Trickster Travels Book Report

The key figure in Natalie Zemon Davis’ Trickster Travels: A Sixteenth-Century Muslim Between Worlds is Leo Africanus, who was born al-Hasan al-Wazzan in Islamic Granada, Spain around 1486-88 to a relatively well-off Muslim family. Soon after his birth, his family moved to Muslim governed Fez, Morocco—where he learned to recite Qur’an by heart and attended school. His personal prowess and political connections allowed him to travel extensively (possibly as far as Timbuktu) on diplomatic missions for the sultan of Fez and in the entourage of Muhammad al-Burtuqali. During one of his voyages across the Mediterranean, in 1518, the well-educated al-Wazzan was captured by Christian pirates and was given to Pope Leo X, due to his exceptional intelligence—swiftly

Internally, he remained a son of the religion of his birth, while pursuing scholarly avenues in Europe, translating the biblical text into Arabic and the Qur’an into Latin and Italian, explains Davis. She uses Description as evidence. For example, his silence regarding the curse of blackness and enslavement upon the descendants of Ham—believed to be Africans—that can be found in the book of Genesis (the Pentateuch), but not in the Qur’an. “[H]e found the curse ridiculous and wholly ungrounded in the Pentateuch,” infers Davis, as his Islamic background dictated. Leo hypothesized Africans had an “entangled ancestry,” find no need to categorize them in terms of enslavement or skin color. At many points, Davis actively uses the Leo’s manuscripts and larger contextual evidence (continuously citing numerous secondary sources) to convincingly explain how one might understand his outlook and why he acted certain ways. However, like the evidence of the life of Leo Africanus, there are extensive gaps in Davis’ narrative, although she attempts to fill them