration of Jews and Christians as dhimmī or “protected monotheists”; and the way Christendom took up [End Page 277] the Almohad Maghrib-West’s intellectual project in the thirteenth century. Understanding the former constitutes, in my mind, the proper historical context for analyzing the latter two phenomena.

The regime’s public image as the “Party of Unity [Ḥizb al-tawhīd]” or “Unifiers [al-Muwaḥḥidūn]” was revolutionary, consciously global, and reflected, as Maribel Fierro notes, the seemingly contradictory desire for a radical but orthodox break with the past that would be as Islamically inclusive as possible.⁶⁶ They officially erased the growing divide between lawyers/scholars and mystics by granting Sufis “official recognition . . . , probably,” writes Majid Fakhry, “for the first time in the history of Islam.”⁶⁷ Almohad leadership, as Manuel Marín has argued, cultivated a personal relationship with the populace by holding public caliphal audiences, maintaining an official news agency for the entire polity, and ensuring public oaths of loyalty. The way caliphs, especially the first three (1133–1199), met, listened to, and corresponded with their subjects was regionally unprecedented.⁶⁸ This campaign extended to the illiterate: “women and slaves or anyone who was legally responsible among [ibn Tūmart’s] entourage (ahl al-dār)” were expected to memorize the “Spiritual Guides” composed in Arabic, Berber, and Spanish to diffuse the Almohad vision of “abstract theology’s” relationship to real life. The Qur’ān was translated for the first time (into Berber).⁶⁹ The issues of greatest political import, such as declarations of presumptive heirs, were regularly advertised on coinage in what constituted a profoundly innovative public relations agenda (discussed below).⁷⁰ The white flag they adopted⁷¹ and the intellectual opening up of informed public debates regarding faith and science which they espoused indicated clear opposition—respectively—to their key competitors: [End Page 278] the Abbasids with their black flag and the Almoravids with their narrow-minded Malikism (the Shi’ite Fatimids were not competitors for Sunni legitimacy).

Almohad ambitions extended doctrinally beyond local legal reform, jihād, or the limited superimposition of their own Masmuda Berber leadership, as some historians have wrongly believed. In fact, ibn Tūmart’s instructions made it clear that the Almohad jihād was aimed ecumenically against all ideological enemies, including non-Almohad Muslims.⁷² Almohad governance utilized but superseded ethnic and tribal organizations. Non-Masmuda Berbers and even tribal isolates (foreigners or ghuraba) were members of governing councils. As Abdellatif Sab-bane has argued convincingly, Almohadism was not anti-Sanhaja (i.e., anti-Almoravid) Masmudism.⁷³ This was precisely why enemies of the Almohads like the historian al-Marrākushī and the geographer al-Idrīsī refused to call them “Almohads” and used “Masmudas” instead to cut them down to tribal size and point out their hypocritical claims to Islamic leadership.⁷⁴ Almohad administrative reform created a complex governance of inclusive multiple councils modeled on the prophet’s polity building, not on tribal norms or Andalusī-Berber distinctions. Arab Andalusī judges silenced any qualms about the Almohads’ non-Arab origins and participated actively in the highest levels of government throughout the Maghrib-West; soldiers from both Mediterranean shores served in armies stationed across from their homelands.⁷⁵

However, in order to argue that they did not innovate heretically, [End Page 279] “to change things because too much has changed,” the Almohads had to recast their ideology as the pure form of Islam’s original constitution, much like the first Roman emperor Augustus had invented the Roman Empire while convincing Romans that he had reestablished the Republic.⁷⁶ Rationalism, Madeleine Fletcher has argued, became ibn Tūmart’s central tool in promoting this reinvented Islam; his Credo (‘aqīda) and “Spiritual Guides” (murshida) aimed to demonstrate that religion and science were not opposed but complementary and teleologically linked processes.⁷⁷ Ibn Tūmart criticized the Almoravids for many doctrinal sins (famously confronting them in Marrakech over the issue of men wearing veils),⁷⁸ but their intellectual deficiency was his foremost bugbear: “Anthropomorphists (mujassimūn), meaning those who give God a body, was the insult used as a war-cry against the Almoravids during Ibn Tūmart’s campaigns.” This vigorous intellectualism “legitimiz[ed] and even mandat[ed] the study” of the “mediation of natural laws between God and creation . . . through science and philosophy,” and even mysticism, as we have seen.⁷⁹ The well-known story of ibn Tūmart meeting al-Ghazzālī is almost assuredly an Almohad-inspired legend created to “boost” the founder’s “theological authority” and to contrast him to the “anti-Ghazalian Almoravids,” who burned the mystic’s chief text in the [End Page 280] Cordoba mosque in 1109.⁸⁰ Artistically, the Almohads cultivated an aesthetic version of this propagandistic rational simplicity in conscious contradistinction to the “sybaritism” of Almoravid “baroque lavishness.”⁸¹

Numismatically, the Almohads broke the mold of previous tradition: the superficial innovation of minting square instead of round coins had ideological substance. They certainly exploited many Muslims’ belief in the mystical properties of shapes (al-Ghazzālī believed in a magical square, and ibn ‘Arabī was once cured by applying a square Almohad coin), but a careful study of the revolutionary message conveyed by their silver dirhems confirms deeper undercurrents. The coins told users that “God is our master; Muḥammad our prophet; and the Mahdī our imam”; “all disposition of things [al-amru kullu-hu] belongs to God,” and there is “no power except in God”—significant messages that were reinforced by a square shape mimicking a Qur’ānic page and the Ka‘ba itself (Almohad Qur’āns were systematically square). The elimination of traditional circumstantial information like dates or the names of rulers and mint locations connoted that temporal details implicitly contradicted the cosmic, Messianic import of the textual messages (in this visual primitivistic apocalypticism they built on Almoravid models).⁸²

The use of coins as mnemonic summaries of ibn Tūmart’s Credo created a Maghrib-West public awareness of the Almohad discourse of “religious, cosmological, ethical, and political—perhaps even esoteric—beliefs.” Chief among the ideas coins conveyed was the importance [End Page 281] of the amr (cosmic “purpose, enterprise, or business”) of Almohad political leadership, whose impact, we will see, was felt well beyond the Maghrib-West’s boundary in Europe. This was profoundly Qur’ānic in inspiration: amr connoted the idea of “matter/affair,” “command/order,” and “structure/order,” as in Qur’ān 3:154 and 12:21 (with a meaning somewhat like the saying “Man proposes and God disposes”), but Vega Martín and others⁸³ argue convincingly that it was synonymous with the Almohad insistence on Muslims’ collective responsibility to “command that which is good and prohibit that which is evil.” Moreover, amr was the complementary binomial to din (religion), so we come close to appreciating the Almohad principle after the death of ibn Tūmart that purely political authority was distinguished from purely religious authority but that their exercise of the one was absolutely necessary for the proper existence of the other. The numismatic propaganda encouraged users to consider how their microcosmic actions formed a united part of a macrocosmic divine plan, and how the Almohad enterprise was—through the antonomasia of divinely instituted amr as “enterprise”—coterminal with God’s plan.⁸⁴ Thus the coins laconically stated that there was no good (i.e., non-sinful) option to the Almohad message, much like today’s Western pundits often tout, following conservative thinkers like Fukuyama, that “history is dead,” in the sense that there is no good option to capitalism and democracy.

This was the ideological meaning behind ibn Jubayr’s references to “God triumphing in his enterprise [Allāh ghālib ‘alā ’amrihi],”⁸⁵ and this perspective made him highly critical of Eastern Muslim apathy. Divorcing high politics from the concerns of the common people ran counter to ibn Jubayr’s profoundly Almohad advocacy of a necessarily participatory citizenship,⁸⁶ much like today’s West, though his grounds were scriptural moralism not contractual legalism (Locke’s legacy to [End Page 282] us). It is not surprising, then, that Michael Cook’s concluding remarks on the uniquely important Islamic principle of “commanding right and forbidding wrong” focus on ibn Tūmart’s teachings, for Almohad rulers made it the sine qua non principle of Maghribi-Western social organization, and ibn Tūmart’s Mahdī version of active citizenship lasted as the official state ideology until 1227.⁸⁷

The Recruitment of Science for God’s Enterprise

Ibn Jubayr’s muscular Maghribī-Occidentalism was driven by enthusiasm for the Almohads’ social blueprint. But this project was not implemented purely through force, despite the evident militarism of leaders like ‘Abd al-Mu’min.⁸⁸ The famous intellectual friendship between the second caliph, Abu Ya‘qūb Yūsuf, and the rationalist philosopher ibn Ṭufayl (ca. 1105–1185) highlights the unprecedented Almohad attempt to integrate philosophical speculation into God’s Enterprise.⁸⁹ In her brilliant analysis of Almohad leaders’ public pronouncements, Madeleine Fletcher observes that “Almohadism at its most typical” was “a mindset that prefer[red] where possible to depend upon reason and to follow the rules of logic.”⁹⁰ This suited Maghribī-Western intellectuals, who were then leading the struggle against both Almoravid Malikī traditionalism and the antirationalism of al-Ghazzālī that was conquering Eastern Islam (to which ibn Tūmart himself was exposed),⁹¹ and confirmed their feeling of scientific superiority vis-à-vis their Eastern counterparts, firmly entrenched by 1200 according to Michael Lerner’s research.⁹² The mutual rapprochement of Almohads and intellectuals [End Page 283] was not without crises: speculative Greek-inspired books, for example, were publicly burned in the 1190s by Yūsuf’s son and heir, Ya‘qūb, known as al-Manṣūr (1184–1199), but even contemporaries ascribed this to the caliph turning his back on the founding principles of Almohadism. In a letter quoted by the anonymous al-Ḥulal al-mawshīya, al-Manṣūr was reported to have asserted “that in his soul and conscience [he] repudiated the doctrine of Ibn Tūmart,” and the fame that he was “intent on putting an end to literature on logic and philosophy in the lands under his sway” confirms the degree of Maghribī-Western political-intellectual collaboration prior to 1184.⁹³ Contemporaries raised the collaboration of Almohad ideology and Aristotelian-inspired science as complementary pillars of the Maghrib-West’s success to mythic levels by endlessly repeating the story of ibn Tūmart advising ‘Abd al-Mu’min that true science (‘ilm)—both theological and natural/philosophical—was to be found in the Maghrib-West.⁹⁴

No better example of the forcefulness of this confidence can perhaps be found than in the congruence between the Almohad project and the well-known work of ibn Rushd (Averroës) (1126–1198), the Almohads’ chief intellectual. The famous scenes in which ibn Rushd was introduced to Abu Ya‘qūb Yūsuf by ibn Ṭufayl, as described by al-Marrakushi, have been retold many times, but in the present context it matters that the central issue for contemporaries was the caliph’s commissioning of ibn Rushd to write an analysis of Aristotle’s works that would reconcile the eternity of matter in the Greek philosopher’s science with scripture’s clear creationism.⁹⁵ This was the greatest challenge for medieval Jewish, Christian, and Muslim science.

Ibn Rushd’s approach to philosophy seems remarkably modern to our eyes, and in fact he is being revived by Muslims as a model for today’s anti-Fundamentalist Islamic rationalism.⁹⁶ “Although the context” in which he wrote “seems very distant to us,” writes Oliver Leaman, “what Averroes was doing nine centuries ago,” selecting and relating diverse texts of Platonic and Aristotelian “political philosophy,” is “what we [End Page 284] see political philosophers doing today.”⁹⁷ Similar parallels between modern attitudes and Almohad ones have been noted by Vincent Cornell in terms of ibn Tumart’s deep-seated epistemological modesty (“a medieval structuralism that would please even a modern anthropologist like Levi-Strauss”)⁹⁸ and by Maribel Fierro in terms of Almohad propaganda’s drop-out/tune-in appeals to those “who shared . . . [a] dissatisfaction with the present” that combined “spiritual alienation from non-Almohad society” with “political activism.”⁹⁹ Thinkers like ibn Rushd pushed intellectual boundaries in the Maghrib-West under Almohad patronage to such a degree that they created a “bold, even dangerous intellectual Zeitgeist,”¹⁰⁰ much of which—especially ibn Rushd’s work—was intentionally compatible with Almohad ideology, writes Fletcher, in long-lasting though not static ways.¹⁰¹

Abdelhamid Sabra and Fierro have alerted us to the nature and world-historical importance of this Almohad-sponsored international republic of letters, centered on the Maghrib-West but extending beyond it: a network of thinkers who were “inter-confessional despite themselves.”¹⁰² The Jewish Maimonides’s inspiration in ibn Rushd’s Muslim-Aristotelian rational reconciliations, for example, are complex but clear.¹⁰³ “When we consider the movement of thought,” writes Sabra, “that culminated in the formulation of a new astronomical theory by al-Bitrūjī [another protégé of ibn Ṭufayl] we are dealing with a compact situation in which a small number of individuals were bound together by a distinctive intellectual milieu, and, in some cases, by direct personal ties.”¹⁰⁴ [End Page 285]

Whether we call it Zeitgeist, Kulturkreis, or “milieu,” this Maghrib-West intellectual network’s importance lay in how it fostered intellectual modesty and boldness at the same time, accepting that tentative theses and failures were critical to scientific discovery. It also sought Greek foundations for its future discoveries. Al-Bitrūjī, for example, “did not intend” his mathematical and astronomical models to be “final solutions to the problems involved but rather illustrations of the kind of solutions that must be sought.” This precocious intellectual position was shared to a great degree by ibn Ṭufayl, ibn Rushd, and Maimonides, and, significantly, by later “eighteenth-century counterparts” in Christian Europe “motivated by the same desire . . . to harmonize some empirically confirmed results with a rationally satisfying idea.” The twelfth-century Western Mediterranean context was instrumental for these medieval thinkers, though we have only begun to explore the specific ways in which Almohad rule constituted the “cultural situation without reference to which” their innovative scientific discoveries “would be difficult if not impossible to explain.” Historians should not attempt to make sense of ibn Rushd’s remarkably modern progressivist epistemology in “strictly cognitive and ‘rational’ terms” but should seek its “cultural, even psychological” context,¹⁰⁵ namely, Sabra explains, in

an intellectual trend that prevailed in Andalusia [sic] under the Almohads among scholars working in such diverse fields as law, grammar, medicine, philosophy. And this trend may itself be related to a noticeable and often expressed Andalusian self-assertiveness vis-à-vis the rest of the Islamic world . . . the Andalusian sense of identity went further than self-praise and actually expressed itself in the creation of systems of ideas that were distinctly Andalusian and consciously directed against intellectual authorities in the Eastern part of Islam.¹⁰⁶

This scientific program to buck convention exhibited itself most incisively, perhaps, as a consistent desire not to accept Arabized versions of ancient Greek scientific ideas, but to return to the sources, reversing the tide of derivative falsafah dominant in the schools of eastern Islam.¹⁰⁷ And this mirrored exactly how Almohad judges altered the Maliki application of sharī‘a, away from maintaining the status quo and toward a constant rationalizing vigilance for the original “constitutional” [End Page 286] principles of Islam such as the ḥadīth, a central theme of the founder’s attacks on Almoravid Malikism’s “derivative” traditions.¹⁰⁸

Ibn Tūmart’s emphasis on seeking truth in authentic sources was, like Petrarch’s later advice for humanists and Luther’s principle of sola scriptura, a revolutionary technique in line with rationalist philosophy (though bound to fail in attempts to control it). In analogous fashion ibn Rushd excoriated Avicenna, al-Fārābī, and al-Ghazzālī for uncritically attributing “to the ancient philosophers doctrines” invented much later. The key for him was to seek ur-texts, to build on classics un-slavishly (intellectually he was not a servile Aristotelian nor even, theologically, a servile ibn-Tumartist),¹⁰⁹ and to reason on firm foundations, without an equally slavish anxiety over contradictions with religion doctrine (he presented Plato’s patently un-Islamic ideas, for instance, without offering either denunciations or exculpatory apologias, “leaving it to the reader to work out how acceptable they are and how closely connected to the notion of the just society and the just citizen”).¹¹⁰ Ibn Rushd even broke with Islamic tradition in applying Plato’s Republic directly as a model for understanding his own political realities.¹¹¹ The paramount injunction was thus to dispense with erroneous modern authorities when one finds ancient arguments more rationally or empirically sound.¹¹² All this is immediately recognizable as key characteristics of the Greek-inspired scientific method usually made into Western Civilization’s central narrative.

Sabra, nevertheless, has missed the mark arguing that it was an Andalusian context that explained this twelfth-century Zeitgeist; Africa and Europe under Almohad rule were contextual Geist-partners. Certainly ibn Jubayr and ibn Rushd were not social equals, nor did they move in perfectly analogous environments, but in the 1170s and 1180s the former’s Granada and the latter’s Marrakech belonged to a larger Almohad “imagined community” that “aroused . . . deep attachments” [End Page 287] (to borrow Benedict Anderson’s phraseology) in both men for similar functional reasons.¹¹³ Both believed their society was exceptional and credited the Almohad movement with its creation. Sabra himself quotes ibn Rushd’s acknowledgment of the Almohads’ role in molding the scientific climate of progress at the end of his Kitāb faṣl al-maqāl (Decisive Treatise), written in Marrakech in the late 1170s, just a few years before ibn Jubayr set out from Granada for Mecca. Significantly, for our purposes, ibn Rushd used the Almohads’ rhetorical devices to point out the way the general culture they fostered—in which ibn Jubayr lived out his life in Granada—was linked to his own highest philosophical goals as a court scientist:

God has dispelled much of the [early] doubts and ignorance and many of the paths to erroneous conclusions [viz. popular denials of religion’s compatibility with philosophy] through this Victorious Enterprise [bi hādhihi al-’amrun al-ghālib], which has brought great benefits, especially to those who sincerely seek truth through the method of rational speculation. And the reason for all this is that it has invited commoners to know God (glorious is He!) through a middle path that does not humiliate them, unlike those who believe simply because of arguments issuing from those in positions of authority or because of theologians’ sophistry;¹¹⁴ and yet it does not fail to enjoin on the highest intellects the need to investigate the reasons for Revelation’s fundamentals.¹¹⁵

We see here how Almohad leadership recruited intellectuals by maintaining ibn Tūmart’s original and heterodox bipartite division of society into those who could understand the deeper meaning of religious truths, called officially in Almohad pronouncements “the [End Page 288] believers [mu’minīn],” and those who simply had to follow “the law,” “Muslims [muslimīn].”¹¹⁶ The parallel is exact—and intentionally so—with ibn Rushd’s elitist argument that sharī‘a and philosophy met the same goal of fostering human happiness, respectively, for commoners and intellectuals¹¹⁷—and reminiscent of his mentor ibn Tufayl’s central thesis in Ḥayy ibn Yaqẓān. This flexible project of internal renaissance and external mission, elite speculation and popular orthodoxy allowed for broad explorations until at least the 1190s of such challenging issues as the infallibility of the Mahdī, Shi’ite polemics, and saint worship.¹¹⁸

The Almohad Abrogation of Jews’ and Christians’ Dhimmi Status

The global exclusivism of “God’s Enterprise” made maintaining Jews’ and Christians’ special legal status within Almohad society intolerable, just as today’s global capitalist democracy struggles with legal exceptionalisms that violate the principle that the generic rights-bearing individual (conceived in Locke’s image) must be a universal individual. The apocalyptic Almohad assumption à la ibn Ṭufayl that pure reason leads ineluctably to Islam¹¹⁹ had disastrous consequences for religious minorities within the Maghrib-West. The vertical Almohad-Averroist politico-philosophical scheme of a “faithful” elite versus a Muslim “commoner” class could not accommodate an intellectual challenge to the elite’s exclusive control of truth, and this made Jewish and Christian sharī‘a (the Arabic term for “law” used by all three monotheisms) necessarily both antithetical in principle to “truth” and ideologically subversive of unitarian order. In line with the theory that one is either part of the solution or part of the problem, the Almohads attempted to force Jews and Christians, previously subordinated [End Page 289] as dhimmī or “protected” monotheists, to convert, a famous exception to Islamic norms.

However, the traditional image of Almoravids and Almohads as fanatics actually reverses this explanation. Created by nineteenth-century European Orientalist scholars with anticlerical and often profoundly anti-Islamic convictions (most notably, R.Dozy and F. J. Simonet),¹²⁰ the image survives fairly intact. It posits orthodox religious fundamentalism as the cause for Almoravid persecutions and Almohad forced conversions, whereas our evidence leads us to conclude instead that the Almohads’ repressive policies were motivated by a religious heterodoxy that was uncharacteristically open-minded to philosophy (though there were crackdowns on intellectual freedoms, as we shall see). Moreover, the tendency to Africanize and thereby Eurocentrically dismiss both movements as peripheral aberrations is historiographically a deeply embedded essentialism that dichotomizes Iberian and North African Islamic history as either Maurophobia or Maurophilia.¹²¹ Finally, unlike medieval Latin persecutions and expulsions of Jews from England, France, and Germany, for which archival documents survive even for the twelfth century,¹²² our understanding of Almoravid and Almohad persecutions relies on extremely limited, mostly derivative sources, despite Haim Hirschberg’s important research. Jewish, Christian, and Muslim eyewitness accounts are mostly after-the-fact recollections or chronicles, and the absence of these Muslim states’ “laws, ordinances, regulations, [and] trial records,” notes Simon Schwarz fuchs, creates an unsatisfactory “organization of historic events.”¹²³ The date of the original Almohad forced conversion statute is uncertain: purportedly in 1159 according to the Egyptian chronicler ibn al-Athīr (d. 1233), a contradiction of Jewish accounts that place it in the 1140s or even the 1130s (Ben Ezra’s Elegy). And its terms are reported variously as “the choice between forced conversion to Islam and death” or as the waiving of the jizya tax, which Hirschberg [End Page 290] explains “abrogated the protective relationship” of dhimmī status but “gave those who were not prepared” to convert “time to leave the country.”¹²⁴ The two références de rigueur for ultimate Almohad persecution of Jews who stayed and converted is the sometimes unreliable anti-Almohad chronicle of al-Marrakushi written in Ayyubid Egypt¹²⁵ and Maimonides’s famous line, also written there, that “no nation has ever done more harm to Israel.” But his family’s complex experience of Almoravid and/or Almohad “evil legislation against us [al-taffaquh fī sharrinā]” is still debated, as Joseph Shatzmiller points out in reviewing Mark Cohen’s Under Crescent and Cross.¹²⁶

Al-Marrākushī’s recollection in 1224 was that “amongst us [i.e., Maghribī-Westerners] no dhimma contract exists with Christians and Jews since the establishment of Masmuda [i.e., Almohad] authority and there are no synagogues or churches in any lands of the Muslims in the Maghrib.”¹²⁷ But we do not know enough about how, where, and when these dynasties actually developed or implemented anti-dhimmī policies or punished contraventions.¹²⁸ We do know—importantly—that both [End Page 291] allowed foreign Jews and Christians (e.g., merchants or mercenaries) to reside in their realms. Moreover, as Jean-Pierre Molénat has pointed out, no explicit Almohad doctrinal statement against dhimmī legal status survives. Partial evidence suggests that regional waves of discrimination against new converts to Islam were accompanied by periods of negotiation with officials (segregationist clothing is attested), punctuated by instances of death sentences being meted out or commuted if suspects of crypto-Judaism “recanted,” processes familiar to us from later Latin Christian persecutions.¹²⁹ One of Maimonides’s friends in Fez, Rabbi Joseph ibn ‘Aqnin, recalled that “the more . . . we obey them as to everything they tell us, and incline after their law [i.e., act like converts], the more they oppress and enslave us.”¹³⁰ Maimonides himself noted the superficiality and hypocrisy of Almohad persecution in his Letter on persecution (1160s): “under our current persecution, we are not forced to perform acts but merely to make simple professions of faith . . . and our oppressors know we do not believe in these statements and only utter them to satisfy the king.”¹³¹ Viguera Molíns has pointed out [End Page 292] that the repeated Almohad instructions to local governors to punish contraventions of general Islamic conduct indicate that infractions to the law were in fact the norm.¹³²

Our interpretations of these events must therefore remain tentative, but obviously dhimmī life in the twelfth-century Maghrib-West became increasingly “marked by subordination, marginalization, and humiliation” as the Almohad project progressed.¹³³ On the other hand, Mercedes García-Arenal and Sarah Stroumsa have proposed that the very characteristic that caused the Almohads to turn their back on the dhimmī system, a ruthless commitment to a heterodox but ratio-nalist revamping of society, attracted not just Muslims like ibn Rushd wholesale, but even non-Muslims piecemeal, like Maimonides, who personally suffered persecution. This needs to be understood in the larger context of a Jewish-Christian-Muslim shared mentalité within the Maghrib-West. García-Arenal points to the way thinkers in all three groups were intensely interested in Jewish Messianism, Muslim mahdism and sufism, as well as Christian apocalypticism, because they saw mutual confirmation in each other’s “reciprocal predictions.”¹³⁴ In a similar vein, “an open-minded thinker, whatever their religion,” Sarah Stroumsa argues, “could not be indifferent to the Almohad revolution” because it sought the deep “infrastructures” of the cosmos against the grain of established consensus, and this triggered unlikely partnerships, such as Maimonides’s admiration for the Almohad’s key ideologue, ibn Rushd.¹³⁵ Non-Muslims may have been repelled by the Almohad attack on dhimmī legal status, but they joined in the Almohad-sponsored projects of privileging “abstract thought” over “positive law” and rationalism over tradition, as Madeleine Fletcher has noted in what is arguably the best analysis of “Almohadism.”¹³⁶ The timing of the Almohad Maghrib-West’s persecution of minorities precisely when Robert Moore’s equally rationalist literati were inventing a “persecuting society” in the Christian Latin-West may thus not be unconnected (pace Cohen).¹³⁷ But this takes us to the final question under discussion: the former’s impact on the latter. [End Page 293]

The External Effects of the Almohad Maghrib-West

In 1212 Alfonso VIII of Castile inflicted a massive defeat on the Almohads at Las Navas de Tolosa. He then built a chapel in his capital, Burgos, for the Cistercian nunnery of Las Huelgas, in magnificence a perfect match to his famous King’s Hospital in the same city. Significantly, both followed Almohad models.¹³⁸ Certainly 1212 marks the beginning of the end of the Maghrib-West as an imagined community spanning both shores of the Mediterranean. Later thirteenth-century Muslims mythologized the two shores’ increasing distance, as Christian reconquest advanced in al-Andalus, by repeating only one phrase from the dying caliph Ya‘qūb’s lengthy last will and testament (1198/1199): that his subjects never forget the “orphans [male] and the orphan [feminine],” meaning Andalusī-s and their peninsula.¹³⁹ But Almohad defeat in Europe is ironically counterbalanced by Alfonso’s imitation of the Maghrib-West at the very heart of his crusading kingdom and by the ensuing century’s great intellectual, commercial, and social porosity between Maghrib-West and Latin-West—despite the way Christian Westerners like Archbishop Jiménez de Rada and Muslim Maghribīs like ibn Khaldūn deconstructed the old Almohad Maghrib-West (the former to install Reconquista Hispanism and the latter, as Ramzi Rouighi has argued, to install Andalusī superiority over North Africans).¹⁴⁰

This porosity was captured in the Almohad-inspired architectural style that Alfonso chose for Las Huelgas, his final resting place, which included decorative Arabic inscriptions testifying to the influence of his opponents’ Maghribī-Western ideology. For these Christianized Arabic inscriptions calqued the Almohads’ motto as published on their silver dirhems—analyzed above—directly: “Jesus is our light; the Messiah is God’s spirit; God is our master; God suffices for me.”¹⁴¹ Alfonso’s [End Page 294] reformulation paid the greatest complement to the Maghrib-West by inscribing an anti-version of its central rhetoric in Arabic in his kingdom’s leading nunnery, an analogue for how southern French aristocrats and troubadours in the eleventh and twelfth century, eminent crusaders themselves, “chose to edit the model” of “Andalusi frontier” courtly culture but essentially mimicked it.¹⁴² Even in Muslim eyes, “Maghrib” survived for a while as a term for something larger than North Africa because even after the almost complete Christian conquest of al-Andalus Mamluk sultans referred to Castile’s Alfonso X (r. 1252–1284) as a “Western” monarch since he ruled from Seville, the former Almohad Maghrib-West capital.¹⁴³

Ironically de-dhimmification of the Maghrib-West’s internal relationship with Jews and Christians, which promoted emigration eastward to other Muslim lands (mostly Jewish) and northward into the Latin-West (both Jewish and Christian) intensified its relationship with its non-Muslim neighbors. The intellectual scope of this influence is clear (some of Alfonso VIII’s artisans were from Almohad lands), but most historians still severely underestimate the evidence under the impression that too many links in the chains of transmission have been lost. The Maghrib-West’s intellectual impact so shocked the Latin-West that it contributed substantially to quite probably the most important long-term development in European (perhaps even world) history: the consolidation of a corporate model for human society.

For intellectuals the Maghrib-West’s appeal lay particularly in how Almohad-sponsored elaborations of Aristotelian rationalism were directed toward political and religious pragmatism. These attempts should not be simplified: they could be, as we have seen, both philosophically stimulating and narrow-minded. There can be no doubt, nonetheless, that in both modalities they directly triggered the twelfth-century intellectual revolution in Christendom. Those “fraternal twins” of Bulliet’s contention that there is really only one Islamo-Christian Civilization—the European “West” and the Arab-Islamic “East”—may have developed “distinctive . . . personalities” and taken up a “sibling” rivalry after 1500,¹⁴⁴ but the evidence shows that it was the Latin-West who learned from the Maghrib-West in the twelfth century, and [End Page 295] not the other way around. More importantly for our purposes, of the two Wests, the Islamic twin was born first by becoming conscious of its ideological identity and naming itself with the geographic synecdoche of West before the other, as we have seen. The closest ancestor of today’s West, the Latin-West, known for having been the West that got the revolutionary Aristotelian spark from the other West, the Maghrib-West, was actually its sibling junior.

It is now a cliché in world history texts to recognize the “Arabic” and “Islamic” contributions to the twelfth- and thirteenth-century Latin-West’s intellectual and scientific Renaissance, but “Arabic” and “Islamic” are too often decontextualized rubrics describing people floating in both time and space.¹⁴⁵ What has not been explored sufficiently is the eleventh- and especially twelfth-century Maghrib-West’s specific roles in what Steven Wasserstrom has called the “export of [intellectual] convivencia” from the Maghrib-West, “with its veritable connoisseurship of thresholds (Schwellenkunde)”—that is, the productive power of living dialogues on matters of the mind—which “unmistakably reshaped the Mediterranean intellectual world.”¹⁴⁶ And this was an unintentional result of how Almohad efforts to integrate philosophy and religion were followed by de-dhimmification and Jewish-Christian migration into Christendom. The “immediate and electric” effect of reading ibn Rushd in Paris, Bologna, and Oxford in the early 1200s,¹⁴⁷ like Azar Nafisi’s Reading Lolita in Tehran today, brought the Latin-West into a panoply of intellectual conversations already under way among Maghribī-Western Muslims, Jews, and Christians. But even [End Page 296] Wasserstrom’s refreshing reference to a convivencia conversation across Islamdom-Christendom borders belittles much more direct transmissions that brought muscular Almohad Islamism directly into the Latin-West’s consciousness. The Maghrib-West “was not merely the port of entry for the Aristotelica,” as F. E. Peters said in 1968;¹⁴⁸ it was a troublesome, varied, unavoidable port of intellectual arrival for Latin-West students, attracted by these convivencia conversations and repelled by them, but finding food for thought even in their growing dialectical disvivencia with a deeply Maghribized Muslim-Jewish intellectual world.

The best illustration of this is Aquinas’s debt to a Maghrib-West notion of science. The chain linking the muscular ideology of Almohadism in late twelfth-century Marrakech and Seville to scholasticism takes us through Michael Scott’s translations in Naples and at the Papal Curia in the 1230s¹⁴⁹ to the Paris university offices of Albert the Great and Thomas Aquinas in the 1260s and 1270s.¹⁵⁰ Madeleine Fletcher’s careful analysis of Aquinas’s debt to Almohadism is conclusive: Aquinas learned Almohad theological and natural science between the 1220s and the 1250s in the translations not just of ibn Rushd’s Aristotelian commentaries but also of ibn Tūmart’s Creed, done by the Dominican professors who taught him in the schools of Frederick II’s Kingdom of Sicily (Naples)—Michael Scott, Peter of Ireland, Raymond Martí—and also by corresponding colleagues all over the Western Mediterranean from Barcelona and Toledo to Almohad (Haf sid) Tunis, where Dominicans, aiming to convert Muslims, operated a studium aimed against Almohadism until 1270. That quintessentially “Western” European debate over science’s relationship with reason, so central to Aquinas’s Summa theologiae, began in earnest when Aquinas learned of ibn Rushd’s postulation that “the study of natural science is required by Islamic law” (but distinct from it) because sensory understanding is possible and cannot contradict God’s cosmic ordering; “subsequently Western European Christianity incorporated this Aristotelian philosophical attitude to religion”—that is, the rejection of the Platonic denial of empirical reasoning about a divine cosmos—“and [End Page 297] reason became a competitor with traditional authority.” Even Western European terminology marks the absorption of Maghribī-Western developments, notes Fletcher. Reading al-Fārābī’s Aristotelian Catalogue of the Sciences through Ibn Rushd’s lens, Aquinas and Albert the Great coined a new word, theologia, to refer to the higher “scientia” that translated the word ‘ilm which Arabic-reading philosophers, both Muslim and Jewish (viz. Maimonides), had for centuries used for both the “science of sensible things” (i.e., natural science) and the “knowledge” of God’s laws (religious science). Scholasticism’s scientia divinae legis, the “science of divine law,” then, was like Alfonso VIII’s Christianized Arabic inscriptions at Las Huelgas: a direct calque of the Almohad “Islamic sources” that had made the science or ‘ilm of nature just as much a “practical science” as that of “the law” or sharī‘a. “The importance given to law” in Scholasticism generally and in Aquinas’s Summa particularly “is a marker of Islamic influence” and especially of the “high culture of the literate population [Almohad one should add].”¹⁵¹ At the roots of the modern Western European science of “laws of nature” lies the Almohad intelligentsia’s Maghrib-West Kulturkreis.¹⁵²

Other chains of transmission for which we have fewer—though hardly negligible—links concern the development of modern natural law theory and diplomacy. It would be anachronistic to argue that ibn Rushd had the foresight to focus on democracy (he dismissed it vaguely as “the people’s community” or “assembly of the multitude”).¹⁵³ But Antony Black has recently advanced the case for linking his Islamicized Neoplatonism, with its characteristic belief that humans require moral/legal guidance, through Marsilius of Padua to Hobbes’s key seventeenth-century discussions of freedom: “it seems that [Hobbes’s] way of looking at the state first came to Europe from the Muslim [End Page 298] world.”¹⁵⁴ Black’s hypothesis is supported by Aziz al-Azmeh’s observation that ibn Rushd’s seminal and dominant influence on medieval Christian jurists took the form of an Aristotelian-inspired rationalization of the law’s separate status from prophecy. As Peters noted long ago, the possibility that perfectly effective “political collectivities” existed outside of scriptural injunctions was “much in evidence in [pre-twelfth-century Arab] theological and legal-theoretical discussions,” but it was in the commentaries on Aristotle’s Rhetoric written by ibn Rushd, the Almohad ideologue par excellence and “the apogee of Aristotelianism in Islam,”¹⁵⁵ that this search, al-Azmeh argues, “yielded . . . most notably and persuasively . . . a certain notion of natural law.”¹⁵⁶ As in the science-scripture debate, this intellectual lineage also demands that we consider the Maghrib-West’s original importance for the absolutism-freedom debate so famously central to Western civilization.

The Marrakech–Seville–modern Europe connection becomes much more dramatic in following the fortunes of the well-known political allegory that ibn Ṭufayl wrote with Almohad ideology clearly in mind. Its protagonist Ḥayy ibn Yaqẓān (“Living, Son of Awake”) is the direct inspiration for Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, hermeneutically transformed in evolving translated guises from the hero of Almohad ruthless rationalism (leading inevitably to Islam) through Pico della Mirandola’s Humanist version (man as intellect) into the minds of Defoe and Locke’s self-made man through Edward Pococke’s 1671 direct translation from Arabic into Latin.¹⁵⁷ If we follow Adorno and Horkheimer’s economicist understanding of Defoe’s allegory, in which Crusoe constitutes the first European Homo occidentalis, Ḥayy might more speculatively be considered Western capitalism’s Almohad grandfather on three counts:¹⁵⁸ it was Hayy’s Maghribī-Western model of “man [as] the superior creature and nature [as] a passive organ awaiting an active force to conquer and control it” that directly inspired Locke’s [End Page 299] Christendom-Western self-made utilitarian Crusoe; it was Pococke’s explanation of Ḥayy’s story as a paradigm of experiential self-discovery that prompted his friend Robert Boyle to praise the Almohad piece for its support of “anti-dogmatic theology” and the scientific “experimental method”; and it was Pococke, as one of Locke’s Oxford professors, who introduced the budding empiricist philosopher to two products of the Almohad West, the work of ibn Ṭufayl and Maimonides, which together inspired Locke’s Essay on Human Understanding, “a pillar of liberal education during the Enlightenment” (he may also have picked up the idea of the mind at birth as a tabula rasa from Maimonides’s commentary on the Mishna translated by Pococke).¹⁵⁹ Let us then begin to talk of Maghribī-Western roots for Latin-Western utilitarianism, scientificism, and empiricism.

In addition to these intellectual links, the political weight of the Almohad Maghrib-West in the medieval Latin-West’s own estimation is attested to by the fact that on 17 December 1198, not long after the Ayyubid emir Saladin (1138–1193) reconquered Jerusalem (1187), the first truly long-lasting permanent (not “conjoncturel”)¹⁶⁰ diplomatic relationship arose between Christendom and Islamdom, but its aim was a Papal-Almohad reconciliation, not a Papal-Ayyubid one. On that day Pope Innocent III authorized the creation of the Trinitarian Order to ransom Christian captives from Muslim belligerents or to ransom Muslim prisoners from Christian captors within Christendom in exchange for Christian ones held in non-Christian poli-ties (the text’s ambiguity concerning captives’ religious identity also implies unprecedented Papal recognition for the legitimacy of trade with and concern for infidels).¹⁶¹ It is indicative of changing attitudes and of the Maghrib-West’s importance that the founder of the new Order was inspired by the need “to forgive one’s enemies’ offences and to love them”¹⁶² and that the 1198 document was first used not to petition for the redemption of the numerous Christian captives taken by Saladin but to petition the Almohad caliph Abu ‘Abd Allāh Muḥammad al-Nāṣir after the 1195 Muslim victory at Alarcos, asking him as caliph and regi marrochetano (“Marrakechi king”; hence the [End Page 300] modern name for Morocco) to permit the exchange of prisoners-ofwar. The papal choice of the Maghrib-West’s ruler as his interlocutor for such an unprecedented diplomatic instrument is a fact, writes Giulio Cipollone, that “merits deep analysis.”¹⁶³

The final example takes us from lofty intellectual and diplomatic heights down to the earthly finances of Almohad Bougie (today in eastern Algeria). Here, along the same coastlines of the Maghrib-West visited by Trinitarian monks then negotiating a Christian-Muslim humanitarian peace (perhaps reflecting the budding consciousness of natural rights thinking in Maghrib-West/Latin-West philosophy), an Italian by the name of Leonardo Fibonacci learned his algebraic math and Arabic numerals, sometime before his influential Treatise on the Abacus was published in 1202. Fibonacci is rightly considered instrumental in the rise of modern capitalist accounting. Even though it took Pisa University’s Humanism and the Medici Bank’s adoption of Arabic numerals in the 1400s for Christian Europe to finally accept Fibonacci’s revolutionary accounting, he played a key role in what we might at this juncture term the Almohadization, Maghribization, or Westernization of Europe’s finances.¹⁶⁴

Conclusions

Such specific lineages and connections will doubtless increase in number and depth with future research. Should we ignore the Maghrib-West’s importance, however, we will have learned nothing from the laughter of Roger Bacon’s Iberian students in the 1240s at the university of Paris. After hearing his Aristotle lectures, they berated him “for his ignorance of Arabic” and taught him “several words” so he could modernize his interpretations.¹⁶⁵ Paying attention to the lesson encapsulated in these students’ laughter suggests a broad macrohistorical [End Page 301] question concerning the dialectical nature of the Latin-West’s and Maghrib-West’s parallel evolution between 1100 and 1300, a process encompassing more than the specific Almohad period but probably climaxing during it.

Elites in both Wests put unprecedented pressure on society to reform internally against heresy and externally to fight religiously defined enemies. The Cluniac Order’s leadership in these efforts, culminating famously in the 1095 Crusade declared by the Cluniac Pope Urban II, was followed fairly quickly by the Cistercian Order’s leadership, which overwhelmed it in the 1140s (in Iberia), as the Andalusian paria funds with which Castile had supported the Burgundian-based Cluny died out after the initial Almohad victories in al-Andalus.¹⁶⁶ It is remarkable that scholars have not investigated how the Cluny-Cistercian attempts to reform Christendom from within and against the other on the outside (“to impose a measure of uniformity” on Christendom and to free it “from improper outside influences”)¹⁶⁷ correspond largely in their chronology, substance, and function to the Almoravid-Almohad projects within the Maghrib-West, with their increasing religio-legal reforms aimed at purifying Islamic society from innovative (heretical) practices, consolidating a macro-theocratic-polity, and promoting unprecedented jihad to defend Islam from outsiders. The task begun recently by Dominique Iogna-Prat in Order and Exclusion: Cluny and Christendom Face Heresy, Judaism, and Islam (1000–1150) and Madeleine Fletcher (reminding us that it was the House of Burgundy who mediated the Latin-West’s relationship with the Maghrib-West via post-1086 domination of the archbishopric of Toledo and intermarriage with Castilian-Portuguese dynasts)¹⁶⁸ needs to be taken up from the Maghrib-West’s perspective: for “expanding [our] scale of analysis,” Patrick Manning has insightfully observed, “helps locate interconnections that explain the patterns” that really matter in world history.¹⁶⁹

Was the creation of “a persecuting society” (most notable in the invention of the Inquisition just after 1200, which perceived itself as rationalist)¹⁷⁰ part of a larger process that included the Almohad [End Page 302] Maghrib-West’s persecution of Jews, Christians, and nonconformists, also rationalist in its own mind? Was the Christian ecclesiastical crack-down in the universities of Bologna and Paris in the 1200s “against the Arabs’ reckless pursuit of philosophical rationalism” not part of a shared debate about science and scripture? After all ibn Rushd, “the gravest menace to Christian faith” from a Latin-Western perspective, equally fascinated and troubled Maghribī-Western authorities: his research was both promoted before 1184 and condemned in the 1190s by the Almohads (his political eclipse was short-lived), and the crack-down by Muslim rulers on intellectual freedom in colleges from Fez to Damascus in the 1200s is paralleled by how the works of Aquinas, his intellectual disciple, were made illegal in Paris in 1277.¹⁷¹ The larger cultural context should perhaps be more properly conceived as a Papal-Almohad hegemonic struggle for the African-European West.

Pursuing these lines of inquiry and accepting the Almohad Maghrib-West as an early example of the subsequent early modern “maritime . . . transoceanic” empires of the later European West¹⁷² will open up interpretive possibilities and highlight the porosity of world history, above the Braudelian level of deep structures. Several longue durée processes suggest intercontextual questions about the Maghrib-West and Latin-West that make them much closer siblings than even Bulliet envisions. It matters that ibn Rushd compared Byzantine rulers (and emperors in general) to caliphs in a political treatise at a time when the Almohad caliphs he served were fighting jihāds against the Popes’ crusaders;¹⁷³ future researchers may discover more evidence of reciprocal conversations that constructed consciously interlocked trajectories. Recent evidence that papal crusades in twelfth-century Iberia aimed to separate Andalusi Muslims from Almohads exemplifies the “deep play”—à la Clifford Geertz—involved in the Latin-West’s awareness of Maghribī-Western faultlines.¹⁷⁴ We underestimate the two Wests’ dialectical efforts to strike out on their own against each other but overestimate the process’s inevitability under the spell of elites’ ultimate success in distancing Christian and Muslim polities from each other. [End Page 303]

The human vectors of porosity are well known: merchants, missionaries, scholars, soldiers (Christians served Almoravid and Almohad armies, as we have seen), redeemed captives, and artisans (whose goods and services testify to intense Almohad-Christian European contact, cross-migrations, and hybridization).¹⁷⁵ The survival of scholars’ texts best demonstrates the embracing-and-distancing dynamic of Latin-Maghrib-West crossovers. The Latin-West’s “image of Islam as a heresy,” John Tolan has argued, was “forged by dhimmis in the Near East and Spain” who took it “to northern Europe” between 1110 and 1250, mostly during Almohad times. This “crucial turning point in the portrayal of both Islam and Judaism in medieval Europe” was marked by intense observation and boundary making.¹⁷⁶ The colonization of large Almohad-ruled parts of the West by Castile, Aragon, and Portugal between 1230 and 1248 and the sustained presence of Dominicans catering to the “burgeoning immigrant populations of [Christian] soldiers, merchants and their families” living in North Africa throughout the 1200s created, in Robin Vose’s estimation, “an unprecedented period” of thirteenth-century cross-denominational interaction, “a rather special circumstance” for anyone crossing boundaries: “a troubling yet exciting and intriguing time when all possibilities were open.”¹⁷⁷ As the Almohad Maghrib-West both intellectually drove Christendom and was politically subsumed by it in the early 1200s, Christendom and Islamdom came closest to forming one conjoined system in which hostility alternated with accommodationism and even collaboration.¹⁷⁸ But neither theocracy nor rationalism explains why the two Wests parted company and why the Almohad “Maghrib-West” [End Page 304] was reduced semantically to “North Africa” for both modern Arabic speakers and modern “Westerners.” The answer lies in Roman Law.

Ibn Jubayr was pleased in 1184 to hear that Saladin himself acknowledged the Maghrib-West’s intellectual leadership by founding charitable institutions for “foreign [scholars] from the West [maghrib]” that promoted their innovative educational system in Egypt, Iraq, and Syria.¹⁷⁹ As we have seen, Maghribī-Westerners’ ideas also spread north into the Latin-West, but George Makdisi has adduced substantial evidence against G. E. von Grunebaum’s thesis that the “Christian West” was not influenced culturally by Islam “except for Averroism.” The rise of Latin universities between 1100 and 1300 depended heavily on the Maghrib-West in eighteen separate ways: “it would unduly” tax “the imagination,” Makdisi argues, “to conceive parallel developments devoid of influence when the number of parallels is so high.” Indeed Western Islamic models apparently motivated Castile’s Alfonso VIII to found Palencia University in 1208–1209 and Emperor Frederick II to found Naples University in 1224. Latin educational reform, then, followed the lead of Islamic colleges institutionally, as well as philosophically, in tackling the “antagonism between two implacable forces . . . basic traditionalism and the nascent rationalism” inspired by Greek philosophy. The varying fortunes of this debate within Islam and Christianity do not, I think, explain how the “great divergence” (to borrow Kenneth Pomeranz’s phrase) arose between Latin-West and Maghrib-West after 1200 as much as their differing institutional laws. Whereas Latin universities thrived as self-governing corporations that could avoid ecclesiastical or political centralization (guaranteed by Roman-Law notions of the corporation as a “fictional person”), Maghrib education became increasingly centralized under the “lay nomocratic theocracy” of Islam. Rulers needed religio-political legitimacy from Islamic professors, and professors were bound by “the law of waqf [an individual’s donation of wealth to support education]” that “there be nothing in the foundation that could be construed as inimical to the tenets of Islam.” While the concept of the university as a corporation was foreign to Islam, in which a necessary alliance between statism and intelligentsia developed, the Latin-West remodeled the Maghrib-West [End Page 305] college into an independent corporation (“universitas”) that joined the other institutions then contributing to fragmenting Christendom’s authority (guilds, municipalities, estates).¹⁸⁰ This molded the European “West” in unique ways, but it took the global triumph of the capitalist corporation for scholars to begin noting that Europe’s relationship to the rest of the world since 1500 may perhaps best be understood in terms of its corporative peculiarities.

Characterizing differing evolutions in Latin versus Maghribī Wests is not tantamount to merely identifying “what Islam prevented and what Muslims lacked”¹⁸¹ any more than noticing that modern Christian Europe lacked anything as comparatively workable as the dhimmī system might be coupled with the fact that Muslim societies did not experience anything as disastrous as Europe’s subsequent relationship with its own Muslims and Jews. If the Maghrib lacked Roman-inspired corporativeness (and thus perhaps a sine qua non element in capitalism’s toolkit), Europe lacked a scripturally inspired dhimmī toleration for Muslims and lost the intellectual battle to privilege its scriptural respect for Jews (perhaps because of the hypercorporativism of nationalism and racism). And this contributed to ominous developments whose relevance to Enzo Traverso’s suggestion that Nazi violence, if not the inevitable “natural outcome” of “Western civilization” was nevertheless its product and “pathological manifestation,”¹⁸² lies beyond the scope of the present study. But the comparison bears keeping in mind given the Almohad West’s dabbling participation in the creation of a medieval persecuting society that ultimately flourished in Christian Europe but was rejected by the post-Almohad Maghrib.

Christians and Muslims, even into the twentieth century, were overwhelmingly unconscious of the divergent directions they had pursued institutionally. Theological and anthropological explanations that essentialized differences or deterministic models that posited differential civilizational modernity were simpler. Christians preferred to imagine that the Latin version of the Maghrib-West was primordially Christian or—later—uniquely “European” (not oddly, un-Jesus-likely Roman); after the Almohad demise Muslims proudly pointed to a reinstituted [End Page 306] system of sociopolitical organization (including dhimmī protection), which was more consistent with Islam’s foundations than anything the modern “West” developed out of the Bible. Notwithstanding these differing views, the two Wests evolved away from each other by denying and effacing the historical importance of a common ancestor, the Almohad Maghrib-West. [End Page 307]