Tlemcen

1951 is when the last one's closed, so it's 101 years.

In Algeria, the three were in Tlemcen in the west, in Constantine in the east, and in Algiers in the capital.

These three cities were intellectual centers in Algeria, and so the French put these schools there as a way to try to claim some connection to the Islamic intellectual history of the Maghreb there.

In the early 20th century, four more of these schools opened in West Africa, in Djenne and Timbuktu in the French Sudan, or what's today Mali, in Saint-Louis in Senegal, that was the first one that I learned about, and in Boutelimit in Mauritania.

And so I would go, I think the trajectory was I started in Algeria, then I went to France, then I went to Senegal, then I went to Mauritania, then I went to Senegal again, then I went to France, then I went to, you know, it was just like, I was constantly on a plane going between these different places.

um which was really fun i got to do the sort of trans-saharan thing that i had wanted to do um i'm gonna like think through my thoughts here for for just a second um okay so um i'll tell you uh a couple of stories about the the archival research and how that sort of came together for me because like i said it was through the research process that some of these these ideas really manifested themselves so In Algeria, I spent a lot of time trying to figure out where the archives were for the Mederses.

Like I said, there were three in Algeria, in Tlemcen, in Konstantin, and in Algiers.

What I found was that the archives for the Medusa of Clemson were in France.

It is only as the days accumulate, four days, then six, then ten, that he begins to notice the accumulation itself, the way the accents of the people he meets shift subtly from village to village, the way the architecture of the mosques changes in small details of proportion and ornament, the way even the quality of the light seems to alter as he moves eastward across the breadth of the Maghreb.

He reaches Tlemcen, an inland city known for its scholars and its markets, its walls enclosing a population that mixes Berber and Arab, settled and nomadic, in ways that remind him at first of Tangier, though the resemblance fades the longer he stays.

Here he encounters his first real experience of what it means to be a stranger among strangers, to walk into a city where no one knows his father's name or his family's reputation, where he must establish through his own bearing and speech who he is and what claim he has on the courtesy of the people around him.

It is a lesson he will relearn in increasingly demanding forms in nearly every city he enters for the rest of his life.

But here in Tlemcen, it strikes him with the particular force of a first experience.

He seeks out the mosque, as his father counseled him.

And finds there a circle of students gathered around a teacher of law, and he is permitted after a brief exchange establishing his own credentials as a student of the Maliki school, to sit at the edge of the circle and listen.

It is in Tlemcen that he first encounters two officials traveling on a diplomatic mission eastward.

The Almohades possessed a large and capacious fleet in which they transported their armies to Spain, and their successors in North Africa, though less powerful, were generally able to keep up a number of vessels for offensive as well as commercial purposes.

During the later Middle Ages, the relations between the rulers of the Barbary Coast, the kings of Tunis, Tlemcen, Fez, etc., and the trading nations of Christendom were amicable and just.

Treaties show that both parties agreed in denouncing and, so far as they could, suppressing piracy and encouraging mutual commerce.

It was not till the beginning of the sixteenth century that a change came over these peaceful conditions, and the way it happened was this.

The Arab governors under the caliphs of Damascus and Bagdad had made room for the houses of Idris and Aglab.

These in turn had given way to the Fatimi caliphs.

And when these schismatics removed their seat of power from their newly founded capital of Mahdia to their final metropolis of Cairo their western empire speedily split up into the several princedoms of the Zirhes of Tunis, the Beni Hammad of Tlemcen, and other minor governments.

At the close of the eleventh century the Muravids or Almoravides, a Berber dynasty, imposed their authority over the greater part of North Africa and Spain.