politics by cherrypicking types of change, and limited his analysis to the fluctuation between strength and weakness in the same Ḥafṣid state.28 This is a fundamental point that brings state-centric colonial scholarship and nation-state-based nationalist historiography in line with the staunchly pro-Tunis Ḥafṣid authors writing at the end of the fourteenth and in the fifteenth century.
In part, these difficulties arise because historians do not always, or fully, take stock of the changing composition of the ruling group, or do so but then take sides with one of the parties. That is why it is preferable to think of an oscillation of Ḥafṣid domination from a “regional” mode centered on Tunis to a “local” configuration with a multiplicity of autonomous Ḥafṣid capitals such as Bijāya. A change in perspective away from strength and weakness of a state is in keeping with this book’s lack of predilection for either of the two modes of domination. This approach also identifies the victory of the regional mode at the end of the fourteenth century as a political phenomenon that requires elucidation.
Characterizing a specific political configuration as regional explains why this book does not develop a theory of regionalization and then test whether it applied to Ifrīqiyā by mustering evidence. Its primary goal is not to use empirical evidence to demonstrate the nonexistence of a region—however one may define it;29 rather, it is to explain what is involved in conceiving of medieval regions in the first place.30
Tribes, Bedouins, and Pastureland
Like the state, the notion of tribe is mostly a source of confusion. On the one hand, a tribe can refer to a small group of nomads with a few goats and maybe a dog. On the other, the term is used to describe a great number of groups who may share elaborate ideas of collective genealogy. In a few cases, tribes founded urban dynasties and even empires.31 The notion has thus no analytical power and lumps together groups with widely different livelihoods, organization, and senses of collective identity. In addition to being an impediment to reasoned explanation of sociohistorical and cultural differences, the term carries with it a heavy ideological baggage, from biblical to colonial tribes.
Although the term appears in the sources (qabīla, pl. qabā’il), it is generally used without special care for analytical precision. Like modern references to biblical tribes, it expresses ideological preconceptions that are not always negative. The term qabīla did not imply an associated territory, although when medieval authors used it to refer to pastoralists, they assumed that the latter moved across a geographic space and that some of these tribes claimed that space as theirs. Medieval authors did not systematically identify each tribe as a tribe, but simply noted the common names of various groups. Modern historians routinely append the moniker “tribe” to these names presumably to help identify them to nonspecialists. When they do so, they make it seem as though they are distinguishing between tribes and states on solid analytical grounds. They are not.
The written record includes only those tribes whose actions made them noteworthy. In general, these groups had political relations with the Ḥafṣids. In contrast, there is very little information about groups that lived outside the dynastic spotlight. For instance, from the narrative of a raid by Abū Fāris ‘Abd al-‘Azīz (r. 1394–1434) into the Awrās Mountains southeast of Bijāya, it is clear that many groups lived there outside of Ḥafṣid rule.32 Even in the case of politically prominent tribes, authors did not mention the borders of their territory, but only that they lived near a city, a river, or a mountain range. This makes situating tribes in Ifrīqiyā in more than very general terms a very difficult proposition.
The Ḥafṣids did not always control the main highways, and bands of roving bandits made land travel a hazardous proposition for much of the fourteenth century and well into the fifteenth.33 In some areas, villages banded together to defend themselves and to share the losses they caused.34 The sources often refer to these outlaws as Bedouins or a‘rāb, another vague term that does not allow us to identify them with any degree of precision.35 While it is common today to use Bedouin to refer to nomadic groups, the term was applied less specifically to all those who did not live in cities. For city-dwellers, settled agriculturalists who lived in villages and nomadic pastoralists were Bedouins. The term was almost an adjective that described non-urban groups, and jurists used it mostly in a derogatory sense. The predominantly urban character of the sources—and their utilization of categories that fit the prejudices of modern colonial and postcolonial historians—make the task of historicizing the perspective of urbanites a necessity.
The City and Its Autonomy
From the 1280s to the 1370s, the rulers of Tunis had a hard time quashing the independence of the Ḥafṣid emirates of Bijāya, Qasanṭīna (Constantine), and Ṭarāblus (Tripoli). Their inability to do so was, according to supporters of the regional configuration of Ḥafṣid domination such as Ibn Khaldūn, the result of weakness.36 Scholars have approached autonomous cities in Ifrīqiyā from a number of perspectives. In the 1940s, Brunschvig saw them as the result of the weakness of the state and petty infighting between cousins. While this would not distinguish him from Ibn Khaldūn, he insisted that their autonomy be distinguished from the popular, communal, and republican character of western European city-states. He reasoned that “in Islam,” legal prescriptions and institutional limitations made a commune inconceivable and thus impossible. Not everyone agreed. Other historians analyzed examples that challenged this view based on prescriptive texts, and sought to develop an alternative approach to the Islamic city.37
In a seminal article that took the comparison with European city-states a step further, Michael Brett focused on the involvement of the Tripolitan elite in bringing about Tripoli’s autonomy from Tunis.38 He argued that seeing Tripoli as a Mediterranean city-state was preferable to understanding it as an Islamic city, and made better sense of its autonomy. Although he did not develop this idea further, his essay pointed to the possibility of developing comparisons with southern Europe that went beyond stating what Islam prevented and what Muslims lacked. Arguing from a different standpoint, Muḥammad Ḥasan thought that, even if urban institutional arrangements in Ifrīqiyā were different from those of European city-states, they performed similar functions.39 He also discussed the involvement of the non-elite mass (al-‘āmma) in politics, but did not argue that there were urban republics in Ifrīqiyā.40 More recently, Valérian abstained from making claims about the participation of the “population” in politics, given the character of the sources. Although he was sure that Bijāya was never an “urban republic,” he was not as confident about the existence of political structures that would have allowed Bijāyans to express themselves collectively.41 While it is not certain whether these structures existed or not, comparisons with European republics and Islamic cities have not helped decide the question. Instead, they have tended to serve as a distraction and perpetuate the discourse of absences and lacks.
Though it pays special attention to Bijāya, this book is not an urban history. It does not try to account for the functioning of the city, its infrastructure, or its history. Instead, it uses the politics of city-centered autonomy—specifically, the autonomy of Bijāya—as a way to illuminate the ideology behind the making of Ifrīqiyā. Since this ideology was not specific to Bijāya or its elite, it incorporates the perspectives of elites in other cities and assesses their participation in support of the regional emirate. The focus on Bijāya sheds light on the socioeconomic and political conditions that enabled urban elites to challenge the dominance of Tunis and points to the process that ultimately led to the political and ideological defeat of the local configuration. In this vein, an event such as the irruption of the “populace” in politics gains full significance in relation to an argument about the realignment of urban elites around the ruler of Tunis. Emphasizing the importance of this event, especially given the paucity of available information, is meant to draw attention to the tendency of the sources to downplay the political role of non-elite groups and, therefore, to the depoliticizing character of the extant chronicles.
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