Italy and the Islamic World: From Caesar to Mussolini
REVIEW: Gaza Ghetto: The occupation’s lasting legacy
- Book Author(s):Ali Humayun Akhtar
- Published Date:March 2024
- Publisher:Edinburgh University Press
- Paperback:288 pages
- ISBN-13:978-1399519625
Caesar to Mussolini, aims to explore the nature of this relationship. Akhtar argues that Italy has a long history of being entangled in the Eastern Mediterranean and North Africa; the story is complex and very diverse. It played a role in shaping Italianness during the 19th century unification of Italy and attempts to build a national identity.In 1384, 3 Florentine merchants, including one with the iconic name Giorgio Gucci, arrived in Cairo. The fall of the Roman Empire, Akhtar argues, resulted in merchants from different Italian city states who could ‘communicate in multiple varieties of vernacular Latin – French, Genoese, Tuscan, Venetian – as well as languages such as Greek, Turkish, Arabic and Persian.’ Even during the Crusades, Italian merchants were traversing the Muslim world for trade opportunities. Leonardo Frescobaldi, Simone Sigoli and Giorgio Gucci travelled together in the hope to visit sacred sites and to make pilgrimage. Their accounts of the trip provide a fascinating glimpse into Italian life on the other side of the Mediterranean. Frescobaldi hired a dragoman who acted as their guide and translator. The dragoman was Venetian, who was married to a Florentine woman. The couple had settled down in Cairo, converted to Islam and learned fluent Arabic. The Venetian-Florentine couple who, as Akhtar says, would have been a site of astonishment in modern times, were of no particular surprise to Frescobaldi. ‘To him, their Venetian Muslim dragoman was simply “a renegade Venetian” married “to one of our Florentines”, suggesting that the phenomenon of Europeans living and working as Muslims in the Middle East and North Africa was not rare.’ Indeed, there is evidence of a substantial community of Italians in the region.
There is a long history of Levantine Italians who played a critical role in the function of the societies they were in and facilitated connections to the Italian peninsula. Many were very proud of their local community and saw themselves as part of the local fabric in Tunisia, Egypt, Syria, Palestine and elsewhere. The diversity and religious toleration meant the Levantine Italians could live quite openly, but this situation began to change in the 19th century. After the Napoleonic wars, the emergence of an attempt to build a shared national identity in the Italian peninsula would have a long-lasting impact on the lives of Levantine Italians. Interestingly, the initial impact of the unification of Italy would increase the size of the Levantine Italians as many Roman Catholic Italians moved to Istanbul or Alexandria in search for better economic opportunities but, by the 20th century, the forces that began to spring up during the period would see the downfall of the Levantine community as insistence on having one citizenship, nationality and belonging turned the hybrid local-foreigners into simply foreigners. The Levantines were integrated members of these Muslim societies and they were involved in ‘insurance, banking, publishing, healthcare, food and beverage production, sales in food and beverage industry, military manufacture, architecture and design, and various forms of design and aesthetic taste-making from apparel to architecture.’ Essentially, they were a big part of the modernisation of the region.
A Center of Christian-Muslim Engagement for Peace and Justice: 