The Rise and Fall of the Other West: The Medieval Arabo-Muslim West.

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This paper challenges the common belief, historically speaking, that there has only ever been one “West,” the amorphous politico-cultural entity which arose the development of capitalism and Liberal democracy in Europe and its trans-oceanic settler colonies between 1500 and 1800. Scholars are quite conscious of the limitations of such relative terms as the “West.” But there have been other “Wests” whose existence problematizes easy generalizations about civilizational boundaries. Samuel Huntington’s mapping of clashing civilizations, for example, focuses on a West in opposition to other cultures with sustained evolutionary trajectories. This projects back in time current global politico-cultural boundaries that are more historically contingent on dialectical processes of ideological and cultural choices than appears at first light. Moreover, the long term existence of entities such as the modern “West” is much more fragile than political analysts like Francis Fukuyama or Benjamin Barber admit. This is demonstrated through the analysis of a case study in the construction of a different “West” on the frontiers between medieval and early modern Europe and Africa which has received practically no attention: an Arab and Muslim “West” which sat astride the Straits of Gibraltar and was antagonistic towards both other Muslims and non-Muslims. Like the more modern West, it too had imperialist instincts which projected its version of Islamic ideology outwards and inwards as a global destiny, in a functional analogue to the hegemonic spread of democracy and capitalism today.

This article explores how this Arab-language vision of Islamic identity (“The West [al-Maghrib]”) developed in North Africa and Spain between 1000 and 1200. It saw itself as a clear political entity with unequivocal qualifications for global leadership—quite similar in function, but not in content, to today’s Liberal democratic capitalist “West.” The medieval term, though not the consciousness of the Muslim/Arab ideology of Westernism, survives in the official name of Morocco, “The Western Sharifian Kingdom.” But it is an irony that modern North Africans, primarily Muslim and Arab or Berber, do not think of themselves as “Westerners.” This medieval Arabo-Muslim “West,” as defined by the leading intellectuals and politicians of that context, did not survive the military and political defeats of the 1200s. Modern commentators like Huntington, Fukuyama, and Barber construct their own “Wests” with as much of an illusory pedigree and as weak a prospect for future hegemony as did the intellectual and political leaders of the other West in the Middle Ages.

Stream: History, Historiography

Paper: A paper has not yet been submitted.

I have been teaching European, Mediterranean, Latin American, and World History in Canada (Calgary) and the United States (Stanford, Arizona State, and Santa Clara University) since receiving my MA (History and Modern Languages) in 1988 and my PhD from the University of Toronto in 1996 (History). Apart from participation in over twenty conferences and co-heading a National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Seminar (Arizona State), my publications include critically acclaimed translations as well as more in-depth research on the history of law and society in early modern Spain and on the cultural interaction of New World and Old World societies (the latest is a study of the impact of Native American science on the evolution of European botany, which appears in volume 11 of the collected studies published by the Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies). My most recent project is a monograph on the Habsburg dynasty's struggle to combat seventeenth-century piracy in the Caribbean, Atlantic, and Pacific, based on archival research in Mexico, Spain, France, Holland and England. The classroom experiments for this proposal's study were conducted in several pilot courses, including my upper-level course on the history of Mediterranean and Caribbean piracy. I have been using and researching peer-learning in higher education for three years using various hybrid software-hardware systems.