This chapter discusses an ijāza (a qualificatory ‘license’) given in 1215/1800 by Muḥammad b. ʿAbd Allāh al-Jalālī to a pupil named ʿAbd al-Qādir b. ʿAbd Allāh al-Rāshidī al-Muʿaskarī. The granter of the license was a major scholar in late 18th century Algiers, who had been appointed by Muḥammad b. ʿUthmān, the Bey of Algiers (r. 1766-1791), as director of the newly founded Madrasa Muḥammadiyya. The ijāza translated in this chapter illustrates many of the common features of an ijāza document. Aside from the usual prayers and salutations (to God, the Prophet, his family and the Companions), there is an extended exposition of the superiority of religious knowledge and the position of the ʿulamāʾ in Muslim society, as well as a brief introduction to the skills and qualities of the ijāza recipient. The author notes that the awardee had attended his classes, and emphasises that the awardee’s learned qualities had impressed him. The genealogies of both the ijāza donor, and the ijāza recipient are also clearly important, as they are noted with care.

Security measures aimed at the repression of corsairing continued apace in the wake of 1816. ‘Barbary piracy’ remained a subject of negotiation and cooperation during the late 1810s and early 1820s. It was dealt with at ambassadorial conferences in London, during meetings of the Congress of Aix-la-Chapelle (Aachen), in combined talks with the Ottoman Porte, and through an Anglo-French expedition to the coasts of North Africa. Increasingly ambitious efforts to enact maritime security and an increasingly vocal opposition to such efforts marked the eight years following the Anglo–Dutch bombardment of 1816. The authorities of the regencies managed to thwart several European security practices, ranging from concerted communications to defensive alliances. To understand the starts, stops and reversals of the fight against Mediterranean piracy, local activity needs to be analysed. This chapter foregrounds the role of actors who were deemed piratical threats. The contestations of these threatening actors influenced the shape and success of European security practices.

The Anglo-Dutch bombardment of Algiers on 27 August 1816 indicated how, after the Congress of Vienna, a new order based on collective security was taking shape, not just on the continent, but also in the Mediterranean Sea. This chapter suggests that 1816 was a moment of departure from past traditions and signified the creation of a new Mediterranean order. Defining features of that order – such as modes of cooperation, the linkage to the Congress System, the use of security as a legitimizing discourse and the important roles of smaller and non-European powers – all came into play during the Anglo–Dutch bombardment. Additionally, this Anglo–Dutch cooperation shows how various states took the lead in the fight against piracy, dependent upon the situation. There was not a single naval hegemon who executed the repressive effort. At this early stage, smaller powers initially drove the repression of ‘Barbary piracy’, later to be followed by Great Britain, Russia and France. The effort became a truly pan-European reorganisation of security in the Mediterranean.

In order to appreciate the imperial impact of the new security culture, the French invasion of Algiers in 1830 ought to be seen within the framework of the post-1815 Congress System and the Concert of Europe. Though the invasion of Algiers was essentially a unilateral action undertaken under the national flag, it nevertheless took shape through extended multinational deliberation and involved a fair share of diplomatic concertation among the different European Great Powers. French imperial aspirations became intertwined with the repression of Mediterranean piracy, which was understood as a shared, European project. In attacking Algiers, members of the French government sought to reassert the country’s position as a nation on par with the other Great Powers of the European continent. The conflict with Algiers allowed French officials to assert status through the much more ‘disinterested’, ‘European’ goal of ending piracy and bringing security to the Mediterranean Sea.

Chapter 4 resituates Cervantes’ poetics within the erotic philosophy of the sixteenth century, particularly in Judah Abravanel’s Dialoghi d’Amore ([Leone Ebreo], Rome, 1535). By 1569, Cervantes was serving in the court of the young Neapolitan nobleman Giulio Acquaviva in Rome, where Vicenzo Orsini’s gardens at Bomarzo were one of many private pastoral courts cultivated by various Italian noblemen throughout the region. Within pastoral poetics, the beloved, as embodiment of beauty, was often conceived of as the summa belleza or summum bonum in the natural world. In light of Abravanel’s influence on early modern poetics, this chapter studies Cervantes’ octavas for the Sicilian poet and fellow captive Antonio Veneziano that Cervantes wrote from Algiers and sent to Veneziano in 1579 in response to Veneziano’s own songbook, the Celia. They survive in Veneziano’s autograph manuscript (Biblioteca Centrale Regione Siciliana, Palermo) along with Veneziano’s sonnet response. This chapter concludes with Cervantes’ earliest dramaturgical work, the Trato de Argel (likely composed in Algiers or shortly upon his return to Madrid, ca. 1575–1582), in which he developed the concept of “love as faith” as transposing the religious within the confluence of Islamic and Christian beliefs. The Trato evidences figurations of intersubjectivity and female desire necessary for character formation in Cervantes’ subsequent fiction.

Given that outskirts of the city, which were mostly developed after swamplands were drained in the early twentieth century, suffered the lion’s share of the damage from the cataclysmic hurricane and levee failure of 2005, much of the writing of these areas is focused on loss and the power of writing to help one bear it. The first classic of the outskirts of the city is Walker Percy’s The Moviegoer, which is focused on trauma and the struggle to recover from it, and thereby sets the stage for the great flowering of Black-themed writing from the suburbs in recent decades by Sara Broom, Maurice Carlos Ruffin, Karisma Price, Rickey Laurentiis, Zachary Lazar, and Niyi Osundare, among many others. Many of these works, shaped by Katrina, voice anxiety about the natural environment, a theme first set forth for wide audiences in the graphic series, The Saga of the Swamp Thing, and other dystopian visions, from William Burroughs’s Naked Lunch to Moira Crane’s The Not Yet to Beyoncé’s “Formation.”

This chapter tells the story of shifting jihadist coalitions within Algeria’s civil war in the 1990s. The Armed Islamic Group (GIA) initially built a broad coalition comprising veterans of Afghanistan, veterans of an earlier domestic Algerian insurgency, local hardliners, and other armed groups that the GIA drew in. Yet at the peak of coalition-building, the death of a unifying figure set the stage for bitter infighting as the local hardliners began to exclude and even kill the leaders of other coalition blocs. Eventually, the GIA fragmented along ideological but also geographical lines, with regional field commanders revolting against the clique of leaders from Algiers and nearby Blida. The GIA splinter organization the Salafi Group for Preaching and Combat (French acronym GSPC) represented the reaction of field commanders, who wished to move away from internal purges and civilian massacres and back to fighting the Algerian state.