4 The Maghrib – the ‘West’ in Ara-bic – inevitably refers to its pair, the Mashriq – the ‘East’ – and is often used in a binary spatial opposition assumed to convey an inherent meaning on its own. However, this meaning must nevertheless be contextualized in time, while rec-og...
was the first to call attention to the broad geographical meaning of terms such as Maghrib, comprising the entire Muslim Mediterranean world west of Egypt (North Africa, al-Andalus and Sicily) and Rūm, in the Geniza commercial documents designating both Byzantium and Christian Europe in general....