Trickster Travels : A Sixteenth-Century Muslim Between Worlds

by Natalie Zemon Davis

• ISBN13: 9780809094349
• ISBN10: 0809094347
• Format: Trade Book
• Copyright: 2006-03-21
• Publisher: Hill and Wang

Summary

"The man whom historians know as Leo Africanus, author of the first geography of Africa, was born al-Hasan al-Wazzan to a Muslim family that in 1492 moved from Granada to Morocco. In this new book, the historian Natalie Zemon Davis offers a study of the fragmentary, partial, and often contradictory traces that this celebrated figure left behind him, and a superb interpretation of his extraordinary life and work." "As a young man, al-Hasan traveled extensively on behalf of the sultan of Fez, until he was captured in 1518 by Christian pirates in the Mediterranean and imprisoned by Pope Leo X, then released when he converted to Christianity. For the next decade he lived in Italy as the Christian scholar Giovanni Leone; it was then that he wrote his famous Descriptions of Africa. After the sack of Rome in 1527, it is likely that he returned to North Africa. Davis describes each sector of this dramatic life in rich detail, scrutinizing the evidence of al-Hasan's movement between cultural worlds, the Islamic and Arab traditions and ideas available to him, and his adventures with Christians and Jews in a European community of learned men and powerful church leaders." "Drawing on all his manuscripts - including ones previously unknown - Davis explores the places and people al-Hasan encountered and the books that shaped his work. We see him studying law and theology in a Fez madrasa; talking with nomads and merchants; reciting poetry; teaching Arabic to a cardinal in Rome; creating an Arabic-Hebrew-Latin dictionary with a scholarly Jew in Bologna. And we see him emerge as an author, using Arabic genres but writing in Italian and Latin for European readers." "Davis's work suggests that the experiences and writings of this adventurous border-crosser bear witness to the possibilities for connection, exchange, and even intimacy among peoples living in a divided world, and to the many ways that they negotiate cultural barriers and fuse divergent traditions."--BOOK JACKET.

Author Biography

Natalie Zemon Davis is Henry Charles Lea Professor of History Emerita at Princeton University.

Table of Contents

Note on Transliteration and Dates	p. ix
Introduction: Crossings	p. 3
Living in the Land of Islam	p. 15
Living in the Land of War	p. 55
Writing in Italy	p. 88
Between Africa and Europe	p. 109
Conceiving Africa	p. 125
Between Islam and Christianity	p. 153
Curiosity and Connections	p. 191
Translation, Transmission, and Distance	p. 223
The Return	p. 245
Epilogue: Affinities	p. 261
Notes	p. 273
Glossary of Arabic Words	p. 377
Bibliography	p. 383
Acknowledgments	p. 413
Index	p. 417
Table of Contents provided by Ingram. All Rights Reserved.

Excerpts

Excerpted from Trickster Travels by Natalie Zemon Davis Copyright © 2006 by Natalie Zemon Davis. Published in March 2006 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC. All rights reserved.

Introduction: Crossings

In 1514 King Manuel I of Portugal presented Pope Leo X with a white elephant from India. Paraded through the streets of Rome in an elaborate ceremony and named “Annone,” or Hanno, by welcoming Romans, the elephant represented to the pope the king’s intention to bring the realms that extended from North Africa to India into the Christian fold. Hanno survived in his pen for three years, a presence at public events and festivities and a favorite of the pope and the Roman populace. He was written about by poets, mythographers, and satirists, and imaged in drawings, paintings, and woodcuts; in fountain ornament, bas-relief, and majolica platter. Raphael designed his memorial fresco.1

In 1518 a Spanish pirate, fresh from successful raids against Muslim ships in the Mediterranean, presented the same pope with a captured North African traveler and diplomat from Fez named al-Hasan al-Wazzan. He would serve as a useful source of information, it was hoped, and as a symbol in the pope’s desired crusade against the Ottoman Turks and the religion of Islam. Had not the Turks been an increased threat to Christendom since their conquest of Constantinople in 1453? The diplomat’s arrival and imprisonment were noted in diaries and diplomatic correspondence. His baptism at St. Peter’s fifteen months later was a grand ceremony. A librarian recorded his book-borrowing. But compared to Hanno, al-Hasan al-Wazzan’s nine years in Italy went unrecorded by those who saw him, his presence unmemorialized by those whom he served or knew, his likeness not drawn and redrawn, his return to North Africa referred to only later and obliquely. Only a shred of his life remained in the memory of Europeans interested in Arabic letters and travel literature, to be passed on orally and reported years later.

In North Africa there are also baffling silences. During the years when al-Hasan al-Wazzan was serving as agent for the sultan of Fez in towns along Morocco’s Atlantic coast, no mention of him was made by Portuguese military men and administrators in their chatty letters to King Manuel. During years when he had diplomatic duties in Cairo, no mention of him was made by a sharp-eyed observer who wrote in his journal of visitors to the court of the Mamluk rulers of Egypt and the Levant.

Yet al-Hasan al-Wazzan left behind in Italy several manuscripts, one of which, published in 1550, became a bestseller. Over the centuries his book attracted the curiosity of readers and scholars in many parts of the world. The mysteries about him and even his name began already with the first edition. Giovanni Battista Ramusio, the editor, entitled the book La Descrittione dell’Africa (The Description of Africa), called its author by his baptismal name, “Giovan Lioni Africano,” and included a brief biography of him in his dedication. So he was known in the several subsequent editions of the book that were published in Venice as the first volume in Ramusio’s series of Navigations and Voyages. And so he was known in the European translations that soon appeared: “Iean Leon, African [sic]” in French (1556); “Ioannes Leo Africanus” in Latin (1556); and “Iohn Leo, a More” in English (1600). Through the German translation (1805) of “Johann Leo der Africaner,” his book continued to shape European visions of Africa, all the more strongly because it came from someone who had lived and traveled in those parts.2

Meanwhile a scholar at the Escorial library in Spain, himself a Maronite Christian from Syria, came upon an Arabic manuscript on another topic by al-Wazzan. It bore both his Muslim and his Christian names, which the librarian included in his published catalogue (1760-70). A century later, when the Description was enshrined in the Recueil de voyages (Collection of Voyages) by the important French Orientalist Charles Schefer, an Arabic name appeared in the introduction; and in the classic Hakluyt Society series of travel literature in England, the title page proclaimed: “by Al-Hassan Ibn-Mohammed Al-Wezaz Al-Fasi, a Moor, baptized as Giovanni Leone, but better known as Leo Africanus.”3

Still its author remained a shadowy figure. Then in the early decades of the twentieth century, a few scholars approached the book and the man in new ways. In the context of the new French “colonial sciences” concerning the geography, history, and ethnography of Africa, the young Louis Massignon did his Sorbonne thesis on Morocco in the early sixteenth century as it had been described by “Léon l’Africain.” From a close reading of the text (a technique that would flower in his later great publications on Sufi mysticism and poetry), Massignon extracted what he could not only about the geography of Morocco but also about al-Wazzan’s life and travels, especially about his sources and methods of observing and classifying. The frame of al-Wazzan’s book was “very Europeanized,” Massignon opined, but “its core was very Arabic.” Massignon’s study was published in 1906, an important moment in France’s steps toward establishing its protectorate of Morocco.4

The historical geographer Angela Codazzi knew Massignon’s book well and took seriously his hope that an original manuscript of al-Wazzan’s book would one day be found. Close to the collections in Italy’s libraries, in 1933 she could announce that she had located an Italian manuscript of The Description of Africa, and it did indeed differ from the later printed edition of Ramusio. At the same time, Giorgio Levi della Vida, a remarkable scholar of Semitic languages and literatures, was making discoveries as well. Excluded from university teaching in 1931 as an antifascist, he was invited to catalogue the Arabic manuscripts at the Vatican Library. He left for the United States in 1939—an act of safety for a Jew—but not before putting the finishing touches on a book about the creation of the Oriental collections at the Vatican. Among its many riches, it had much to say about the reading, writing, and signing practices of al-Hasan al-Wazzan. Back in Italy after the war, Levi della Vida helped Codazzi interpret two manuscripts on other subjects that she had found by “Giovanni Leone Africano.”5

The last important colonial presentation of Jean-Léon l’Africain was a new French translation and commentary prepared by Alexis Épaulard. During years in Morocco as a physician and military officer with the French protectorate, Épaulard had become impressed with “the exceptional value,” both historical and geographical, of The Description of Africa. His book built upon the work of Massignon and Codazzi, without following their spirit. Épaulard used the Italian manuscript in Rome in 1939—and applauded Codazzi’s plan to publish it one day (alas, unfulfilled)—but his Description is an amalgam of translations from Ramusio, occasional translations from the manuscript, and a modernized version of the sixteenth-century French translation. He ignored the possibility that the differences between the texts could reveal larger differences in viewpoint and cultural sensibility.

Like Massignon’s book, the Épaulard edition confronted assertions made in the Description with evidence from outside its pages—from the distance between places to the unrolling of historical events—and corrected al-Wazzan when necessary. Geographical names were clarified, and Arab authors he cited were identified. To achieve this, Épaulard assembled a team of French scholars in sub-Saharan studies, two of them then based in Dakar at the Institut Français d’Afrique Noire, and consulted specialists in North African folklore and historiography. The notes are useful, but they did not address the question raised by Massignon about where the text or its author was positioned in regard to the world he was writing about and the world he was writing for. Differences were smoothed over again: Épaulard liked to think that “Jean Léon” had never left his Christian life in Italy.

Épaulard did not live to see the fulfillment of his project. The team finished it up, and the Description was published in Paris by the Institut des Hautes Études Marocaines in 1956, three years after Morocco became an independent state.6

The Épaulard team had particularly envisaged their readers as historians of Africa, and soon scholars of sub-Saharan Africa began to have their say about al-Wazzan’s reliability as a witness. In the late decades of the century, specialists from Europe, Africa, and America compared his pages on Black Africa with other evidence and later accounts: some claimed he gave convincing, precious detail on little-known societies and kingdoms, others that he was reporting tall stories picked up in Timbuktu and had never traveled beyond its borders. Here a ruler verified, there a conquest found false, here a trading practice confirmed, there a fire mentioned by no one else but al-Wazzan. All these approaches—in worthy pursuit of “scrupulous care in handling” a primary source—broke the Description into fragments, rather than considering it as a whole or its author’s literary practices.7

While the Africanists were arguing, a new generation arose of post-colonial readers of al-Hasan al-Wazzan. Most important was Oumel-banine Zhiri, whose own travels took her from her native Morocco to France to the United States. Her 1991 book, L’Afrique au miroir de l’Europe: Fortunes de Jean Léon l’Africain à la Renaissance, showed what impact the printed editions of Jean Léon’s book had had on the European view of Africa’s peoples, landscapes, and past. Her scope was wide—literary books, history books, and geographies—as she detailed what European writers had taken from, reshaped, and sometimes ignored in the Description. She inserted the non-European world into the consciousness of the Renaissance in a new way. In contrast with earlier studies of European attitudes toward the Turks, where all the imaging came from the European side, Zhiri’s Mirror set up an interchange, with the North African Jean Léon making a difference. Zhiri has gone on to carry the story forward over the centuries and is now turning to issues in the manuscript itself.8

The second major study of Leo Africanus comes from a different part of the world and takes the story in different directions. Following his years as a German career officer and diplomat in Morocco and Tunisia, Dietrich Rauchenberger plunged deeply into research on the intriguing al-Hasan al-Wazzan. Among other stops, his quest led him to the Africa manuscript in Rome, the basis of his big Johannes Leo der Afrikaner (1999). Rauchenberger recounted the life, writings, and Italian milieu of Johannes Leo and uncovered the little-known resonance of his work among German scholars. The force of Rauchenberger’s study is its remarkable treatment of al-Wazzan’s controversial pages on sub-Saharan Africa. He used the manuscript and its divergences from the printed editions to assess al-Wazzan’s reliability as an observer and traveler and placed this assessment in a richly drawn picture of the sub-Saharan region and its peoples. He concluded by quoting approvingly one of the African specialists on Épaulard’s team: “ ‘We are lucky that the work of Leo Africanus was directed to a European public in Europe. Had he written for an Arab public, many valuable details would doubt-less have been left out because they would have been assumed known.’ ”9

Scholars in Arabic studies and Arab scholars based in Morocco have, in fact, increasingly turned to al-Hasan al-Wazzan and his Africa book. In 1995 Serafín Fanjul, a specialist in Arabic literature, translated anew a Ramusio edition of the Description into Spanish. In part he wanted to close the gap between Arabists and Europeanists; in part he wanted to claim “Juan León,” who was born in Granada, and his book for the mixed “cultural patrimony” of Spain.10

Fanjul had his doubts about the sincerity of Juan León’s conversion to Christianity, an act that was troubling from the beginning for scholars in Morocco. In a pioneering study of 1935, Muhammad al-Mahdi al-Hajwi described al-Hasan al-Wazzan as a captive, who had been constrained in his conversion, had always remained attached to his people and his religion, and had himself influenced the pope. Forty-five years later, in 1980, the first Arabic translation of al-Wazzan’s Africa book was published in Rabat. Its translator, Muhammad Hajji, had defended his thesis at the Sorbonne on the intellectual life of Morocco in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries not long before and was now professor of history at the University of Rabat. Introducing his translation from Épaulard’s French, Hajji reclaimed al-Wazzan by insisting that he had feigned conversion to Christianity and that certain features of the Description, such as his use of the word “we,” showed his continuing devotion to Islam.11

Such questions were recast at a Paris conference on “Léon l’Africain” in 2003, which brought together scholars from the Maghreb, Europe, and North America interested in this enigmatic figure. The task of reclaiming him for Morocco had become less sensitive by then. In part, the way had been cleared not by a scholarly text but by a widely read and lively novel, Léon l’Africain (1986), written by Amin Maalouf. Born in Lebanon into a family of mixed religious loyalties and much geographical outreach, Maalouf worked as a journalist for the Arab press and then, as the civil wars tore apart his native land, moved to France. There he completed his studies in economics and sociology, wrote for and edited Jeune Afrique, a periodical of African independence movements and newly formed states, and in 1983 brought out a book of readings—in French and Arabic editions—on the Crusades as viewed by the Arabs.

Three years later Maalouf found his voice as a historical novelist, writing in French about the Arab and Islamic past, and he created in Leo Africanus/al-Hasan a figure who perfectly represented his own way of rising above constrictive and exclusive identities of language, religion, and nation. “I come from no country, no city, no tribe,” his hero says at the opening of the novel. “I am the son of the highway, my country is a caravan…all languages, all prayers belong to me.” Of himself, Maalouf has said, “I claim all the cultural dimensions of my country of origin and those of my adopted country”; and again, “I come from a tribe which has been nomadic forever in a desert of worldwide dimensions. Our countries are oases that we leave when the water dries up…We rely only on each other, across the generations, across the seas, across the Babel of languages.” Routes, not roots: in Léon l’Africain, Maalouf saw a figure from his Mediterranean past who combined its “multiple cultures.”12

Historians might find Maalouf’s portrait of al-Wazzan somewhat free-floating in its facile accretion of tastes, stances, and sensibilities, but it opened the door to new questions. At the 2003 colloquium, colleagues from the Maghreb had varied views on al-Wazzan’s cultural placement, but all thought it an issue to confront. The philosopher Ali Benmakhlouf gave a strictly European context to al-Wazzan’s art of describing; the historical anthropologist Houari Touati saw his treatment of African animals as connected with earlier Arabic constructions; for Ahmed Boucharb, al-Wazzan’s treatment of the battles between the Portuguese and the Moroccans was an extension of certain forms of Arabic historical writing, but his impartiality showed that he had dropped all feeling for the world of his origins; meanwhile Abdelmajid Kaddouri interpreted al-Wazzan’s Description in terms of both Arabic and European genres.13

introduction • crossings

1. Silvio A. Bedini, The Pope’s Elephant (London: Carcanet, 1997), especially chaps. 2, 4, 6-7.
2. Johann Leo’s des Africaners Beschreibung von Africa, trans. Georg Wilhelm Lorsbach (Herborn, 805), discussed in Rauch, 165-71.
3. Miguel Casiri, Bibliotheca Arabico-Hispana Escurialensis, 2 vols. (Madrid: Antonius Perez de Soto, 1760-70), 1:172-74; Description de l’Afrique tierce partie du monde escrite par Jean Léon African, ed. Charles Schefer, 3 vols. (Paris: Ernest Leroux, 1896-98). Schefer (1820-98) founded the École des langues orientales, edited a number of texts about Persia and travel to Muslim lands, and built up a great collection of Arabic manuscripts, subsequently purchased by the Bibliothèque Nationale. The History and Description of Africa…written by Al-Hassan Ibn-Mohammed Al-Wezaz Al-Fasi, a Moor, baptized as Giovanni Leone, but better known as Leo Africanus, ed. Robert Brown, 3 vols. (London: Hakluyt Society, 1896). The Lorsbach German translation also referred to an Arabic name in its introduction (Rauch, 31 n.118).
4. Louis Massignon, Le Maroc dans les premières années du 16e siècle, Tableau géographique d’après Léon l’Africain (Algiers: Typographie Adolphe Jourdan, 1906), 43-45. Massignon thanked both his thesis director, the colonial geographer Augustin Bernard, and the folklorist René Basset, a specialist on the folktales of the Berbers and North Africa (ix-x). Daniel Nordman has presented an excellent paper on Massignon’s book at the Colloque “Léon l’Africain,” held at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Paris, 22-24 May 2003: “Le Maroc dans les premières années du XVIe siècle. Tableau géographique d’après Louis Massignon,” to be published in François Pouillon and Oumelbanine Zhiri, eds., Léon l’Africain, forthcoming at the Institut d’Étude de l’Islam et des Sociétés du Monde Musulman (EHESS), Paris. On the French “colonial sciences,” see Li-Chuan Tai, “L’ethnologie française entre colonialisme et décolonisation (1920-1960),” doctoral thesis, EHESS, 2001.
5. Angela Codazzi, “Leone Africano,” Enciclopedia italiana (Rome, 1933), 20:899. Angela Codazzi, “Dell’unico manoscritto conosciuto della Cosmografia dell’Africa di Giovanni Leone l’Africano,” Comptes rendus du Congrès international de géographie. Lisbonne 1949 (Lisbon, 1952), 4:225-26. Angela Codazzi, “Il Trattato dell’Arte Metrica di Giovanni Leone Africano,” in Studi orientalistici in onore di Giorgio Levi Della Vida, 2 vols. (Rome: Istituto per l’Oriente, 1956), 1:180-98 (henceforth AMC). Giorgio Levi Della Vida, Ricerche sulla formazione del più antico fondo dei manoscritti orientali della Biblioteca Vaticana (Vatican City: Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, 1939), viii (dedication dated Rome, August 1939), 99-110.
6. Jean-Léon l’Africain, Description de l’Afrique, trans. Alexis Épaulard, annotated by Alexis Épaulard, Théodore Monod, Henri Lhote, and Raymond Mauny, Publications de l’Institut des Hautes Études Marocaines, no. 61 (Paris: Librairie d’Amérique et d’Orient, 1956), v-xvi (This edition was reprinted in 1980-81 and will henceforth be referred to as Ép.). Use of manuscript V.E. 953 at the Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale, Rome, by Alexis Épaulard, 6-20 June 1939, recorded on the list inserted into manuscript. Épaulard (1878-1949) trained as a physician at the University of Lyon, with a thesis on Vampirisme, nécrophilie, nécrosadisme, nécrophagie (Lyon, 1901). Monod, a professor at the Museum of Natural History in Paris, was one of the two founders of the Institut Français d’Afrique Noire in 1938. By the time the Description was published, Monod had become one of the supporters of the new review founded by African intellectuals, Présence africaine, published in Dakar and Paris (Tai, “Ethnologie,” 195, 253-55).
7. For instance, Pierre Kalck, “Pour une localisation du royaume de Gaoga,” Journal of African History 13 (1972): 520-40; R. S. O’Fahey and J. L. Spaulding, “Comment: The Geographic Location of Gaoga,” and Pierre Kalck, “Response,” Journal of African History 14 (1973): 505-8. Humphrey J. Fisher, “Leo Africanus and the Songhay Conquest of Hausaland,” International Journal of African Historical Studies 11 (1978):86-112. Djibo Mallal Hamani, Au carrefour du Soudan et de la Berberie: Le sultanat touareg de l’Ayar (Niamey: Institut de Recherches en Sciences Humaines, 1989), 177-78, 181, 184. John O. Hunwick, Timbuktu and the Songhay Empire: Al-Sa'di’s Ta’rikh al-Sudan down to 1613 and other Contemporary Documents (Leiden: Brill, 1999), 113, 285 n.74. Pekka Masonen, The Negroland Revisited: Discovery and Invention of the Sudanese Middle Ages (Helsinki: Finnish Academy of Science and Letters, 2000), chap. 4 (Masonen doubts that al-Wazzan saw anything of sub-Saharan Africa beyond a first visit to Timbuktu, 188-89). Hunwick concludes that al-Wazzan visited at least some of the sub-Saharan areas he described; his use of al-Wazzan’s text is judicious and persuasive and is informed by his extraordinary mastery of the sources for the history of sub-Saharan Africa. Kalck is unusual in explaining seeming error or omission in the Description by something other than weak memory or passing on rumor: he asks, given the situation of “Léon l’Africain” at the time he was writing, what he would have wanted to say and what withhold. Kalck, “Pour une localisation,” 546-47.
8. Oumelbanine Zhiri, L’Afrique au miroir de l’Europe: Fortunes de Jean Léon l’Africain à la Renaissance (Geneva: Librairie Droz, 1991); Les sillages de Jean Léon l’Africain: XVIe au XXe siècle (Casablanca: Wallada, 1995); “‘Il compositore’ ou l’autobiographie éclatée de Jean Léon l’Africain,” in Ali Benmakhlouf, ed., Le voyage des théories (Casablanca: Éditions Le Fennec, 2000), 63-80. In the wake of Zhiri’s Afrique, a younger generation of literary scholars have been using al-Wazzan’s text to rethink how issues of race, non-European sexuality, and colonization have acted on the European imagination. See especially Kim F. Hall, Things of Darkness: Economies of Race and Gender in Early Modern England (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1995), 28-40, and Bernadette Andrea, “The Ghost of Leo Africanus from the English to the Irish Renaissance,” in Patricia Clare Ingham and Michelle R. Warren, eds., Postcolonial Moves: Medieval Through Modern (New York: Palgrave Macmillan 2003), 195-215. See also the informative Web site of Cristel de Rouvray, www.leoafricanus.com.
9. Rauch, 237 (quoting Raymond Mauny). Rauchenberger also transcribes the pages of al-Wazzan’s manuscript on sub-Saharan Africa.
10. Juan León Africano, Descripción general del África, ed. and trans. Serafin Fanjul with the assistance of Nadia Consolani (Barcelona and Madrid: Lunwerg Editores, 1995), introduction, 11, 47. Like Massignon in the early years of the century, Fanjul characterized the work as “Arabic in its subject if Italian in its form and immediate inspiration” (43). An earlier Spanish translation of the Ramusio edition appeared in 1940, published by the Instituto General Franco de Estudios e Investigación Hispano-Arabe.
11. Muhammad al-Mahdi al-Hajwi, Hayat al-Wazzan al-Fasi wa-atharuh (Rabat, 1935). Al-Hasan al-Wazzan, Wasf Ifriqiya, trans. Muhammad Hajji (Rabat, 1980); Hajji, L’activité intellectuelle au Maroc à l’époque Sa'dide, 2 vols. (Rabat: Dar El-Maghrib, 1976-77). Important papers were given on al-Hajwi’s study and on Hajji’s translation at the Colloque “Léon l’Africain” (EHESS, Paris, 22-24 May 2003): on the former by Alain Roussillon, “Une lecture réformiste de Leo Africanus: Patrimonialisation d’un renégat,” on the latter by Driss Mansouri, both to be published in Pouillon and Zhiri, eds., Léon l’Africain.
12. Amin Maalouf, Léon l’Africain (Paris: J.-C. Lattès, 1986), 7, 9. Amin Maalouf, Les croisades vues par les Arabes (Paris: J.-C. Lattès, 1983). “Amin Maalouf,” in Marcos Ancelovici and Francis Dupuis-Déri, L’archipel identitaire. Recueil d’entretiens sur l’identité culturelle (Montréal: Boréal, 1997), 169-72. Amin Maalouf, Origines (Paris: Bernard Grasser, 2004), 9-10. Amin Maalouf, interview by author, Paris, 17 October 1997.
13. Ali Benmakhlouf, “Cosmologie et cosmographie au XVIe siècle: Le statut épistémique de la description”; Houari Touati, “La girafe de Léon l’Africain”; Ahmed Boucharb, “La conqu$$$te ibérique du littoral marocain d’après la Description de l’Afrique: Vision d’une entreprise guerrière en terre d’Islam”; Abdelmajid Kaddouri, “Al-Wazzan de part et d’autre de la Méditerranée: Lire Léon dans une perspective de regards croisés,” all papers presented at the Colloque “Léon l’Africain” (EHESS, Paris, 22-24 May 2003), to be published in Pouillon and Zhiri, eds., Léon l’Africain. Two other Moroccan scholars have also written about al-Wazzan in a book that has come into my hands as my own goes to press: Hamid Triki and Amina Aouchar, who contribute introductory essays to a handsomely illustrated edition of Épaulard’s translation of al-Wazzan’s pages on Fez (Fez dans la Cosmographie d’Al-Hassan ben Mohammed al-Wazzan az-Zayyat, dit Léon l’Africain [Mohammedia, Morocco: Senso Unico Editions, 2004]).

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Excerpted from Trickster Travels: A Sixteenth-Century Muslim Between Worlds by Natalie Zemon Davis
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