I usually try to read up on a country before I visit there, but on Tunisia, I didn't do so well. Okay, so I was grading exams. But more than that--I simply couldn't find enough stuff that caught my fancy. Amazon does offer a biography of Tunisia's great postwar leader under the title of Habib Bourguiba: The Tragedy of Longevity (used copies starting at $65) but it is just not the sort of tagline that thrills the blood. I did read one academic study on the lives of Tunisian women--interesting as a powers-of-the-weak yarn about how women in a man's world use cunning and the advantage of interior line to outwit their overlords. I also read one so-bad-it-was-good travelogue by that very model of British Imperial arrogance and presumption, Norman Douglas. Douglas never met an off-white-person whom he didn't find scheming, shifty and gullible, but he's fascinating as an example of his kind, and actually kind of fun when he reports on sites that I walk over myself.
Beyond that, my main efforts went into expanding my knowledge (or perhaps just reducing my ignorance) about the Arab world more generally. And this line of inquiry led me to one of the most extraordinary finds since I don't know when: The Muqaddimah, by Ibn Khaldûn. The cover of the paperback bills it as "The Classic Islamic History of the World." A literate Tunisian acquaintance describes the author as "the first sociologist." Either of these is at least minimally adequate, but neither is enough. The fact is, Ibn Khaldûn is one of the world's great polymaths: he seems to have learned everything available in his world (14th Century). More, he seems to have fashioned an informed judgment on everything, characteristically supported with reasons, many of which survive the test of time (example: at the very beginning, he offers his account of why the Biblical story of Moses cannot possibly be true--his reasoning would do credit to an academic archaeologist in the 21th Century).
Ibn Khaldûn made most of his career outside of Tunisia (he traveled a lot) but he was born in Tunis, and there is a statue of him on the edge of the New Town, just outside the Souq. A cynic would identify it as proof that the Tunisians don't have much else to brag about. But that is unkind; Ibn Khaldûn is a force of nature, and I can't imagine why I never heard of him before.
More modest but worthwhile in different ways are two books by modern scribblers. The more polished and professional is Hugh Kennedy The Great Arab Conquests, about the Seventh-Century explosion that catapulted Muslims from obscurity in the desert onto the center of the world stage. Kennedy is a total pro, but in a way that's the problem. He spends perhaps a third of the book lamenting the inadequacy of the sources. This is intellectually honest, but it means he has less of a story to tell than he, or we, would want. Still, shorter Hugh Kennedy: it's not so much that the Arabs "won" as that their opponents had "lost." Plague had decimated the Mediterranean world just a century or so before, and old, corrupt, inefficient governments were tottering everywhere.
Tamim Ansary's Destiny Disrupted has the opposite problem. Seeing as how it bears the subtitle of "A History of the World through Islamic Eyes," I suppose I could hardly expect to find it anything except incomplete and superficial. But that is quite the problem. Any story can be told in 10 pages or 10 million pages, depending on how you choose your level of abstration. The trouble here is that Ansary doesn't seem to understand his own limitations or, worse, assumes that the reader will not. So it is an irritating read; nevertheless, I stuck it out, for her did tell me a bit I didn't know, and did bring together a number of disparate threads into a (mostly) coherent narrative.
[Idle afterthought: as proof that ambition in scope is no excuse, compare (invidiously) Ansary to Ibn Khaldûn, supra.]
That about does it for my Tunisia reading so far. I realize in retrospect that I might have broadened the search set if I had understood that what I was studying was not Tunisia so much as Carthage--the remnants of the old pre-Roman (and, later, the Roman) civilization. This would have opened me up to, e.g., biographies of Hannibal, or chunks of Livy. Or perhaps Sallust, of whom, I admit, I had only the vaguest knowledge before (can you say "Jugurthine"? No? Well, neither could I until last week). Ah well, it may not be too late; a copy of Susan Raven's Rome in Africa is winging its way to me even now as we speak. More anon.
Afterthought: It isn't quite my primary interest, but I note that there is also a fair amount of Wold War II history in Tunisia--not least the Kasserine Pass, venue for the first great encounter between American forces and Rommel's Panzers. Apparently there is quite a literature on this topic alone including, not least, Rick Atkinson's An Army at Dawn. Okay, it goes onto the list.
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