Europe Through Eighteenth-Century Moroccan Eyes (Critical Essay‪)‬

This article compares two travel accounts by the eighteenth-century Moroccan ambassador Muhammad bin 'Uthman al-Miknasi. The accounts demonstrate that Arab-Muslim perceptions of the European Other were not exclusively predicated on religious premises, but on political and diplomatic relationships. A1Miknasi's negative description of Spain--unlike that of Italy, Sicily, and even Malta that had not shared in the re-conquista of 1492 and after--emanated from Spain's anti-Muslim history. History and diplomacy played a decisive role in the formation of the Arab-Muslim percpetion of the Europeans. **********