The "Mediterranean" through Arab Eyes in the Early Modern Period

From Rumi to "White In-Between Sea"

Nabil Matar

The Sea of Andalus, the Sea of Maghrib, the Sea of Alexandria, the Sea of Syria, the Sea of Constantinople, the Sea of the Franks, and the Sea of the Rum [Europeans/Byzantines] ... are one sea.

— YAQUT AL-HAMAWI (D. 1229), MU'JAM AL-BULDAN

The sea belongs to Christians — as it is said, the sea belongs to the Rum.

— THE MOROCCAN AMBASSADOR 'ABDALLAH IBN 'AISHA TO HIS FRENCH HOST IN PARIS, JEAN JOURDAN, 1699

This essay will examine Arabic writings about the Mediterranean Sea in the period after Fernand Braudel's terminus ad quem (1598) until Napoleon's invasion of Egypt in 1798 — the period in which European naval powers, chiefly Britain and France, came to dominate the Mediterranean basin. It focuses on the writings of the Arabic-speaking peoples who inhabited the Arab mainland (Barr al-'Arab), extending from Iskanderun on the southeastern border of Turkey to Tangier, situated at the intersection of the Mediterranean and the Atlantic. Accordingly, it does not take into account the Turkish mainland (Anatolia; Barr al-Turk) or the Euro-Christian shores. The reason for this Arabic focus is that, even though the Ottomans ruled the eastern and southern Mediterranean basins (excluding Morocco), Arabs and Arabic speakers constituted the largest population at sea: merchants, scholars, jurists, travelers, fishermen, pilgrims, princes, ambassadors, migrants, and families. And these Arabs held entirely different views regarding the name and significance of the sea than the Ottoman Turks. At the same time, they differed markedly from their European counterparts.

THE MEDITERRANEAN OF EUROPE

After the end of World War I, and as soon as European powers gained control of the Arab countries around the Mediterranean basin, Henry Pirenne wrote in Muhammad and Charlemagne that the expansion of Islam from the seventh century on had partitioned what had been a unified sea under the Roman emperors Constantine and Justinian (fourth–sixth centuries CE) into a religious space of confrontation between Christianity and Islam. Disagreeing with Pirenne, his pupil Fernand Braudel showed in The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II (1949) that trade, negotiation, travel, and diplomacy had brought Ottomans together with Frenchmen, Britons with Algerians, and Dutchmen with Aleppans in a manner that turned the sixteenth-century Mediterranean into an interactive geographic unit. Braudel explained that "the movement of boats, pack animals, vehicles and people themselves made the Mediterranean a unit and gave it a certain uniformity in spite of local resistance." Such Braudelian unity was possible only because by 1949, the sea and its shores had been turned into a European lake, with all the Arab countries around the basin under European or European-sponsored mandate/colonization: Morocco (France and Spain), Algeria and Tunisia (France), Libya (Italy), Egypt and Palestine (Britain and Israel), and Lebanon and Syria (France). Looking back, Braudel projected twentieth-century European navigational and commercial hegemony over the Mediterranean onto the sixteenth century, when the "northern invaders" (chiefly British and French, with the Dutch playing some role) had begun to consolidate their control over the sea.

At the end of his book, however, Braudel admitted that the evidence he had used to build his case for a "unifying" Mediterranean had been limited. He had not consulted sources in Arabic or Ottoman — the languages of the southern, of the eastern, and of part of the northern shores of the Mediterranean basin — and he urged scholars to do that. One of his students, Ömer Lutfi Barkan, began studying the Mediterranean through Ottoman population and taxation records to test Braudel's theory of the unity of the Mediterranean, yet half a century after Braudel, Peregrine Horden and Nicholas Purcell in The Corrupting Sea (2000) paid no attention to the non-European sources, dealing with the history of the sea in a synchronic manner. Faruk Tabak's extensive study of trade, ecology, and geography in The Waning of the Mediterranean 1550–1870 (2008) also reflected an exclusively European epistemology of the sea, with a special focus on Venice and Genoa and on the food production (grains, wine, olives) in the hillsides and mountains beyond the Euro-Mediterranean basin. And much as David Abulafia in The Great Sea (2011) aimed to study both the sea itself and those who sailed its waters, what he called the "human history of the sea ... those who dipped their toes into the sea" (more so than Braudel's people's history), he too ignored Turkish and Arabic cartography and geography.

The view of the Mediterranean as a single unity and the interest in Its connectivities (Horden and Purcell's term) has not been confined to academe. The 1995 Barcelona Process of Euro-Mediterranean partnership made the Mediterranean part of European/Western political strategy, and in 2005, the European Union "defined the Mediterranean as a strategic priority;" two years later, the French President, Nicolas Sarkozy, proclaimed the "unity of the Mediterranean" (later changed to the "unity for the Mediterranean" as a result of German insistence). This "unity" served to resolve historical dilemmas, as well as to confirm European hegemony: it retroactively justified the European colonization of the Arab-Islamic coast in the first half of the twentieth century. At that time, Mussolini and other leaders replaced Arabic place names in North Africa with their Latin precedents, while, since their conquest of Algeria in 1830, the French had appealed to the classical past to turn Algeria into France. The unity established the Mediterranean basin as a European "middle sea" of geographical and commercial connectivities, recapitulating thereby the mare nostrum of Roman imperial memory. That is how Braudel (and for that matter Albert Camus before him) could present the sea as a "humanistic Mediterranean" shared by all the peoples of the basin, from the French to the Syrians and Moroccans.

Ironically, crises in the Arab-Islamic Mediterranean have begun to cast their shadow over Europe in recent years. As refugees and migrants from the Mediterranean countries have flooded into western Europe, the...