Constructing the Boundary between Mashriq and Maghrib in Medieval Muslim Sources

The classification of the world’s many facets – its territories, populations, languages and history – is one of the fields where the differences between cultures become most evident. Likewise, within a single cultural milieu, such classifications reveal the changes that occur over time in the way of conceiving oneself and others. It is also a field where the need to separate, to establish differences, and thus identities, is continuously held in check by networks of relationships that prove divides wrong, contradicting labels and classifications. The second volume of the New Cambridge History of Islam, entitled The Western Islamic World: Eleventh to Eighteenth Centuries, is a case in point. At first glance, it follows a rather unusual geopolitical structure, including, apart from the predictable first section on “Al-Andalus and North and West Africa (Eleventh to Fifteenth Centuries)”, a second one on Egypt and Syria (11th c. until the Ottoman conquest), as well as a third one on Muslim Anatolia and the Ottoman Empire. It then returns to “North and West Africa (Sixteenth to Eighteenth Centuries)”, and concludes with a chapter dedicated to the “Ottoman Maghreb”. Thus, the label “Western Islamic World”, considered over a period spanning from the 11th century to the 18th century, applies here to a much wider geographical domain than one might expect. However, as can be inferred from Maribel Fierro’s introduction to the volume, the Mediterranean orientation of the political powers and commercial trends, as well as the encounter/clash with Christian Europe, are the main elements binding together geographical areas that are not always strictly “western”. Meanwhile, the regions viewed as the Islamic East – including Iran and Central Asia – were much more profoundly influenced by the encounter/clash with Indian and Chinese civilizations.1 Yet, as observed by the editors of the volume dedicated to The Eastern Islamic World, “crudely severing the lands