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Featured Review
| Natalie Zemon Davis. Trickster Travels: A Sixteenth-Century Muslim between Worlds. New York: Hill and Wang. 2006. Pp. 435. $30.00.
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| Natalie Zemon Davis has spent part of her long and distinguished career exploring the relationship, and testing the boundaries, between storytelling and history. This was first evident in her widely read study The Return of Martin Guerre (1983), in which she reconstructed the fascinating tale of a man who successfully passed himself off as a long-missing inhabitant of a village on the western edge of Languedoc, until after some time his masquerade was revealed, with disastrous consequences, at least for the impostor himself. In Fiction in the Archives (1987), she explored more directly the uses of storytelling by individuals seeking pardons in sixteenth-century France. Many if not most historians recognize the importance of narrative in the writing of history. But storytelling brings us closer to fiction, and that proximity makes some historians nervous. Consequently Davis's approach has engendered controversy, most notably in an exchange with Robert Finlay in the AHR in 1988. |
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In this book, Davis turns her attention to a fascinating episode from early sixteenth-century Italy, a story that resonates with much larger implications for the Mediterranean region as a whole and, even more broadly, the history of Muslim-Christian relations. The principal figure in the story is Leo Africanus, who was born al-Hasan al-Wazzan to a Muslim family in Granada a few years before it fell to Spanish Christians in 1492. Al-Hasan's family fled to Morocco, a biographical detail that sets up one of the principal themes of his life and especially of Davis's reconstruction of it: the ambiguity and transitional character of Muslim-Christian relations in the Mediterranean region on the cusp of modernity. Having received an education in the religious and legal sciences common not just to jurists but to Muslim professionals generally, al-Hasan served the sultan of Fez in a variety of diplomatic capacities. In 1518, as he was returning from a mission in the eastern Mediterranean, he was captured and enslaved by Christian pirates, and eventually was presented as a gift to Pope Leo X (Giovanni, son of Lorenzo de' Medici). Having been persuaded to convert to Christianity, al-Hasan was baptized in St. Peter's and given the name Joannes Leo de Medicis, after the pope, although he became better known to posterity as Leo Africanus, Leo the African, in reference to his Moroccan roots. For such an individual, even determining which of his many names to use is a choice fraught with meaning. For the most part, Davis refers to him as he referred to himself in his Arabic writings, with the Arabic form of his baptismal name: Yuhanna al-Asad, "John the Lion." |
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The story of Leo Africanus is well known, and has been told many times before, by scholars and also in a novel by the Lebanese journalist Amin Maalouf (Léon, l'Africain [1986; Eng. trans., 1988]). Davis's account, however, will stand out among other reconstructions of Leo's story, not least because her extensive knowledge of early modern European history allows her to contextualize her hero's adventure. The detail provided is extraordinary, and brings the subject to life in mesmerizing ways, as when she provides a list of Arabic books provided to Leo from the Vatican library while he was imprisoned in the Castel Sant'Angelo in Rome before his conversion and baptism. (At first he was mostly fed a diet of the lives of early Christian saints and anti-Islamic and anti-Jewish tracts, although eventually he was allowed to feast on works by the great Muslim theologian al-Ghazali [d. 1111].) Davis is a historian of Europe, but to prepare herself for the telling of this story of cultural crossings she has read widely in the literature on premodern Islam. There are a few places where her reconstruction of the Muslim context of Leo's story trips over details, as for example when she identifies the "Malikite and Hanabalite" schools of law as dominant in Cairo (pp. 140–141). (The Maliki school—forms such as "Malikite" are a throwback to an earlier layer of European scholarship on Islam—was prominent in Cairo in the early medieval period, but had been largely eclipsed there by the Shafi'is and Hanafis for several centuries before Leo visited the country. The Hanbali school has never been especially strong in Egypt.) But such moments are rare. Leo/Yuhanna/al-Hasan moved back and forth between the Muslim and Christian worlds, between his own personal Muslim and Christian identities, and the story of Leo who was once al-Hasan—and who in fact apparently became al-Hasan once more after almost a decade of living in Italy—could only be told in full by a historian willing and able, as Davis is, to bridge the cultural divide. This is transcultural history at its best. |
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