Decolonial Ventures in Early Modern History

This article explores the diplomatic mission of ambassador Muḥammad b. ʿAbd al-Wahāb al-Ghassānī (d. 1707) to seventeenth-century Spain, as detailed in his account The Journey of the Minister to Ransom the Captive (1690–1691), focusing on two pertinent dimensions. First, it aspires to read his use of Ibn Khaldūn’s philosophy of history to fathom Spanish modernity, as a decolonial attempt to utilize local Islamicate epistemology in the face of an engulfing modernity whose beginning was marked by the expulsion of his ancestors from Islamic Spain (1609). Second, it underscores the burgeoning of Islamicate diplomatic ethics which were dislodged from the secular formation of diplomacy in its early modern Western conception. In light of these two arguments, this study aspires to showcase the decolonial significance of the period 1492–1609 to the study of the Islamic Maghreb, particularly as it is premised upon confronting unprobed historical presuppositions about the paradigm of decline in the writing of Islamic cultural history.