Wiley-Blackwell Encyclopedia of Literature

Extract

The Maghreb is the name that Arab writers and geographers gave to the region north of the Sahara which, for Europeans, corresponded to Barbary or Africa Minor, and for Ibn Khaldoun, to the Berber zones before the seventh-century Arab conquest. Nowadays, the term is much more specific but not fully unequivocal. As opposed to the Mashreq (i.e., the place of the rising sun), which covers all Arab lands east of Egypt, the Maghreb (i.e., the place of the setting sun) refers to the westernmost fringes of the Arab world in northwestern Africa. At the height of Arab Muslim rule in the medieval Mediterranean, the Maghreb used to denote not only northern Africa but also Sicily and Spain. Given that the word Maghreb in Arabic comes from the root gharb (“west”), it has at times been used sweepingly in reference to different regions west of the Arab peninsula. Hence, the association between the Maghreb and the West in the Mashreqi imagination has enjoyed an enduring resonance throughout Arab history and did not fully diminish after either the collapse of Arab rule in Europe nor of European rule in the Maghreb. Because it is the Arabic word for Morocco, Arabic writers have reserved the expression al-Maghreb al-Aqsa for Morocco and al-Maghreb al-Kabir for the Greater Maghreb. Whether in English or French, the word Maghreb is synonymous with what is called in Arabic the Greater Maghreb. As ... log in or subscribe to read full text