Culture, Society & Diaspora
Culture, Society & Diaspora
Our signature section that explores the historical and cultural links between Algeria and the wider world, highlighting figures or events with global significance.
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…
A second-century writer born at Madauros — modern M’Daourouch in Souk Ahras Province — not only called himself “half Numidian, half Gaetulian” in his own defence speech, but smuggled his hometown into the closing pages of his novel when a…