Speaker 1 0:00
Hi, welcome back, everybody. My name is Erica, and I'm the Deputy Director of the African Studies Center, and it's my pleasure to welcome you to our keynote with Dr Alan from Hertz, who is a professor of history the department in the Department of History at the Georgia State University, and he's also the director of the Middle East Study Center. So Dr Alan from Hertz, the research focuses on the history of the Mediterranean and the Gulf. His first two books, the Almohads, the rise of an Islamic empire and Ibn Khaldun Life and Times, examine the rapid change in lineage based societies, especially the rise of the Almohads mid 12th century, originating in the Atlas Mountains, the Almohads controlled much of the western Mediterranean. And his work on the life and writings of Ibn Khaldun, a great historical thinker inspired Dr from Hertz recent interest in the countries of the Gulf, examining questions of change, modernization, identity and culture, his latest book, Qatar a modern history, looks beneath the surface of oil and gas bulk and examines the importance of memory, lineage and loyalty in Qatari and Gulf society from the 19th century to the present. I could go on talking about the many kinds of works that Dr Romans has published, as books, as chapters, as articles, and the various research interests that he has, but for the sake of time, I will go ahead and give the floor now to Dr Allen from her thank you for joining us before today's keynote.
Speaker 2 1:21
Thank you so much, Erica for that very generous introduction. I hope I can live up to the standard of your introduction. Thank you so much. And thank you to Amparo and to Danny for all the preparation work and everything that we've done in advance. And it was such a pleasure to join you a little early and get an idea of the work that you're doing to develop this important curriculum. I think it's vital work in to introduce these important concepts as soon as possible, so that when the students come to us as professors, they'll be ready for questions that we want to engage them with. So the main question of this lecture is, how did encounters in the North African city of Marrakesh spur innovations in the early modern world really influenced the birth of the early modern world as well? I think one of the main points here is that Africa, and particularly North Africa, is often left out of these conversations. And it shouldn't be that North Africa is a vital point of convergence that is happening, beginning in the 11th century with the founding Americas. This huge. This really a surge of people of economic influence that is coming into the Mediterranean, into the Atlantic, and changing the course of world history. So Marrakesh, as you can see here, was a new city in the 11th century. There was no ancient precedent before Marrakesh. It's not like many other cities in North Africa, in the Mediterranean, where you already had a Roman or Greek settlement, but it became the capital of a great empire, an empire founded by people far away from any experience of Empire or urban settlement, a people from the Saharan desert, which is really an extraordinary story, how these people became a part of the stage as center, at the center of the stage of world history. So Marrakesh, I would argue, is this geographic place of interaction and transition. We need to understand that although many of us have an understanding of Morocco today as part of the Near East or the Middle East, it is very much 100% a part of Africa as well, that when we teach North African history, we're teaching African history, and I think that's an important thing to emphasize, even though it is, of course, connected to the Mediterranean and the Middle East from this side of encounter. What are those connections? Well, they include trade, gold and salt also slavery, which happened both directions, both white slavery and Black slavery occurred. But the most important trade of all was across the Saharan Desert of salt and gold. Salt traded for gold that came from the Niger River, and that gold spurred what is called the commercial revolution, the great growth in capital, the great growth in economic development that occurred throughout the Mediterranean and Europe in the 12th century, that set the foundations with the Renaissance and the early modern world, that would not have been possible without this important conduit of trade, without this opening of both gold and even more importantly, the large number of people who come onto the scene of history with the establishment of Marrakesh, with the establishment of the Almoravid empire. So faith is another important. Connecting point. You can see that with the green arrow here, as the Saharan peoples and the people of the mountains, who were somewhat isolated from the core Islamic lands, convert to Islam and convert to more standard forms of Islam, regulated by standardized clerical understandings of Islam, they begin to go on major pilgrimages. This is before Mansa Musa, right? But it's happening even well before Mansa Musa. You have these Emirs, these important people going with their new wealth, their newfound wealth from this trade and going all the way connecting Africa to Mecca, you also have migration of peoples from Arabia and to and from Iberia into Africa. Right as Islam expands, it also provides opportunities for those seeking new lands and new and new ways of life from all around the world. War is another factor that should not be ignored, as a place, as a conduit, as a catalyst of encounter. I think sometimes we put war into this category of, oh, intolerance and devastation, and so therefore we need to ignore it. No, you have to talk about war to you have to talk about conflict because conflict is actually where we can see encounters happening as well, and then a place of ideas coming together and coming into contact with one another. It might be surprising to know this, but Marrakesh was a place where Franciscan monks and Muslim Sufi Sufis being the mystical, ascetic sort of version of Islam following a particular a particular master or Sheik, who were really developing their system of Islam and of Sufi, Islamic thought in Marrakesh. So one thing we need to emphasize, I think, is the fact that Marrakesh was this siege or capital of specifically Amazigh of Berber empires, who were the Berbers? And why are they important? They have been left out of most world history curriculum, like a lot of indigenous people throughout the world, these are indigenous, rural North Africans who are still living in North Africa today. Non Greek, non Roman, non Arab. They are there before the coming of Islam in the seventh century and in the eighth century. Their name itself is considered problematic by some burgers because it comes from the word bar, bar, which is attributed to a Arab king who said, Oh, I don't understand them. They're just going bar, bar, I don't understand their language. It's it's become recently, burgers have embraced the name, right, even though it is a problematic name as a way of reacting to it. But also, some say that we should call ourselves Amazon, which is the Berber word for free people, the free people of the Maghreb of North Africa. Of course, like many indigenous groups, there are many different types of Amazon, many different types and many different languages within North Africa. In fact, even like ancient sources such as plenty, he said there are 517 that he could count way back in the first century AD. So all of these groups, though, are very distinct from Arabic, and it is a very distinct language group. You can see here, there this ancient script, the tip and not which, it can still be found throughout the Saharan desert, remarkably well preserved, of course, because the dry conditions of these ancient Berber peoples right? And this script has become embraced now today, as forever script, and is being taught in Moroccan primary schools, right? So it's a whole alphabet that's that's being used to kind of turn what is typically an oral language into a written one. So this is something to sort of teach to that's important to teach here is that although these are this is an Islamic history, it is a history of a people coming onto the stage of both Islamic and world history. Okay, and.
Speaker 2 10:00
People in the sense of their their history being now recorded. And who are these people who founded Marrakesh? And do we have some connections to them, even to today? Yes, we do. We have the Tuareg who consider themselves descendants of the almoravis who founded Marrakesh. What's fascinating about the Tuareg is that they are the inversion of many of our assumptions about Arab and Islamic culture. Right? Among the Tuareg, especially when it comes to gender roles. Among the Tuareg, men are veiled women unveiled, right? Women provide the matrilineal basis for inheritance. It is through the son of your sister that your money and your wealth is transferred at death, right? So, matrilineal system. You see here, there's a wedding. Women are unveiled, wedding, the men are veiled. What's interesting is that the lamtuna, who were the ancestors the Tuareg who founded the Amur of empire, they found a place for themselves within Islam and within Arabic tradition by saying, Well, we were originally Arabs. Before the Arabs, we dressed ourselves up in veils in order to escape an oppressor, to escape a tyrant, and then we went all the way across Africa and and went into the sarin desert. So there's this interesting conversation occurring between these different traditions, and I think it's a really interesting encounter that's going on there, the other group that we need to talk about, because, of course, there's diversity within the Berber community. Are the Berbers of the mountains, right? These are the mass murders, right? Example is this woman here, an Amazon, woman of the Atlas Mountains. Importantly, though, these empires come out of a very important initial encounter, which is with Islam itself. Being converted to Islam in the 10th century and having the message of Islam spread throughout the Saharan desert, which wasn't at all empty at the time. It was full of very burdened and lush oases. It was a different climate than what we have today that could support people. And of course, the trade that was going on at the time was quite important that this preaching and this conversion kind of created it's like adding cornstarch to your to your recipe. It gelatinized everything. It created a unified group of people where there wasn't that unity before. Okay, so the 11th century Saharan desert Burberry's, these Alma ravas emerge out of the desert saying, oh, even though we recently converted to this new faith, we are the standard bearers of the true faith, right? So they go into lands that had already been converted to Islam, but they're saying, Oh, we're enforcing the true standards now, and we're enforcing a new unity. And with this message, and with this power, they were able to conquer lands all the way across from Iberia, so the lands of Al Andalus, or Muslim Spain, all the way down to Ghana today, right? And they created this great quarter that was that was all under one empire. After the Almoravids, we have the rise of the Almohads. The Almohads came not from the desert, but from the mountains, and they actually proclaimed a completely new version of Islam that was adapted to a Berber prophet, a type of Mahdi. It's called. He proclaimed the end of the world. He said the end of the world is coming, and we are going to be the ones who bring it about from the land of the setting sun. Because there is a tradition of the Prophet that says that the Mahdi, the one who will bring about the era of justice at the end of time, will come from the west. So that must be us. We will come from the West. We will restore the Islamic world. So the amahants with this vision, again, the cornstarch vision, Latinized and unified and came down over the mountains and conquered Marrakesh for themselves and transform Marrakesh for themselves. But back to the actual founding of Marrakesh. I provided those translations. Actually Did those translations. Unfortunately, there's not more in English. There should be. That's just sort of a sample of what I what could be provided if we had more translated. It into English about the actual founding of Marrakech. How did this city come from a tabula rasa, you know, from nothing into this great center of commerce, this great center of cultural encounters. How did tents turn into riyadhs? And what do I mean by that? What? Why am I saying tents? Well, Marrakesh was a nomadic settlement, right? It was settled by these nomadic Saharan Berbers, many of whom had no idea even what bread was. According to the historian, they're not been exposed to urban life at all. So the settlement, originally of Marrakech, was basically an encampment of these nomadic Berbers with camel hair tents, right? And we can see even in this aerial image of Marrakesh, that these tents transformed into buildings over the decades, right into a specific type of building called a Riad. A Riad has this atrium in the middle, and it's focused on that center. The outside becomes the inside. Right the outside of the Riad is not as important, and it's actually de emphasized. You don't want to see the wealth that's within. What's important is what's within the Riad. But it was interesting. What's interesting about the found in the place it was of the founding of Marrakesh is that it was deliberately on a boundary area, a no go zone between two rival tribes, and it was possibly purchased from a former black slave. The name and burger for a slave was coos so marakush, it could be related to that. There are many different dates for the actual founding of America. When does it actually occur? Well, that's because there's this question of, when was it a tent encampment, and when was it a city? And who actually it's something that the sources themselves seem to dispute from the time. So you have to consider this as this remarkable transition from a people who had no, almost no, experience with urbanity, to a people who are now founding the most important urban settlement within North Africa. And under the Almoravid, Amir Yusuf ibn tashfin, it was declared the capital of an entire empire, almoravi Empire, from Ghana to Spain. Yusuf ibn Tashfeen is one of the most important characters of the story. If you read the primary source, it really focuses on him quite a lot. Many accounts say that he was of darker complexion, probably had curly hair, and was the cousin of Abu Bakr, who was the original conqueror, the original founder of the Amur Robins. Importantly, he forms a marriage with Zainab, who was a mountain Berber princess, and who used to be the wife of Abu Bakr, his own cousin. So this Zainab woman, the queen of the Berbers, is actually an important part of the story as well. It was interestingly, it took a long time for Marrakesh to get walls, because the Empire was so powerful and the city was so successful, it didn't need to have the protection that it would meet later on. It had a good relationship with the mountain Berbers at first, that broke down as taxes started to be levied on trade through the mountains, trade through the end, through the Atlas and the anti athletes mountains. And over time, Marrakesh transforms from this encampment of jihadi fighters who had just come out of the desert, just been converted to Islam, into a cosmopolitan capital of a vast empire, a site of cultural encounters, a site that began to be open to both Christians and Jews and Muslims as well. What's interesting is that we see this pattern repeated after the quest too in the 12th century. So what does this mean? What is a what is cosmopolitan Marrakesh? Well, as I mentioned earlier, Marrakesh started as sort of this neutral ground between different tribes. So the cosmopolitan started within this newly formed Islamic community itself, as a place of unity between rival tribal groups, right? So there's an element of cosmopolitanism. Even though it was an exclusively Muslim city at first, it still had that sense of creating unity within different rival tribes. Then Jewish and Christian quarters began to emerge within America. And why is that? Well, Jews were a vital part of
Speaker 2 20:04
connecting the Christian and Muslim world, right? They were both ambassadors, but also traders who could, who could journey between both worlds and who really existed in the space between Christian and Muslim worlds. Also, the Jews had have a long standing history within the Maghreb, most scholars think that many of the Berbers before Islam even came, were in fact, Jews and some of them Christians. The Christian Quarter developed in Marrakesh because the Amir or the ruler realized he needed mercenaries. They needed a private army around him that was loyal only to him. And he actually hired Christian knights at the time to come and fight for him. And they said at their own church. They set up their own community, and they were also Christian merchants living within Marrakech at this time. In fact, there was the prince of Eragon named vevater, who was the leader of the Christian life, the Almohads, who came after the Almoravids. They said, Oh, we got to get rid of all this, and we got to restore Marrakesh to its original purity to its exclusively Islamic city. But of course, over time, they also realized, well, we need to actually open things up a little bit. And maybe we do need to bring in mercenaries to keep our power. Maybe we do need to welcome back the Jews. Maybe we do need to become more of a city connected beyond just our own concept of Islam, but with that, you see some interesting limits of cosmopolitanism occurring through the reactions both of the minority community and of the majority community in power. Remember, the majority community in power right now is the Amir, the Muslim ruler. We have Franciscan proto martyrs. This is a group of these Franciscan martyrs who actually went to Marrakesh seeking martyrdom. They deliberately blasphemy the name of the Prophet. They tried once in front of the Amir. Amir said, Oh, go away. I don't want to deal with this. Why are you? Why are you forcing me to potentially execute you? It's too much paperwork. They came a second time, and then only on the third time did the Amir say, Okay, that's enough. I have all this pressure from my population. They're demanding action for me. And these five Franciscans were actually killed, martyred, and are still celebrated within Portugal as martyrs to this day, killed by the Amir of Marrakesh, even though the Franciscan community that wasn't as strident as these five, continued to live within Marrakech, and there was even a bishop who was appointed by the Pope, and there continued to be that form of cosmopolitanism, but The limits had been tested. Okay, also, as this diversity increased, there was some reaction to it within the Muslim community, and many were saying, Well, this is an era of indulgence and higher taxes, and we need to return to the pure image of the past again. So that begins sort of this cycle of cosmopolitanism and anti cosmopolitanism. One thing that I think is interesting that I wanted to include, because of listening in earlier to the Colombian Exchange, is that history could have been very different if a particular voyage by a group of ammo Robin adventures called the mula room, who were sent by the rabbit ruler Ali Bin Youssef, the ruler of Marrakesh in the 12th century, on an expedition into the sea of darkness that is, the Atlantic. Had been successful. They got caught up in what we know as the volta de Mar these currents that led them into the Sargasso Sea. Some of their descriptions of the islands and strange lands that they encountered are very intriguing, and I think there's room among scholars to to really go into some more research and some more detail about what and where these adventures went. But I think one thing you could ask is, what if Ahmed ibn Omar, who was the Admiral of the Almoravids, not Columbus? To lay claim to this new world. So that's an interesting sort of question to consider, because the Almoravids were sort of this driving force of 11th century, and then Alma had a 12th century history within the Mediterranean, not really Christian Europe as much at this time. Okay, another important thing that you can learn from Marrakesh and its founding is that it is a really great example of a Berber Islamic city, that it includes many of the elements of Islamic cities that are repeated elsewhere within the Islamic world. And an important historian, em even says that the state and the city is like a human body, right? That you can divide up the city into different functions, into different organs, just like the human body is brought together by different organs working together, states like people also have a natural lifespan, right? What does that mean to think of a state as a reflection of a person, right? And what are other instances of this happening in history, right? And how much do we do that as well, where we think of things having a definite period of time of lasting a certain amount of time? What's interesting though, is that we see Ibn Khaldun having both a desire for urbanism, but then also criticism of it right, saying that civilization finds its final stage in the creation of cities and the creation of all this diversity across populism, but then also begins To decline at that point. So what does that mean? This narrative about and it comes about in many different places, of sort of reaction to the promise of the cosmopolitan city. So you can talk about the city's heart being the mosque, right? Because it is what keeps time for the community when you're supposed to pray throughout the day, but also on Friday, which is the most important, especially if you're in Ramadan. Just as the heart keeps time, the head is the palace or administrative center, the skin protective walls of defense, digestion, right? So the souk, right, allows things to come in and out of the city. And what's interesting is that they are connected to one another. So the souk, what we would consider today, you know, you have you want to connect the McDonald's with the church that's next to the McDonald's, but in the 11th century, Marrakesh, you would right, because it was the revenues from certain markets that were connected to the support of the mosque, right, and the levies from those and in fact, your closeness, your proximity to the mosque designated your relative cleanliness or holiness in relationship to the community. So book sellers would always congregate close to the mosque, because books were considered the most holy thing to engage in commerce with, because a book is ultimately written in Arabic, which is the language of the Quran, which is revealed from God, right? So you have booksellers, first after book sellers, you might have vegetables, right? And then only after that will you have the butchers and the meat sellers, because they're considered less clean than the booksellers. So you can see even sort of this onion, these layers within the city itself and every place having its specific meaning, unlike the capitalist modern cities of today, where you have different specializations spread throughout the city in order to avoid competition. In Marrakesh, all the butchers are in one place, all the booksellers are one place, right? And why would that be? Wouldn't there be too much competition for that one area? No, they actually support each other in a type of guild system. So there's a lot of really interesting things to talk about when it comes to urban
Speaker 2 29:47
to the urban life within Marrakech and the counters going on within the city. So to talk about Marrakesh, you have to talk and its origin. And you talk about, we have to talk about three centuries in these three Berber empires. First the ALMA rabbits who founded it. Almoravid means people. The Rabat robot is the type of monastery where these jihadi flyers would come together and expand out with their message, these followers who actually wore a male veil, established the Maliki School of Islam and created this empire from Ghana to Andalus. The second era is the era that amahads who tried to refound Marrakesh in their image, right? These are the mountain Berbers, and they even destroyed the old alma Robin Mosque, the remnants of which we see here next to the ALMA, had mosque saying, well, the Almoravids, they didn't get it right. They had the mosque oriented in the wrong direction towards Mecca. We know the right direction towards Mecca, and we're going to destroy that mosque, destroy the memory, and create our own monument, our own proclamation of our faith and our Islamic and our dedication to true Islam, which is pointed in the right direction. And this is symbolic of so much more, though, than just a religious symbol. It's also a symbol of superior scientific knowledge, because it took an extremely detailed understanding of astronomy and science as it was understood at that time to create a correct qibla, or correct direction towards Mecca, which, of course, you can't see. You have to use the stars and advanced geometry to determine. So they're saying, we have a better Islam here on offer. And they created this brand new minaret called the kutubia. What's interesting here is we have the destruction or attempted destruction of civic symbols from the past and the recreation of new ones, but in the same sorts of places, right? So this is the amber Robins in pink. Here you see sort of a northern, north, south, kind of directionality here, connecting, though crucially, this Saharan trade in this sub Saharan and Supra Saharan worlds, right? Bringing the Sahara, bringing West Africa into Mediterranean history and into this connection that you talked about earlier, with the Almohad empire, we have coming on to the stage of history, a vast and important land that before really been ignored, and this is the land of the Atlas Mountains, right? Why are the Atlas Mountains so important, and why were they ignored? Well, you can consider it similar to the Andes or the Incas, right? An entire civilization existed in the Atlas Mountains, these Berber people of the Atlas Mountains that was so isolated and could be so protected from the outside world that they could establish themselves without interference, significant interference, even from powerful empires such As the Romans. The Romans never conquered the Atlas Mountains. The Almohads created their empire from within the Atlas Mountains, which created this vast fortress out of the Atlas Mountains and allowed them to control from that fortress the entire western Mediterranean, completely reshaping the history of 12th and 13th centuries, being the main kind of power center of the Mediterranean at that time, completely ignored, of course, almost completely ignored, by most traditional textbooks of medieval history. But it was the engine that allows the 12th century commercial revolution and 12th century Renaissance to occur. And it wasn't simply through trade or commerce or the existence of this powerful empire alone. It was also through intellectual exchanges that were occurring and were developing within Marrakesh and then spreading out throughout the rest of the Empire, and then ending up in European libraries and used by European scholars. The most famous examples of this is the most important writer, the most important book in medieval Europe after. The Bible was of various Ibn Rushd, who was a great amahad Muslim philosopher, wrote an extensive commentary on Aristotle, a translation of Aristotle, most importantly, a commentary of Aristotle that made the argument that Aristotle, the work of the ancient Greeks, is not entirely alien to a monotheistic understanding of the universe, to an Abrahamic Understanding universe, that we can integrate Greek learning with theology. So Averroes Ibn rush, this combination of Greek and Islamic thinking, ironically, is what spurs a huge interest in Europe and the trend that we call scholasticism that eventually morphs into the Renaissance. So that all happened because of Marrakesh, because of this Omaha empire, because of the later translations and the the transit of knowledge and ideas that were occurring through Marrakesh. Okay, after the amahans, we have a much smaller and weaker groups of empires that try to re establish the authority and the power of the amhas or the rabbits, but fail to do so. They fail to create the unity that occurred in the past, similar to what happened after the split up of the Roman Empire. Among these was the marinids, for example. And at this time, we see the increase in power and increase in conquests of during the some more on this idea of the state or the city as a body, and there's some more on this. I'll have to do some more translating to make it accessible outside of French. But there is actually a very famous market inspector, so his job was to go through the city and tell people that they were doing the right thing or the wrong thing, make sure that the weights were all correct, but also make sure that people stayed within their respective onion ring, make sure that they were where they're supposed to be, the part of the city that was designated for their type of commerce, for example. What's interesting is that this market inspector complained that many people were dressing up, pretending to be like the Almoravids, wearing veils up to no good in the market. But it shows that Saharan cultural traditions, or even being adopted as far away as the city of Seville, which is now in Spain. You can also talk more about the cycle of history that I referred to earlier even Cal dunes. Idea that cities have a definite and dynasties have a definite lifespan, like humans, that they start out vigorously and young, and then they go through this process of decline, and then a new dynasty comes in to replace it. How Much Is that true, or how much can we maybe discuss this and critique that cycle as well. So here's some classroom activities, discussions, you've already done some with the with the readings. I included one of those. I think that's really interesting. Is the all the dries, the map showing Africa on top of the world. I think that's very important maybe to start off with, to show that we're looking at things from a different perspective, but this idea of a state as a person, and what ways have different cultures personified states civilizations,
Speaker 2 39:18
and can states and societies have a lifespan and act in ways similar to individual humans. And how does that relate to how states relate to outsiders, and how we as individuals relate to people we don't know as well, and the type of interactions that occur there the rural and urban divide as well, I think is interesting. So as the city is being created, it also it starts to create outsiders who are not a part of that city, who then become, eventually a threat and try to themselves, take over the city a little bit. Deeper you could go is the influence of things like environmental change. So many scholars think that, well, one of the reasons why the ALMA rabbits came out of the desert was desertification, that things were drying out within the Saharan desert, and they were desperately looking for new places to conquer new lands in order to avoid starvation. Another important event that occurred that in the 14th century, actually, when this historian was writing was the plague. And why was it that the plague and other pandemics seem to impact cities far more than the countryside, and how this led to certain moral judgments about cities versus the countryside that may might even exist to this day, right? So it's interesting, and I think maybe we, even if we use I mean, how do it? It's important to also critique him and some of the assumptions that come out of this cycle of history narrative. One of them is that urban urbanity is always bad for the rural communities or rural development. In fact, what's interesting about Marrakesh is that there is an entire research center that the almoravis and Almohads developed for agricultural development. It's kind of like Purdue University is today. You know, there they go and test the different plants and things and watering system. And if you looked in the readings, there is this innovative water distribution system. It's called Qatar, sort of an underground water channel system that you want it to go underground so that doesn't it all evaporate, but that allowed for this whole area around Marrakech to bloom into this magnificent garden. And they tested different plants and different olive trees at different times to see that they could withstand desertification and other and drought and so on. So you can still go and find this Manara, still today, just outside of the walls America. That's also actually where the sailors, the adventurers who went off into the Atlantic, were trained, did their swimming lessons Marrakesh also, though, I think one of the most important takeaways from Marrakesh is as a site of encounter between people of different faiths. We talked about the Franciscans, but there were also the Sufis. And these are monuments to the so called Seven Saints of Marrakesh, seven great Sufi saints who all emerged out of Marrakesh. Why is it such a City of Saints? Well, I think part of it is this interaction that occurred with the Franciscans, but also because it was such a bustling center of ideas and exchange that that naturally led to people looking for new spiritual outlets and New spiritual leaders, especially as they became disenfranchised or disillusioned with secular rulers, and as the promised expanded Empire never fully materialized, they never completely reformed the Islamic world, which was the promise of these empires. So Marrakesh as a site of encounter, I think is a very rich topic, and I think it is a topic that deserves a lot more focus, because it brings in Africa and North Africa fully into the picture of world history. It shows students that there is the possibility of Colombian Exchange, even before Columbian Exchange. It shows the importance of connecting to these indigenous people of North Africa and their entry onto the center of the stage of world history. And it shows the importance of, of course, transmission and translation of ideas and philosophies as well. So Marrakesh set the stage for the modern world, I would argue, because it expanded and even created a new chess board the founding and we founded the Marrakesh represented the full entrance of this large group of people who were kind of left out of historical imagination, the Amazigh people, into world history as empire builders. They rebalance World History towards North Africa, connecting Africa to the Mediterranean and the Middle East, and even potentially, although. Not actually to the Atlantic world. Economic Impacts were vast. The Golden trades of the Saharan and Atlas Mountains created this notion of a safe North Africa that you could actually go into these mountain valleys and feel safe and protected by the Ahmad Empire was an extraordinary development, New Voyages, new agricultural technology and building techniques spread from North Africa and were connected to Al Andalus in Spain. All of this development came to be inherited by the Spanish and the Spanish Empire, that empire that expanded throughout the entire world and even into what is now California. So we have a connection between California and the Maghreb. It is one that is deep in world history that goes back to the 11th and 12th century. But that is very real, and I think it is even recognized today by architects. And if we look here, this is the famous, the famous Ferry Building in San Francisco. Have you all? Have many of you been there, San Francisco, to Bay Bridge, and you see the tower there in what that tower, the coup to be a tower of Marrakech, which inspired the herald the tower of Seville, which inspired the fairy tower of San Francisco. It's the same idea of the square, Tower, minaret, the square being emblematic, actually, of Western Islamic architecture, not not the round which is not the conical around which is more Ottoman style of minaret architecture. And even, of course, when we talk about the establishment of the Spanish Empire, this the way that the Spanish conquered their territories and established hierarchies and relationships with indigenous peoples is similar to the way that they interacted with the Berbers and the Arabs as well. And we see the Spanish even using the art and architecture of the Alma had empire in their art and architecture that of monasteries, specifically Franciscan monasteries, like the monastery of San Francisco in Lima Peru and other places as well. So that just wanted to end with that interesting last connection to this world that sometimes we think of as very far away, but still has these impacts on the way our world is shaped to this day as well. So thank you very much. It's a pleasure to be involved in this project, and I want to thank emperor and Danny and everyone else for the conversations and encouragement along the way. Thank you so much
Speaker 3 48:46
for joining us, for for sharing your your content knowledge and those great resources, folks, again, you could do another round of applause here with the emoji. Hey, thank you all so much. You.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai