Against the Mediterranean
In sharp contrast to these well-established scholarly traditions, other academic fields resist the idea of the Mediterranean as a legitimate category of historical research. Anthropologists and historians of the Muslim world have been particularly prominent in these critiques.
This brings us to a consideration of Muslims who live along its southern, eastern and northeastern shores, whose relationship to the inland sea is quite different. An essential part of the rejection of ‘the Mediterranean’ or ‘Mediterranean studies’ is the very term itself, ‘Mediterranean’, and what it implies about the place of Muslims in it. Mediterranean is a Roman/Latin word, of Greek origin. Until the nineteenth century it was never used by the Muslims of North Africa and the Levant.[440] [441] In addition, the Europeans expanded their usage of the term into the concept of the ‘Mediterranean region’, in that same century, at the exact moment when Britain and France were establishing their regional dominance. Braudel’s connected and unified Mediterranean was very much a sea that was stitched together by Europeans and it is certain that the intensification of the European presence across the Mediterranean was experienced as something considerably worse than ‘connection’ by Muslims from Algeria to Istanbul.11 In the most lethal use of ‘Mediterranean’-type thinking French colonial officials fervently promoted Algeria’s classical past as a way of turning their new conquest into a part of France. This connection between the word and European imperialism or, at the very least, Eurocentrism is an anxiety that the field of Mediterranean history shares with Atlantic and Pacific history. Historians of the Atlantic, for instance, worry that they still tend to view Atlantic history (whatever that may mean) from the perspective of Europe and to divide up the Atlantic, and even a compact area such as the Caribbean, along imperial lines. This is an unfortunate irony, given that one of the original motivations for the study of bodies of water was ‘to escape the restrictions of the nation-state’.[442]For the Arabic writers of the medieval period the sea was a barrier, not a bridge; it separated two adversarial shores.[443] Nor did they call it the Mediterranean. The Arabic translation of the word - al-Mutawassit - started to be used only in the nineteenth century; it appears in none of the medieval maps and makes only a rare appearance in the chronicles or geographical texts.[444] Instead, what the Europeans saw as one sea was viewed as many by the Arabs: the ‘Rumi/Byzantine Sea, the Shami/Syrian sea, the Akhdar/Green Sea and the Malih/Salty Sea. This did not signal a cultural predisposition against maritime endeavours, since the Indian Ocean and the Red Sea were viewed as part of the Islamic world.[445] Rather, it stemmed from the fact that their Christian adversaries came from across the Mediterranean Sea and, from the tenth century onwards, were increasingly successful in their campaigns to retake territory they had lost and to conquer other areas anew. These campaigns culminated, in the medieval period, in the Crusades. Even when, over the course of several centuries, Muslim armies managed to drive the Europeans out of Egypt and the Levant, their attitude towards the coastline remained cautious. When the Mamluks retook Damietta from the French in 1251, they destroyed the city’s fortifications: ‘[they] demolished all the ramparts, razing them to the ground in order to prevent the Christians from ever making use of the city, they took all the Stones and carried them to the River Nile’.[446]
The tradition of multiple names for this body of water continued into the early modern period, as did the view that the sea was a source of danger, not connection. This is unsurprising considering the reality of European piracy and, in the case of North Africa, actual naval attacks.
Speaking of a late sixteenth-century Moroccan traveller, Matar observes that: ‘Common to him and other Muslims was the image of a terrifying sea, not because Arabs or Muslims had a religiously engrained or an instinctive hostility to the sea but because they feared attacks from European fleets.’[447] In this period North Africans moved inland as a response to British and French bombardments of the shoreline, a pattern that we see in the Greek islands as well, where coastal villages were abandoned in favour of settlement in the interior of the islands.[448] In the latter case the attacks were more likely to come from an assortment of Catholic corsairs and pirates.Andrew Hess, another scholar of North Africa, does not concern himself with the Muslim view of the Mediterranean per se. Nevertheless, he stands in firm opposition to the idea of a coherent Mediterranean world, spanning the northern and southern shores, at least in the early modern period. His book The forgotten frontier: A history of the sixteenth-century Ibero-African frontier, was pioneering in its day and remains an essential text on the western Mediterranean.[449] Hess argues that three events in 1492, ‘three shocks to the old order’, shattered what had previously been a dense network of contact and movement between Muslim North Africa and Andalusia.[450] These were Columbus’s journey to the New World, the expulsion of the Jews from Spain and the defeat of the last Muslim kingdom, Granada, on the Iberian peninsula. In the wake of these events, both sides (even the victorious Christian side) decided to call a halt to their battles with each other in favour of directing their attentions elsewhere. In his words: ‘contrasting Mediterranean civilizations separated themselves at the Strait of Gibraltar, ending their history of integration in a little-known exchange of ambassadors and border populations’.[451] As a result, ‘the wide belt of cultural pluralism of the late fifteenth century, the zone including both Hispano-Muslims and the Christian-Muslim military border in North Africa, shrank to a thin line’.[452] What remained in the western Mediterranean was a watery frontier that separated Spain from North Africa. Two mutually antagonistic foes glared at each other over this divide, with only violent entrepreneurs such as the so called Barbary corsairs willing to sail out into these now hostile waters.