A novel of mid-15th century Venice and Tunisia

When young Venetian ne’er-do-well Antonio is stricken with love at first sight of the aristocratic Maria, his schemes to win her affections are met with disdainful rejection. Days later, the two are kidnapped by pirates during Carnival celebrations and hauled onto a ship headed to the coast of Tunisia and sold to slave traders. Thus begins their new life as foreign captives (‘iluj) in mid-15th century Tunisia, but on drastically divergent trajectories.

With her natural beauty and noble breeding, Maria finds herself in the royal harem where she will rise as queen consort and mother to two sultans. Antonio drifts from prison to vagabondage, surviving through the kindness of friends and patrons despite his obsessive and delusory love for Maria that leads to failures in business, addiction, and eventual madness.

Hasanein Ben Ammou’s The Foreigners’ Quarter is the saga of a new quarter of late-medieval Tunis medina as site of a European migration of captives, political and religious exiles, pirates, soldiers, diplomats and merchants who navigate their way to a new world that juggles religious and ethnic tolerance, financial opportunities, and the Hafsid dynasty’s battles with rival kinsmen, rebellious tribesmen, and external enemies.

Against the pairing of Antonio and Maria as would-be lovers in the vein of the Arabian romantic legend of Majnun Layla, The Foreigners’ Quarter is a novel that draws from the real-life history of the Mediterranean world rocked by the Spanish Reconquest and the expulsion of Muslims and Jews from the Iberian Peninsula on the one hand, and the subsequent rise of Christian-Ottoman rivalries on the other.

By evoking actual events, places and characters, Ben Amou crafts a novel cast in the shadow of the Andalusian “myth of inter-faith utopia” to tell the story of hostility and the sharing of a common life that foresees a modern, multi-ethnic Mediterranean Tunisian identity and nation.