The Foreigners' Quarter

“In The Foreigners’ Quarter (Bab al-‘Aluj), and especially through the story of Antonio and Maria, or Reem, Hassanine Ben Ammou masterfully transports the reader to fifteenth-century Hafsid Tunis, a city open to the Mediterranean and to the goods, peoples, and cultures it carried to its shores. William Granara, with his deep knowledge of Tunisia and the Mediterranean, renders this journey into English with elegance and fluency. Historical fiction requires not only imagination and literary skill, but also an intimate knowledge of history, customs, and social worlds, qualities that both the author and the translator display with remarkable success.” – Houssem E. Chachia, Associate Professor of Early Modern History, University of Tunis“The Foreigners’ Quarter by Tunisian Hasaneen Ben Ammou is the portrait of a vibrant, cosmopolitan Mediterranean city run by an ambitious dynasty in the fifteenth century. On the canvass of this city, we read stories of politics and business, sprinkled with an imaginary of harems and love stories. In the fifteenth century, Tunis was at the heart of Mediterranean politics and commerce and trafficking, and the novel does justice to that. William Granara conveys this time and sense of place to the Anglophone reader in a smooth, fluent read, unencumbered by lengthy notes and commentary. The Foreigners’ Quarter should be of interest to students of the Mediterranean, historical fiction, and the under-translated Tunisian and Maghreb literatures. The writer, Hassaneen Ben Ammou is the leading figure in Tunisian historical fiction, with a celebrity status among readers and the media in his home country. His novel recalls times of ethnic and religious conflict as well as confluence, with an eye on the fractured times we live in.” – Mohamed-Salah, Professor of Arabic and Comparative Literature, University of Oxford

Hasanein Ben Ammou

Hasanein Ben Ammou is a leading Tunisian novelist and visual artist born in Dar Chaabane in 1948. He spearheaded the new Arabic historical novel in Tunisia and has published more than a dozen historical novels that deal with late medieval and early modern Tunisian history, some of which have been adopted for television and radio. He is the recipient of the prestigious Tunisia Novel Grand Prize for Eternal Sunset (al-Ghurūb al-khālid) in 2007. Critics and readers compare his novels to those of Jurji Zaydan (d. 1914), founder of the Arabic historical novel.

William Granara

William Granara is research professor of Arabic and Comparative Literature at Harvard University. He specializes in the literature and history of the Arab Mediterranean in both the medieval and modern periods. He translated several novels from Arabic, including The Earthquake (2000), Granada (2004), and The Battle of Poitiers (2011). He is also the author of Narrating Muslim Sicily: War and Peace in the Medieval Mediterranean World (2019), Ibn Hamdis the Sicilian: Eulogist for a Falling Homeland (2021) and is co-editor of The Thousand and One Nights: Sources and Transformations in Literature, Art, and Science (2020).

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