Near West

Allen Fromherz is Professor of History at Georgia State University and director of the Middle East Studies Center. He graduated Summa Cum Laude from Dartmouth College in 2002 and received his PhD from St. Andrews University in Scotland in Medieval Islamic History in 2006. Dr. Fromherz has held several international fellowships including Fulbright, Gerda Henkel Stiftung, the Sultan Qaboos Cultural Center. He was a senior fellow in the humanities at NYU Abu Dhabi (2016). He has lived in various parts of the Gulf, including Oman, United Arab Emirates and Qatar. He is President of the American Institute for Maghrib Studies (AIMS). His publications include: Ibn Khaldun (Edinburgh University Press, 2010); The Almohads (IB Tauris, 2012); Qatar (Georgetown Univeristy Press, 2016) and The Near West (Edinburgh University Press, 2016).

A fast-paced and innovative look at the medieval western Mediterranean which will leave the reader intrigued, fascinated, and eager to know more about the unexpectedly cosmopolitan character of the ‘middle sea’, the oft-forgotten role of the Berbers in that cosmopolitanism, and the surprising contributions of southern, Muslim knowledge to the efflorescence of northern Christian shores.'

• MapPersonal Note and AcknowledgementsPreface: North Africa and the Mediterranean ParadoxChapter 1. Bèjaïa: Introducing North Africa, Latin Europe and the MediterraneanChapter 2. Rome: North Africa and the PapacyChapter 3. Tunis: Axis of the Middle SeaChapter 4. Marrakech: The Founding of a CityChapter 5. The Almohads: Empire of the Western MediterraneanChapter 6. Ibn Khaldun and the Fourteenth CenturyChapter 7. Conclusions: Proposing a Second Axial AgeNotesBibliographyIndex