Culture, Society & Diaspora
Culture, Society & Diaspora
Constantine did not so much build its bridges as it was compelled to. The historic core of Constantine — often described as the capital of eastern Algeria — sits on a remarkable natural fortress: a rock plateau carved on nearly…
Henna is one of the most widely recognised symbols of Algerian celebration — and one of the least understood. To see it only as body decoration is to miss most of what it does. In Algeria, the reddish-brown paste applied…
Few sounds in Algerian life carry as much weight as zagharid (زغاريد). The high-pitched, trilling vocal call — often called youyou in everyday francophone Algerian usage — fills the air at weddings, circumcision processions, and national celebrations alike. It is…
In the summer of 430, as Vandal forces laid siege to a North African port city, one of antiquity’s most influential thinkers lay dying inside its walls. Augustine, bishop of Hippo Regius for more than three decades, had spent the…
In the winter of 1377, in a hilltop fortress in what is now western Algeria, a scholar put the finishing touches on one of the most ambitious works of intellectual history ever attempted. The text was the Muqaddimah — the…
In the autumn of 1575, a Spanish soldier named Miguel de Cervantes was sailing from Naples toward home when corsairs seized his ship in the western Mediterranean. He would not see Spain again for five years. The city where he…