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This chapter presents the following documents: Congressional Chaplains, 1789; George Washington's Thanksgiving Proclamation, 1789; George Washington's Farewell Address, 1796; the Treaty of Tripoli, 1797; John Adams's proclamation of a day of fasting and prayer, 1798; Thomas Jefferson's First Inaugural Address as President, 1801; the Treaty between the United States and the Kaskaskia Indians, 1803; and Dorothy Ripley remembering her sermon in the House of Representatives, 1806.

This chapter begins by describing Dr. Mohamed Helmy’s Muslim assistant, who was observed as a woman with fair-skin, round face, and intelligent eyes when Gestapo barged into the doctor’s practice in Berlin in fall 1943. It details how the Gestapo were hunting down thousands of Jews that had escaped the round-up and gone to ground in Berlin. The Gestapo had been returning to the practice, demanding to speak to the Muslim doctor and asking the whereabouts of a Jewish girl named Anna. The chapter reviews the fascination with the Middle East that had been evident in Berlin since at least the late nineteenth century. It talks about how Arabs were exhibited in Berlin like exotic animals, such as in in 1927 when they formed part of a ‘Tripoli Exhibition’.

Pitigliano is the birthplace of Giannetto Paggi (1852–1916), a Jewish teacher who opened the first Italian school in Tripoli and was celebrated as ‘the pioneer of Italian civilization in Libya’ in the colonial and Fascist decades. The chapter considers the mobility of memory as a series of intersubjective and translational processes. It draws on Luisa Passerini’s concept of intersubjectivity, Naomi Leite’s ethnography of affinity and Francesco Ricatti’s ‘emotion of truth’ to engage with the processes of identification and knowledge exchange that emerged through the fieldwork. Spadaro explores the webs of imaginative and emotional interconnections linking her interviewees with the stories of Giannetto Paggi and Pitigliano, and, by extension, with narratives of Italianness and Jewishness across the Mediterranean and the Atlantic.

This chapter discusses the political and religious-legal challenge that North African corsairs posed to the Ottoman treaty regime in a post–“Northern Invasion” Mediterranean, and explores the reasons for and consequences of the diplomatic divergence of the 1620s, when England, France, and the Netherlands began concluding treaties directly with the North African port cities. It argues that the legal and diplomatic fallout of a series of Algerian-Tunisian piratical raids in the 1620s and 1630s led to a permanent restructuring of the imperial center’s relationship with North Africa. As a result, Istanbul washed its hands of responsibility for the North African corsairs’ predations, granting explicit permission to its treaty partners to destroy any African corsairs who threatened them and creating conditions that led to dozens of European punitive expeditions against the North African port cities beginning in the 1660s and culminating in the French invasion of Algiers in 1830.

The conclusion recapitulates the book’s key arguments, fast-forwarding to the mid-eighteenth century to test the assertion that the Ottoman Mediterranean was a legal space, defined in large part by the challenge of piracy. Recounting an incident from the 1740s, in which Cretan seamen traveled to Tripoli to acquire licenses to attack Venice—with which Tripoli then considered itself at war—it reflects on the path by which Tripoli and the rest of North Africa came to be excluded from the Ottoman Mediterranean legal space, such that neither administrators in Istanbul nor sailors in Candia considered Tripoli truly “Ottoman.” It then reconsiders the connections between legal corsairing/privateering and illegal piracy, and the complex roles religion and subjecthood played in fixing the line between them.

Chapter 3 argues that, as with other sectors, the caravan slave trade was influenced by the Husaynid beys' economic reforms and the desire to capitalize on expanding European trade. It shows how Tunisian foreign trade affected economic developments in the central Sudan, particularly Katsina in Hausaland after the 1780s.

This chapter describes a time before strategy, when the lands of the Middle East were intensely fractured, and trust and loyalty were scarce commodities. It looks at a time when self-interest was paramount and where chaos was so ingrained that an entire life could be lived without knowing anything else. It also talks about wars that are guided by politics, driven by policy objectives, and implemented through strategy but often lost in the rushed outpouring of human actions and emotions. The chapter discusses the liberation of Jerusalem and the end of the First Crusade, where most of the original crusaders returned home and some remained to defend the Holy Land. It also includes the four political entities that are collectively known as the “crusader states”: The Kingdom of Jerusalem, the County of Tripoli, the Principality of Antioch, and the County of Edessa.

The history of the Alawis in the Ottoman period is usually presented as one of discrimination, impoverishment and constant persecution. This contribution, rather than relying on the narrative chronicles or oral accounts of the period, concentrates on the wealth of Ottoman administrative documents referring to the Alawis to be found in the Basbakanlik and the Tripoli Shari’a Court archives. In doing so it seeks to show that the Alawis enjoyed quasi-recognition as a sectarian community, that they made extensive use of the Ottoman court system, and that they were characterized by a high degree of social stratification including a landed gentry co-opted by the Ottoman state.

This chapter explores the embattled existence and contested identities of Lebanon's Alawi community in Tripoli. It focuses on the entrenched hilltop enclave of Jabal Mohsen, perched above its historic Sunni rival, Bab al-Tabbaneh, in the valley below. Economically marginalised and religiously mistrusted, the social and urban fractures of Jabal Mohsen have been exacerbated by reliance and support on Syria's Alawi-led Asad dynasty. Political and military complicity with Syrian forces during the Lebanese civil war (1975-90) and more recent support for Bashar al-Asad in Syria's ongoing civil war continues to enflame historic grievances and contemporary animosities. For almost four decades, Tripoli has witnessed intermittent violence between Salafist militias and Alawi fighters from these rival neighbourhoods. Open conflict has transformed and distorted daily lives and everyday urban structures. This territorial conflict reflects and is fuelled by a number of broader struggles: the battle for Lebanese sovereignty and army control; the role and influence of Tripoli's political elites and intensifying geo-political rivalries — Syria-Iran-Hizbullah and Saudi-Qatar-Sunni ‘Future party’. This chapter, based on interviews and ethnographic observations within Jabal Mohsen, examines the ongoing and complex negotiation of identity, social memory and everyday survival. It seeks to analyse Jabal Mohsen as a both a physical site of urban conflict and an imagined space of communal solidarities (national, religious, political, victimhood) and geo-political rivalries.

Chapter 4 describes the rapid shift from a “consumer” to a “producer” market at the end of the 1960s. This shift was characterized by the radicalization of the political and social climate in most petrostates, by the emergence “peak” oil production in two crucial producers such as the US and Venezuela, and generally by the passage from the era of “cheap oil” to that of “expensive oil.” The chapter will also explain the cultural context of this passage with the rise of environmentalist movements and criticism towards overconsumption that had characterized the societies in industrialized countries. All of these factors led to the first two major victories of OPEC during the Tehran and Tripoli negotiation with the international oil companies in 1971.

Chapter 1, Frankish Expansion, explores the chaotic years following the departure of the First Crusaders. In this period, the Frankish settlers who chose to remain and defend the newly-founded Crusader States were locked in an almost permanent state of war with many of their foes. This chapter recreates their military history, examining how such small numbers of Frankish knights could continue to expand their territories across the Levantine region. Working through each of the four Crusader States in turn, it examines the aspirations of these fledgling states and discusses their evolving strategic goals. In their early days, in the wake of the First Crusade and its military victories, these states could be extremely ambitious when selecting their targets, although their aspirations became more tempered in later years. Close attention is also paid to the level of co-operation demonstrated by these Frankish leaders, along with their willingness to seek allies among both their neighbours and the communities under their control.

This chapter surveys the limited evidence on Islamic palatial architecture in the Western Mediterranean during the Early Modern Period. Northern Africa was weakly incorporated into the Ottoman Empire as the Barbary States. In the capital cities– Tripoli, Tunis and Algiers – leaders took on the trappings of traditional Islamic rulers and preserved the earlier architectural styles and concepts of space in their palace designs. In Morocco a succession of Berber and Arab dynasties resisted the Ottomans and united the far-western Maghreb. These rulers underpinned their rule by religious ideology and built huge palatial cities featuring a diversity of architectural forms at the “royal cities” (Fes, Marrakesh, Rabat and Méknes) – though, for the most part, the chief typologies and spatial concepts were developed in previous centuries. Towards the end of the period, the growing influence of European colonialism brought an end to the tradition of Islamic architecture in both regions.

This chapter examines how political interests in Mindanao and in Manila have made it difficult to resolve the territorial cleavage in southern Philippines, even though the 1987 Constitution envisioned Muslim autonomy within the unitary republic. It first provides a historical background on the Muslim insurgency in Mindanao, led by the Moro National Liberation Front (MNLF) and later, the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF). It also considers the 1976 Tripoli agreement signed under martial law, the drafting of the 1987 Constitution, and the creation of the Autonomous Region of Muslim Mindanao in 1989. It goes on to describe the period of constitutional engagement and more specifically, the “constitutional moment” for resolving the Mindanao question that began in mid-2010. Finally, it analyzes the outcome of the peace talks between the government and the Moro insurgents, along with some of significant the lessons that can be drawn from the experience.

As the rebel net tightened around the loyalist forces and Gaddafi lost Tripoli, this chapter provides an account of the final days of the regime and its unsuccessful struggle to maintain power. NATO scaled back its targeting of loyalist forces due to an increasing risk of targeting the rebels and civilian population and the decline in territory occupied by the Gaddafi’s forces. The chapter examines the international stage, as the priority was placed on finding a political solution, stimulated by a variety of high-level meetings involving the Contact Group, UN, AU, NATO and NTC. Public exposure of the presence of special forces in Libya sparked international outcry and the tempo of NATO operations subsided gradually and ceased altogether on Gaddafi’s death and with the final collapse of the regime. NATO ended Operation Unified Protector on 31 Oct 11.

This chapter explores the deep and slow currents that have permeated Libyan society as it has evolved in the last century. It starts with a brief discussion of the debate surrounding the constitution of the short-lived Tripoli Republic around 1918, and continues with an analysis of the eventful period that preceded independence from which emerged the constitutional monarchy that ruled Libya for the following eighteen years. It looks at the various currents that emerged in that period because it is the unresolved disputes, the bad compromises, and the frustrations of the nationalist movement that led to the enactment of a constitution that was too complex and muddled to begin with, and inadequate in reaching the main purpose of a constitution: limitation of power.