The Crossroads of Civilizations: Sicily Under Arab Rule

When Arab forces wrested Palermo from Byzantine control in 831 CE, they acquired more than just another Mediterranean port city. Sicily represented the westernmost jewel in the expanding Islamic world, a fertile island where North African, Greek, Italian, and Arab influences would intermingle for centuries. The geographer Ibn Hawqal, born in Upper Mesopotamia and educated in Baghdad, arrived in Sicily during the 970s after three decades of travels across the Islamic world. His account provides one of the most detailed – if deeply biased – snapshots of this multicultural society at its zenith.

The Arab emirate transformed Palermo into a showpiece of Islamic urban planning and agricultural innovation. Ibn Hawqal begrudgingly acknowledged the city’s material splendor: its 300 mosques (including a converted cathedral accommodating 7,000 worshippers), bustling specialized markets, and elaborate garden irrigation systems. As the only papyrus-producing center outside Egypt, Palermo served as a crucial link in Mediterranean trade networks. Yet beneath this prosperous surface, the geographer detected what he considered shocking cultural deficiencies that would inspire him to write an entire (now lost) treatise on Sicilian ignorance.

A Traveler’s Indignation: Ibn Hawqal’s Catalogue of Complaints

What provoked such visceral disdain from this seasoned observer? Ibn Hawqal’s surviving work, The Book of the Depiction of the Earth, offers a litany of grievances against Sicilian Arabs that reads like a medieval TripAdvisor review gone spectacularly wrong. His criticisms reveal as much about 10th-century Islamic intellectual standards as they do about Sicilian society:

Intellectual Bankruptcy
The geographer lamented Palermo’s utter lack of scholars, scientists, or qualified jurists, dismissing local teachers as “fools” who only took positions to avoid military service. This critique carries particular weight considering Baghdad’s flourishing House of Wisdom and Córdoba’s emerging intellectual scene during this period.

Linguistic Crimes
Sicilian Arabic apparently offended Ibn Hawqal’s refined ears. He mocked their incorrect pronunciation and inability to engage in proper theological debates, suggesting an evolving regional dialect diverging from classical Arabic norms.

Agricultural Philistinism
While praising Sicily’s legendary fertility, Ibn Hawqal scorned the inhabitants for allegedly wasting land on onion cultivation rather than more sophisticated crops. His peculiar fixation on their raw onion consumption suggests cultural snobbery toward peasant foodways.

Legal Ignorance
The geographer accused rural Sicilians of improperly applying Islamic law, reflecting tensions between urban religious elites and countryside practices common across medieval societies.

The Baghdad Standard: Ibn Hawqal’s Cosmopolitan Perspective

To understand Ibn Hawqal’s harsh judgment, we must consider his background as a product of Abbasid Baghdad’s golden age. His travels spanned from Muslim Spain to the Indus Valley, allowing him to compare regional variations within the Dar al-Islam. Some modern scholars speculate his Sicilian sojourn came late in his journeys, when travel fatigue may have sharpened his critical edge.

The geographer’s work reflects the Abbasid worldview at its cultural apex. He meticulously compared cities by scale (noting Córdoba measured half of Baghdad’s size) and celebrated specialized regional products like Syrian nougat. His ability to traverse politically fragmented territories while maintaining a unified Islamic cultural identity speaks to the enduring legacy of early caliphal rule.

Legacy of a Scornful Observer: Reassessing Ibn Hawqal’s Account

Modern historians approach Ibn Hawqal’s account with cautious appreciation. While his descriptions of Palermo’s urban landscape prove invaluable, his cultural criticisms likely reflect elite Baghdad biases rather than objective assessment. Several factors warrant consideration:

The Agricultural Paradox
His complaint about Sicilians failing to exploit fertile land contradicts his own observation of advanced irrigation systems. Recent archaeology confirms sophisticated Arab agricultural practices in Sicily, including citrus cultivation.

Selective Reporting
The geographer omits Palermo’s renowned multicultural scholarly circles that included Jewish and Christian scholars, suggesting a deliberate focus on perceived deficiencies.

Comparative Context
Other contemporary travelers described Sicilian Arabs more favorably, indicating Ibn Hawqal’s account represents one extreme in a spectrum of perspectives.

Sicilian Islam After Ibn Hawqal: The Norman Synthesis

Ironically, the Arab culture Ibn Hawqal disparaged would profoundly influence Sicily’s next rulers. When Normans conquered the island in the 11th century, they preserved much of the Arab administrative system and architectural legacy. Palermo’s hybrid Norman-Arab style, epitomized by the Palatine Chapel, stands as testament to the vibrant culture the geographer failed to appreciate.

The very elements Ibn Hawqal criticized – regional dialect, local legal interpretations, and agricultural traditions – demonstrate how Sicilian Islam developed distinctive characteristics while remaining connected to broader Islamic intellectual currents. His account ultimately reveals more about the tensions between cosmopolitan and regional identities in the medieval Islamic world than about any inherent Sicilian shortcomings.

From our modern vantage point, Ibn Hawqal’s frustrated portrait provides priceless insights into the diversity of 10th-century Muslim societies. The very cultural variations that offended his classical Arabic sensibilities today help historians understand the dynamic, adaptive nature of Islam’s westward expansion. Palermo’s Arabs may have mangled their vowels and loved their onions, but they created one of medieval Europe’s most fascinating multicultural societies – whether Ibn Hawqal approved or not.