Scholarship, Space, and Strategies of Belonging in Al-Maqqari's (d. 1031/1632) Literary and Historical Writings

This article explores two key literary and historical texts, Raw at al-as (The Garden of Myrtle) and Naf al- ib(The Breeze of Perfume), by the tenth-/sixteenth- and eleventh-/seventeenth-century North African Muslim scholar al-Maqqari (d. 1031/1632) in order to show that, contrary to popular understandings of the period, these were times of robust Islamic scholarly activity. In order to explore the nature and dynamics of such activity, this article addresses the following overarching questions: (1) How did al-Maqqari write about North Africa and North African landscapes in relation to those in the eastern Mediterranean and also in relation to historically resonant landscapes, namely Muslim Iberia (al-Andalus)? (2) What can this author's conceptualisation of places tell us about how texts shaped the category of North Africa as well as its imagined boundaries? In response, this article examines excerpts from al-Maqqari's texts in order to show that he not only engaged in scholarly activity, but he also used rhetorical strategies to inscribe himself into his articulation of this activity. Using Antrim's 'discourse of place' theory, which proposes a consideration of a broad variety of Arabic texts as a means to unearth how land and place figured into the lives and imaginaries of premodern Muslims, along with their understandings of identity and belonging, my paper hones in on the autobiographical sections of both works, which have commonly been overlooked by scholars. An examination of these sections demonstrates how al-Maqqari both participated in perpetuating an understanding of land and space and helped to produce it.