Six years have elapsed since Denis Crouzet and I concluded these conversations. The political landscape has changed in both our lands. We have both published works whose themes are anticipated in our exchange: Denis his brilliant study of Christopher Columbus, whom he portrayed as “a herald of the apocalypse”; I, my Trickster Travels, where I placed al-Hasan al-Wazz
n between the worlds of Islam and Christianity. I turned eighty a year ago and chat with students about their doctoral dissertations on my parlor couch; Denis in his mid-fifties is busy training a new generation of young historians at the Sorbonne. Despite the decades that separate us, I feel a kinship in our ethical and scholarly goals, a complicity deepened by our discussions.
A year ago, too, Barack Obama was elected the president of the United States, an event totally unpredictable during the time of our conversations and, indeed, still chancy until the votes were finally counted and we knew that the election had not been stolen again and that Obama had won. So was ushered in one of those “moments of hope” in history, about which I spoke with Denis, here a very great moment, felt around the world. Now a year later, we are enmeshed in the old order of things—Iraq, Afghanistan, Israel/Palestine, the recession dropped on us by the bankers, the American health-care crisis, climate change, and more. Much of this was inherited by Obama and is part of the tough structure of institutions of power, infused as they are by greed and aggression. But the president’s own decisions must bear part of the blame: some could be expected from his campaign speeches (though he had opposed the invasion of Iraq, he always said he wanted to intensify the war in Afghanistan); others come as more of a surprise (concessions he has made in perpetuating the unconstitutional treatment of Guantánamo Bay prisoners).
Yet the moment of hope is not an illusion: it stems from events and observations that can shape the possibilities and difficulties ahead. Barack Obama’s life and family—his graduate-student anthropologist, socially engaged white mother, his Kenyan father, his Indonesian stepfather, his African-American lawyer wife (she was an undergraduate at Princeton!)—still confirm for us the multiple sites and sources of world leadership in the early twenty-first century. From the pages of Dreams from My Father still emerges the community organizer deeply committed to the black residents of Chicago’s South Side: we can urge upon the president the strong needs of the poor and unemployed so that their voices, which he once headed, will not be drowned out by the Wall Street advisors he has selected. In fact, it seemed to me that I was hearing that young activist on the radio today as the president defended the current health-care bill, with its public option, and warned us not to believe what the insurance companies were saying against it.
Obama’s great speeches still offer a vision of what we might strive for: his truth-telling speech in March 2008 on the wounds of slavery and racism in America and the need for alliance between white and black; his Cairo speech in June 2009, where he recast the relation between America and the world of Islam, noting the overlap between the two worlds, since there were many Muslims living in the United States, and calling for common endeavor toward shared goals.
And finally, there is the enduring fact that American voters chose an African-American to be president of the United States, an event many of us never thought we would see in our lifetime. That event reminds us that even in the face of situations fraught with violence and passionate and irreconcilable claims, we must keep our ears pricked for those still saying “Yes, we can,” and trying to nudge the situation toward the better.
In my own life, too, there was a deeper relation with the world of Islam in these past six years, as I completed my study of al-Hasan al-Wazzn (Leo Africanus) and published it as Trickster Travels: A Sixteenth-Century Muslim Between Worlds. I had been struggling with the ending of the book during my conversations with Denis on two counts. One was the question of al-Wazzn’s apparent failure to continue as an author after his return from Europe to North Africa and to Islam. In the end, I offered a cluster of possibilities: an enduring uprootedness drawn from the practices he developed to live between worlds during his Italian years; his failure to find patrons and listeners for a detailed travel account that would have conversion to Christianity as a necessary story line—and told by an apostate who had for a time been in the service of pope and cardinal. Right after Trickster Travels came off the press, I learned while lecturing in Istanbul that there were a few captivity narratives written by Turkish Muslims in the late sixteenth and seventeenth century, but they never admitted to conversion to Christianity (I was able to add this reference to later editions and translations of my book!).
I compensated for al-Wazzn’s silence in North Africa by stressing the balanced tone of the book he wrote in Europe, as he talked of Islam and wars between Muslims and Christians. He ridiculed some forms of popular piety as inefficacious and condemned harshly the Shia “heresy” in Persia, but his description of his Sunni religion was informative and often appreciative, yet not partisan—an unusual achievement for a writer on either side of the Mediterranean in those years. I left it to a seventeenth-century Spanish inquisitor to make the point for me in the last sentences of the main body of my book: on the title page of a copy of al-Wazzn’s Description of Africa in the National Library in Madrid, the outraged cleric had written “Prohibited in full.”
Denis and I had also discussed how I would shape the relation between François Rabelais and al-Wazzn, important to me as a final bridge-building across the Mediterranean. I decided to follow my outraged inquisitor with an epilogue on the two men. I showed how Rabelais, during his own visits to Italy, could easily have heard of the African “Giovanni Leone” and his manuscripts, and suggested possible faint echoes of the Africa book in Rabelais’s great novel. But much more important were the parallels between the two men, parallels that Denis and I had talked about: the truth-telling role they gave to trickster figures; their distaste for world-conquerors of all religions; and their quest for grounds for common agreement. I had also wondered with Denis whether I might ever again resort to an imaginary dialogue with my subjects, as I did in the prologue to Women on the Margins. I didn’t quite do that in the last pages of Trickster Travels, but I did imagine what might have happened if Rabelais and al-Wazzn had been able to meet—and while I was at it, I added al-Wazzn’s Jewish collaborator, Jacob Mantino, to the party. Who knows whether I hit it right? But I wanted to end the book with a moment of peace and laughter.
Several times in my exchanges with Denis, I found myself saying that I wrote about historical figures or subjects that in some sense “needed” me, or to whom I felt a special responsibility. I felt this way about al-Hasan al-Wazzn and his books. This is not because Leo Africanus is ignored by other scholars; he is not—some splendid writing on him has been done and continues to be done. But as a scholar of Jewish background and an early modernist from the West, I wanted to take the time I needed to enter into the world of Islam in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, to discover the Muslim and Arab-speaking al-Wazzn behind the European construct of Leo Africanus, and to see Europe through his eyes. I hope to find—and indeed have found—common ground through the rules of my historian’s craft with scholars from the Muslim world. Among my choicest experiences was meeting last year in Casablanca with young women and men in a graduate class in French literature (by then, my book had appeared in French) and being peppered with questions and comments about what it could mean to be “between worlds.”
But now, as I turn eighty-one, there is less urgency to my calling. I look around me and see generations of scholars doing every kind of history I ever hoped for, reformulating older questions and asking new ones. I know that some among them carry in their breasts this sense of being needed by or of obligation to their subjects. As for me, I am deep in my current project on slavery, sociability, and crossings in colonial Suriname, following certain slave families and owners’ families across the generations, and even running back to the archives and libraries in the Netherlands as though I were a youngster. And yet Seerie and Joanna, Sarah, Simcha, and Reuben don’t “need” me the way Glikl did, for such wonderful studies of slavery are being done in every corner. Rather I can sit back and enjoy being a simple storyteller.
Toronto
November 2009