Ürubba in early modern: Arabic sources

This chapter focuses on the ‘idea of Europe’ in the early modern period and how that idea was understood by those who lived just across the sea from Europeans: the Arabic-speaking peoples from Tangier to Alexandretta. Given the twentieth-and twenty-rst-century political and economic consolidation of western and central Europe, scholars have examined the historical record to see whether there was or has been a cultural ‘idea of Europe, ' too. Denys Hay (1957, 25) noted that the rst use of the term ‘Europeans’ appeared in the wake of the battle of Tours in 732, thereby suggesting that a religious-Christian idea of Europe had emerged as a result of the encounter with Islam. If such a territorial-cum-religious appellation came about as a result of the confrontation with Islam, it will be necessary to inquire whether it was an appellation that the ‘Europeans’ projected to the Muslim Arabs (and Berbers) across the sea, and whether they dened themselves to themselves as having a common “economic and cultural and legal base. .. in the western half of the old Roman Empire” (Hulme 1994, 193).