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Book Review
| Trickster Travels: A Sixteenth-Century Muslim between Worlds. By NATALIE ZEMON DAVIS. New York: Hill and Wang, 2006. 448 pp. $17.00 (paper).
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Hasan al-Wazzan was born in Granada around 1486. Like most other things about him, neither his name nor his date of birth can be known with exactitude. Indeed, as Natalie Davis suggests in her marvelous Trickster Travels, the silences and inconsistencies are characteristic of the man. Known to the West as Leo Africanus, Hasan al-Wazzan was the author of a Description of Africa as well as numerous other books on a variety of subjects. A refugee from Nasirid Granada after its fall in 1492, raised and educated in Fez, widely traveled in Africa and the Mediterranean, he lived most of his life in the Rome of the Medicis. His claim on our attention as world historians derives from his liminal status as a voyager between worlds. |
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Whereas Ibn Batutta's travels provide a vantage point to explore the fourteenth century world through which he traveled, al-Wazzan's peregrinations occurred at a time when the shadow of the West was beginning to fall over the western Mediterranean. An expellee of Islamic Spain, his life invites us to consider the ethnic cleansings that made modern Spain possible. Like many other Granadans, both Jewish and Muslim, he ended up in Fez (where an entire quarter, that of the Andalusians, marks Moroccan historical memory). Captured by Christian pirates while on his way back to Morocco from a diplomatic mission to Cairo, he was sold into slavery in Italy in 1518, and his life (and Davis's book) began anew. His owner was Pope Leo X. |
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