The Mercenary Mediterranean_ Sovereignty, Religion, and Violence in the Medieval Crown of Aragon - Hussein Fancy

etymologies and etiologies 27

it cannot be used unproblematically as a window onto the past. It inevita-

bly reflected a certain perspective on the world, that of the royal court, and

one that in this early period is partial or inchoate at best. We, the solitary

readers, holding these remarkable papers some eight hundred years later,

can only join the story in that epic fashion, in the middle of things.

A Curious Embrace

Arabic sources present new opportunities to break through this impasse

and new challenges. Although we find a great deal written about the Ber-

bers of North Africa, by and large our sources are chronicles rather than

archives. These narratives served and responded to different pressures

than the documents in the chancery registers and also cannot be used as a

window onto the past. The earliest accounts of North Africa, for instance,

were filled with embellishments and legends that coded political and eth-

nic tensions between Arabs and Berbers.^63 From the tenth century on-

ward, however, written materials on the Berbers increased. And of these

sources, the most thorough and complete, the Kitāb al- ‘ibar (The Book

of Lessons) of Ibn Khaldūn, a near contemporary of the jenets, devoted

its longest section to a description of the Zanāta.^64 At different stages of

his life, Ibn Khaldūn served in the major courts of North Africa and al-

Andalus, giving him a unique but complicated vantage point.

A great deal has been written about Ibn Khaldūn, and it is worth re-

iterating some of those arguments.^65 Nineteenth- century European Ara-

bists stressed Ibn Khaldūn’s exceptional status and his rather unorthodox

opinions. They cast him as a premodern materialist and as the father of

secular social science.^66 Aziz al- Azmeh and others have strongly rejected

these approaches. Although Ibn Khaldūn pursued a rational explanation

of historical and religious development, his views were, in fact, traditional

and unexceptional for his period, which is to say that they were fully com-

patible with a widely held understanding of divinity in medieval Islam and

with his position as an Islamic jurist ( faqīh).^67

Nevertheless, his Kitāb al- ‘ibar is somewhat unusual, and self-

con sciously so. What began as a conventional introduction to his theory

of history developed into a universal history, a detailed elaboration of the

cyclical nature of society, in which nomadic and tribal groups settle, lose

their spirit of cohesion (‘aṣabiyya), and are overtaken by hardier ones.^68

This dynamic not only shaped Ibn Khaldūn’s exposition of history but also

explains why he emphasized the centrality and vitality of nomadic warriors