Ifriqiya

A young man of standing and a young woman of good family bound together for mutual support and companionship as the road stretches on toward Egypt.

The journey from Tunis eastward carries the caravan along the coast through country that grows progressively harsher and more sparsely populated as they leave behind the settled, cultivated lands of Ifriqiya.

They pass through Sfax, through the coastal towns of what will later be called Libya, the landscape shifting by degrees from the olive groves and wheat fields of Tunisia into something drier, more austere, the vegetation thinning until the caravan finds itself crossing stretches of country where the horizon offers little but sand and scrub and the occasional stunted tree clinging to existence near some hidden source of water.

This is the young traveler's first true encounter with the character of the roads that will define so much of the rest of his life.

Her name is Fatima.

She was born into the al-Fihri family sometime around the turn of the ninth century in a city that had, by then, already become one of the great centers of the Islamic world, Kairouan, in the region the Arabs called Ifriqiya, a name that would in time lend itself to an entire continent.

To understand the child is to understand first the city that shaped her, because Kairouan in these years was not simply a place.

It was an idea given form in mudbrick and stone, a frontier outpost that had grown within less than two centuries into a capital of trade, governance, and learning.

The calling of prices, the bleating of goats being led through narrow streets, the rhythmic hammering of a coppersmith beating a bowl into shape one patient strike at a time.

Her father, Muhammad al-Fihri, was a merchant of considerable means, a man whose family had roots stretching back to the Arabian city of Fihr, from which their name descended, though generations had passed since anyone in the family had set foot there.

They were, by the time of Fatima's birth, thoroughly rooted in Ifriqiya.

Kairouan was the only home her father had ever known, and it would be the only home Fatima would know for the whole of this chapter of her life.