Islamic Medievalism and Mobility in Mathias Énard's Street of Thieves

Abstract

Set against the backdrop of the Arab Spring uprisings, Jihadist extremism, and the neoliberal exploitation of the Global South, Mathias Énard's 2012 novel Street of Thieves (Rue des voleurs) follows the fortunes of Lakhdar, a young man from Tangier who finds himself living as an undocumented migrant in Barcelona's notorious Carrer d’En Robador, the Street of Thieves. Lakhdar's misadventures are shaped by regional and global forces which have compelled Moroccan nationals to seek political and economic asylum in Mediterranean Europe. Although Street of Thieves is strikingly contemporary, this essay explores the novel's medievalism: its contrasting of the grim present with the premodern Islamic world as an era of sophistication, mobility and cultural exchange. The essay focuses on Lakhdar's preoccupation with his fellow Tangier native Ibn Battuta, the fourteenth-century traveler and writer whose life becomes a frame through which Lakhdar views his own. It argues that contrary to the current tendency to view Ibn Battuta's world as a precursor to modern globalised culture, Énard's novel invokes cosmopolitan Islamic premodernity to comment on the turmoil of the modern Islamosphere and the harm done to the Islamicate world by Western neo-colonialism and neoliberalism.