Worlds apart? An Andalusi in Fa imid Egypt

This article explores a sixth/twelfth century memoir of an Andalusi polymath who travelled from the small a’ifa kingdom of Denia in the Iberian Peninsula, to Alexandria and Cairo in Egypt, in search of patronage at the court of the Fa imid vizier al-Af al b. Badr al-Jamali (d. 515/1121). The memoir, called al-Risala al-Mi riyya, is authored by Umayya b. ‘Abd al-‘Aziz Abu al- alt al-Dani al-Ishbili (460–528/1068–1134). The memoir concerns Abu al- alt's stay in Egypt and consists of a description of the place, and those scholars that he encountered in his fields of interest: primarily medicine, astronomy, and poetry. Written after his departure from Egypt, and dedicated to his subsequent Zirid patrons in Ifriqiya (present-day Tunisia), the Risala most directly provides information on the intellectual and cultural world of late Fa imid Egypt. In so doing it also provided an example of scholarly travel across the Mediterranean, one that indicated the rarely discussed transmission of knowledge from the western to the eastern Mediterranean, rather than the more commonly assumed eastern to western direction of transmission of knowledge across the Islamic Mediterranean. As well, the Risala indicated the porousness of confessional boundaries in the Mediterranean, as it entailed the search for patronage by a Sunni scholar in a Shi i court. In all these respects Abu al- alt's Risala served to illustrate an intellectual culture that displayed the kind of seamless interaction that led to the ‘fusion’ and ‘synthesis’ in the material culture of the Mediterranean, according to scholars of ‘Mediterraneanism’.