Abbey Stockstill, Marrakesh and the Mountains: Landscape, Urban Planning, and Identity in the Medieval Maghrib. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania University Press, 2024, 150 pages; 72 color & b/w illustrations and images.

Recent studies corroborate a significant break in the historiography of the medieval Dar al-Islam. Older treatments that we now read as Eurocentric, Orientalist, and reductive, often based more on extraordinary prejudice than attention to detail, have given way to thoughtful and careful accounts of diverse peoples populating a vast landscape. Abbey Stockhill’s exploration of the geographical setting and architectural changes in the period from the emergence of the Almoravid Dynasty (1040–1147), through to the end of the Almohad Dynasty (1147–1269) fits comfortably as a profitable contribution to this scholarly turn. Still, for all that is productive in these pages – and there is a great deal – readers may conclude their encounter wondering about the limits of what seems a speculative enterprise. Marrakesh, the fourth largest city in present-day Morocco, in the northwest of the African Maghreb, sits in a wide, arid basin at the base of the northern slopes of the Atlas Mountains. The site was an unlikely one for a medieval capital city, but it became so, first under the Almoravids, who founded the city about 1070, and again when the Almohads defeated the Almoravids in 1147 and rebuilt the city to fit their own desires. These were Berber dynasties, although the ruling elites and administrative core groups of the two dynasties had little in common. Perhaps the greatest commonality was a distrust of those Arabs who had previously ruled over them.