Context and Content
The provenance of Arabic literature of Mauritania and the western Sahara can most simply be defined by geography: the authors and their works within a triangle roughly demarcated in the north by the south of Morocco, in the south-east by Timbuktu on the Niger Bend, and in the south-west by the mouth of the Senegal River at the Atlantic.1 It is also a region that is culturally and, until the 20th century, politically coherent. Unlike earlier volumes in this ALA series the region is largely populated by a …