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4.5
Natalie Zemon Davis is not the first historian to examine the life al-Wazzan. Her contribution to the study of early modern history comes, rather, from her interpretation of al-Wazzan’s life. She suggests that al-Wazzan’s conversion was not completely genuine. Caught between the tensions and contradictions of the Christian and Islamic worldviews, al-Wazzan, Davis argues, attempted to avoid public conflict and denouncement of either religion. In his writings, he attempted to “build a bridge for himself, one that he could cross in either direction” (114). His writings are, therefore, esoteric. They employ the Arabic concept of hila, or stratagem. On the one hand, his scholarship integrated Arabic storytelling into the Western world, synthesizing Christian and Muslim thought. On the other hand, al-Wazzan wrote his treatises carefully and cautiously, lest Christians or Muslims challenged his orthodoxy. Davis argues convincingly that al-Wazzan’s corpus needs to be examined with his autobiography in mind.While Davis’ book is engaging, “Trickster Travels” partakes in several of the pitfalls of cultural history. Above all, Davis employs too much conjecture in her book. For example, in her long – and virtually unnecessary – chapter on sex, Davis, drawing on the slang al-Wassan uses in his "Geography," raises the possibility that al-Wazzan frequented the brothels of Rome and Africa and that he may have engaged in homosexual activity or had suppressed homoerotic desires. While he may have had such tendencies, Davis does not provide enough evidence to support this claim. The second pitfall of cultural history present in Davis’ book is that the modern concept of ‘identity’ is imposed on al-Wassan’s life. Although Davis does show that al-Wassan realized that he was caught in between worlds, she does not demonstrate that al-Wassan viewed himself as an ‘individual’ in the modern sense of the word. Al-Wassan seems less concerned with identity politics and more concerned with the more philosophical question of what is truth.These faults aside, Davis’s book is a fine monograph. Davis’s prose is clear and easy to read. The book, printed by a major publishing house, is accessible to a wide reading audience and could be used in an undergraduate class to introduce students to global history in the sixteenth century. Despite being a work of popular history, the work is an impressive product of world-class scholarship. There are one hundred pages of notes, a small glossary of Arabic words, and an extraordinary bibliography of primary and secondary sources.
