Egypt through Maghrebi eyes. Al-'Abdari's Rihla between Ibn Jubayr and Ibn Khaldun

This paper focuses on the image of Egypt and its inhabitants in the Rihla of al-‘Abdari, a thirteenth century Moroccan traveller. His unprecedented disparaging criticism against the people of Alexandria and Cairo is analyzed through a comparison with other medieval authors, not only travellers, while the words he uses to express his admiration for the Turks, at the time the lords of Egypt, is seen as a precedent of the evaluation of the Mamluk phenomenon, which will be found, one hundred years later, in Ibn Khaldun’s Kitab al-‘Ibar. The analysis aims to contribute to the issue of the construction of boundaries within cultures and more precisely to a comparative history of the mutual perception between the east and the west of the Muslim world in the middle ages, in which Egypt – the first “oriental” region of Islam in the eyes of Maghrebi authors – plays a pivotal role.