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Precolonial Memory, Postcolonial Critique: Ibn Khaldun in Tunisian Arabic Fiction of the 21st Century

By Hanan Natour

This text is based on a presentation delivered at the MECAM Conference “A Decolonial Mediterranean? Disparities, Imaginations, Power Relations” held in Tunis, 4–8 November 2024. It explores imaginations of Tunisia as part of the Mediterranean from a literary angle.

As part of this publication series on the decolonial Mediterranean, focusing on Tunisian literature serves as a gateway to creative engagements with the country’s significant geography. Tunisian literature links to the region in several directions — it is part of North African literature and modern Arabic literature. Grounded in the violent experience of colonialism, it also finds multiple ways of engaging with French literature from the other end of the Mediterranean Sea. The multiplicity of perspectives which shape Tunisian literature finds expression across various genres and languages. This contribution explores transtemporal imaginations of the Mediterranean in two Tunisian novels in Arabic: Kamāl  al-Riyāḥī’s al-Mishraṭ: min sīrat Khadīja wa-ahzānihā (The Scalpel: The Life and Worries of Khadīja, 2006) and Rashīda al-Shārnī’s Tarātīl li-ālāmihā (Hymns to Her Pains, 2011).[1]

Many Tunisian novels published in the 1990s and early 2000s engage with early modern personalities who shaped how the history of the Mediterranean is remembered today. Returning to travelling intellectuals like Ibn Khaldun (1332–1406) and Ibn Battuta (1304–1377), they reach back to a time before imposed nation-states restructured the regional order in the Middle East and North Africa. This observation inspired me to inquire how the interest of Tunisian authors in figures of this period affects their concepts and visions of Tunisia. Re-inventing historical figures, and implicitly touching upon “imagined geographies” (Edward Said) that precede French colonialism, they criticise present challenges and inspire alternative visions for the future. The two novels presented here revisit the life and works of Ibn Khaldun.[2] They do not explicitly address his time or visions of the Mediterranean – referring to him, however, invites their readers to explore a precolonial angle of reflection.

While previous generations of his family had moved from Yemen to Spain during the Arab conquests, Ibn Khaldun himself was born in Tunis and died in Cairo. As an intellectual of the region, he shaped how the Mediterranean and its history is perceived. In his famous Muqaddima (Introduction), he sought to narrate the history of North Africa as part of the Mediterranean, uncovering the structures of state and society across different regions while also reflecting on how history is told.[3] Libyan novelist Hisham Matar described him as a “man who arrives at the palace of infinite rooms but gets distracted by the garden”.[4] Indeed, he set out to write the history of the entire region, but got “distracted” by his wish to write an extensive introduction. This endeavour developed into an entire volume, notably the one he became most famous for.

Ibn Khaldun’s writings were impacted by his travels across the Middle East and North Africa during a time when the Mediterranean landscape differed from its postcolonial division into nation-states. When authors reach back to him in the present, they also tend to implicitly criticise colonialism. Writing during a period in which the “Greater Maghrib […] stretched into al-Andalus or Muslim Spain, into Muslim Sicily, and across the Sahara into tropical Africa”, he explored the invasion of North Africa by the Banu Hilal and Banu Sulaym in the 11th century, a turning point in North Africa’s history.[5] Tunisian authors like Muṣṭafā al-Kīlānī have interpreted this event as an early experience of colonialism which lends historical depth to their contemporary critical lens on the European imperialism of the 19th and 20th centuries.[6]

Tunisian novels in Arabic look at Ibn Khaldun from a different angle. Al-Mishraṭ and Tarātīl li-ālāmihā engage with Ibn Khaldun’s statue on Avenue Bourguiba, in the heart of Tunis. The location of the statue is telling, as is its history: placed in the centre of the Tunisian capital, it has witnessed numerous demonstrations, including those in 2011. Originally set up by the first president of independent Tunisia, Habib Bourguiba, it stands opposite the clocktower which his successor, Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali, put up at the other end of this avenue.[7] Both presidents instrumentalised these monuments for the political narratives they intended to communicate.[8] Bourguiba tried to emphasise the country’s precolonial past when commissioning the statue of Ibn Khaldun by Tunisian artist Zubayr Turkī and replacing with it a statue of the French missionary Charles Martial Allemand Lavigerie. On the spot of today’s clocktower, he also replaced a statue of Jules Ferry, one of the initiating minds behind French colonial imperialism after whom the avenue had been named until 1956. After his silent coup against Bourguiba in 1987, Ben Ali, in turn, wished to demonstrate a change of regime and domestic politics by replacing Bourguiba’s statue.

A statue in front of a building.
Avenue Habib Bourguiba, Tunis. Photo by Sami Mlouhi, via Wikimedia Commons.

Both novels show an interest in Ibn Khaldun’s statue, both link it to the theme of disillusionment and choose a decidedly contemporary angle. They use references to his statue to criticise the Tunisian regimes that followed independence. Without explicitly addressing imaginations of the region during his times, the historical backdrop of this statue calls for an awareness of the anti-colonial sentiment within which it was established.

The experimental novel al-Mishraṭ engages with violence and inequality. It fictionally addresses a series of crimes against women which actually occurred in Tunis in 2003. The novel forms a collage of three parts which include newspaper articles and pictures of paintings. In the second chapter, the statue is revived, lamenting lice in its beard and the book’s weight in its hands.[9] With irony, the text ridiculises the esteemed historical figure, while also allowing it to claim back a voice over his life and legacy. I argue that this reference to Ibn Khaldun serves as a criticism of Ben Ali’s regime, accusing it of caring only for its reputation while disregarding the challenges and needs of its people. A key scene supports this interpretation: At unease about being confined to one place, the statue leaves its spot and walks off. When representatives of the state try to move it back, its turban appears to be missing. Immediately, civil servants panic and decide to issue a statement which claims that this change to the statue had been intentional.[10] Lacking respect towards the statue and its symbolical value, the ministry acts quickly to save its own reputation. It therefore serves as a caricature of the state and its structural absurdity.

Tarātīl li-ālāmihā alludes to the same statue but without reviving it. This novel addresses the effect of political imprisonment on the mothers, wives, and sisters of captives. Relating to al-Riyāḥī’s critical stance towards the contemporary Tunisian state, it addresses the absurdity of political imprisonment. A young female narrator, Dunyā, renarrates her mother’s life and worries after her passing. Notably, the mother is called Khaḍrāʾ, echoing the trope of “Tūnis al-khaḍrāʾ”, green Tunisia, which stems from a time when Tunisia was perceived as the granary of Rome. She stands for the individual experience of a prisoner’s mother as much as symbolising the Tunisian nation. In Tarātīl li-ālāmihā, two protagonists address the statue of Ibn Khaldun which, in this case, stays passive. Dunyā imagines a dialogue with him in which she reminisces about the severe loss he experienced in his personal life.[11] He lost his wife and daughters to the sea when they were on their journey to join him in Egypt.[12] Looking beyond his legacy as a historian, she seeks parallels between their personal lives. Her brother Ṭāriq, in turn, addresses the statue after he failed a teaching qualification.[13] His address to Ibn Khaldun raises education as another aspect which he influenced as a public intellectual and became known for. Both siblings visit the statue to lament their individual loss and their generation’s disillusionment. They seek advice in the imagined time of Ibn Khaldun, long before the country was colonised, and before the postcolonial regimes imposed their own measures of censorship and repression.

Published in 2006 and 2011 respectively, al-Mishraṭ and Tarātīl li-ālāmihā engage with the Tunisian public’s growing discontent on the brink of the uprisings of 2010 and 2011. Their protagonists implicitly criticise Ben Ali’s repressive regime and its violent policies. By revisiting the travelling intellectual Ibn Khaldun, however, both novels also explore a collective memory which transcends the contemporary context and links to the regional history of the Maghreb. While the novels themselves do not explicate it, the reference to a figure that has come to symbolise the precolonial Tunisian past invites contemporary readers to reflect on Tunisia as part of the Mediterranean.


Notes

[1] Kamāl  al-Riyāḥī, al-Mishraṭ: min sīrat Khadīja wa-aḥzānihā, ed. Tawfīq Bakkār, ʿUyūn al-muʿāṣara, (Tunis: Dār al-Janūb li-l-Nashr, 2006).  Rashīda al-Shārnī, Tarātīl li-ālāmihā (Tunis: Nuqūsh ʿArabiyya, 2017). Extracts of these novels have been translated into English. Kamal Riahi, “The Scalpel,” in Beirut 39: New Writing from the Arab World, ed. Samuel Shimon, A Hay Festival Project (London: Bloomsbury, 2012). Rachida Charni, “An Excerpt from the Novel ‘Hymns to her Pains.’ Transl. by Robin Moger,” Banipal,  44 (2012), 147154. I have explored these two texts from a different angle and in more detail in my PhD thesis titled „Narratives of Liberation, Emancipation, and Decoloniality in Tunisian Arabic Prose (1987-2017)“, defended on 9 October 2024 at Freie Universität Berlin (summa cum laude). I follow the transliteration system of the Journal of Arabic Literature (JAL), with the only exception of dropping the „h“ indicating „ة“.

[2] These are only two examples illustrating a generally significant interest of modern Tunisian and Arabic literature in Ibn Khaldun and his contemporaries. Further Tunisian examples include, but are not limited to ʿArūsiyya al-Nālūtī, Tamāss (Dār al-Janūb: Tunis, 1995). Examples from Arabic literature by other Maghrebi authors include, among others, Binsālim Ḥimmīsh, al-ʿAllāma (Beirut: Dār al-Ādāb, 2001). The topic further extends to many examples beyond North Africa, for example the Syrian playwright Saʿdalla Wannūs, see Edward Ziter, “Historiography as Resistance in the Later Plays of Wannous,” in The Theatre of Saʿdallah Wannous: A Critical Study of the Syrian Playwright and Public Intellectual, ed. Sonja Mejcher-Atassi and Robert Myers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021); Friederike Pannewick, “Historical Memory in Times of Decline: Saadallah Wannous and Rereading History,” in Arabic Literature. Postmodern Perspectives, ed. Angelika Neuwirth, Andreas Pflitsch and Barbara Winckler (London: Saqi, 2010).

[3] ʿAbd al-Rahman Ibn Muhammad Ibn-Khaldun, The Muqaddima: An Introduction to History, ed. Franz Rosenthal, N. J. Dawood and Bruce B. Lawrence, trans. Franz Rosenthal, Abridged edition ed., Bollingen series; Princeton classic, (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2015).

[4] Hisham Matar, A Month in Siena (London: Viking, an imprint of Penguin Books, 2019), 87.

[5] Michael Brett, Ibn Khaldun and the Medieval Maghrib, Collected studies series 627, (Aldershot: Variorum, 1999), ix.

[6] See Muṣṭafā al-Kīlānī, Mayār: sarāb al-jamājim thumma māʾ (Tunis: Dār Diyār, 2017).

[7] Al-Riyāḥī engages with the clocktower in his novel al-Ghūrīlā. Kamāl al-Riyāḥī, al-Ghūrīlā (Beirut: Dar al-Saqi, 2011).

[8] Aida Ben Achour, Das Ibn Khaldoun Denkmal in Tunis: Zwischen nationaler Identität und kollektiven Gedenken (Hamburg: Diplomica Verlag, 2012).

[9] See al-Riyāḥī 2006, 110.

[10] Ibid., 111.

[11] See al-Shārnī 2017, 147.

[12] See Allen James Fromherz, Ibn Khaldun: Life and Times (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2022), 173.

[13] See al-Shārnī 2017, 138.


References

Primary Literature

al-Shārnī, Rashīda. Tarātīl li-ālāmihā. Tunis: Nuqūsh ʿArabiyya, 2017.

Charni, Rachida. “An Excerpt from the Novel ‘Hymns to her Pains.’ Transl. by Robin Moger.” Banipal, no. 44 (2012): 147-154.

al-Riyāḥī, Kamāl al-Mishraṭ: min sīrat Khadīja wa-aḥzānihā. ʿUyūn al-muʿāṣara. Edited by Tawfīq Bakkār. Tunis: Dār al-Janūb li-l-Nashr, 2006.

Riahi, Kamal. “The Scalpel.” Translated by Kristen Hope. In Beirut 39: New Writing from the Arab World, edited by Samuel Shimon. A Hay Festival Project, 137-145. London: Bloomsbury, 2012.

Further Literary Sources

Ḥimmīsh, Binsālim. al-ʿAllāma. Beirut: Dār al-Ādāb, 2001.

al-Kīlānī, Muṣṭafā. Mayār: sarāb al-jamājim thumma māʾ. Tunis: Dār Diyār, 2017.Matar, Hisham. A Month in Siena. London: Viking, an imprint of Penguin Books, 2019.

al-Nālūtī, ʿArūsiyya. Tamāss. Dār al-Janūb: Tunis, 1995.

al-Riyāḥī, Kamāl. al-Ghūrīlā Beirut: Dar al-Saqi, 2011.

Secondary Sources

Ben Achour, Aida. Das Ibn Khaldoun Denkmal in Tunis: Zwischen nationaler Identität und kollektiven Gedenken. Hamburg: Diplomica Verlag, 2012.

Brett, Michael. Ibn Khaldun and the Medieval Maghrib. Collected studies series 627. Aldershot: Variorum, 1999.

Fromherz, Allen James. Ibn Khaldun: Life and Times. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2022. doi:10.1515/9780748642267.

Ibn-Khaldun, ʿAbd al-Rahman Ibn Muhammad. The Muqaddima: An Introduction to History. Translated by Franz Rosenthal. Bollingen series; Princeton classic. Edited by Franz Rosenthal, N. J. Dawood, and Bruce B. Lawrence. Abridged edition ed. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2015.

Pannewick, Friederike. “Historical Memory in Times of Decline: Saadallah Wannous and Rereading History.” In Arabic Literature. Postmodern Perspectives, edited by Angelika Neuwirth, Andreas Pflitsch, and Barbara Winckler, 97-109. London: Saqi, 2010.

Ziter, Edward. “Historiography as Resistance in the Later Plays of Wannous.” In The Theatre of Saʿdallah Wannous: A Critical Study of the Syrian Playwright and Public Intellectual, edited by Sonja Mejcher-Atassi, and Robert Myers, 96-118. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021.


About the Author

Hanan Natour is a Postdoctoral Researcher of Arabic and Comparative Literature at the Cluster of Excellence “Temporal Communities: Doing Literature in a Global Perspective” (Freie Universität Berlin) and an Associated Postdoctoral Fellow of the Programme Europe in the Middle East – The Middle East in Europe (EUME). She received her PhD in Arabic and Comparative Literature focusing on modern Tunisian fiction (Freie Universität Berlin, 2024, summa cum laude). Her forthcoming monograph is titled “The Tunisian Novel – Narratives of Liberation, Emancipation and Decoloniality”. Her research included five months as a visiting scholar at the University of Tunis. Together with Mohamed-Salah Omri (University of Oxford), she co-edits the first English-language volume devoted to the variety of modern Tunisian literatures titled Tunisian Literatures: Multilingual Realities, Genealogies, Testimonies (Bloomsbury, forthcoming). During her PhD, Hanan Natour served as Research Associate to the European Research Council (ERC)-funded project “PalREAD — The Reading and Reception of Palestinian Literature from 1948 to the Present”. She holds an MPhil in Modern Middle Eastern Studies (University of Oxford, 2018) and a BA in Arabic and German (University of Goettingen, 2016), which included a year of studying abroad at Université Paris-Sorbonne.


Citation: Hanan Natour, Precolonial Memory, Postcolonial Critique: Ibn Khaldun in Tunisian Arabic Fiction of the 21st Century, in: TRAFO – Blog for Transregional Research, 11.09.2025, https://trafo.hypotheses.org/61251


OpenEdition suggests that you cite this post as follows:
Forum Transregionale Studien (September 11, 2025). Precolonial Memory, Postcolonial Critique: Ibn Khaldun in Tunisian Arabic Fiction of the 21st Century. TRAFO – Blog for Transregional Research. Retrieved February 11, 2026 from https://doi.org/10.58079/14miw


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