Muhammad al-Fihri

The Western world was blanketed in the isolation of the early Middle Ages.

But in North Africa, Fatima al-Fihri was embarking on an act of radical defiance and monumental ambition.

Stripped of every man who had ever protected her, her father, husband, and brothers all claimed in a harrowing wave of sudden loss, Fatima stood at a pivotal crossroads.

Possessing a fortune that could have guaranteed a lifetime of silent luxury, she chose a path of radical sacrifice instead.

Not all at once, but patiently over years she has not yet lived.

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.