The question of mediation and defining cultural difference in diplomatic relations: Islamic embassies in Western Europe in the early modern period

What is diplomatic contact, and what modalities of same and other does it call into play? To what degree did diplomatic relations intrinsically imply the staging or dramatizing of what may well have been fictional difference, and what was the real role of the swarm of mediators that are today’s historians’ preferred focus of attention? My main question is: Is a cultural continuum from one society to the other possible, a continuum that might be revealed in the course of diplomatic interaction but above all did not pertain exclusively to diplomatic agents? In the productive, legitimate reassessment of the role of mediators and other intermediaries currently under way, may we not have marginalized the ambassadors and official envoys themselves, assigning them to a sort of functional neutrality? For if we say that official agents needed intermediaries, were dependent on mediators, that mediators were crucial if there was to be any contact at all, that suggests we think of official agents as impotent to act on their own in a foreign society, establish contact directly, as if they were frozen in their own cultural categories and cultural otherness. This explains the recurring theme of cultural misunderstanding, of a sort that may become useful, productive misunderstanding. Political distance and even political opposition and patent conflict do not necessarily, in and of themselves, imply cultural distance, though in such situations there is a tendency to see one's interlocutor as barbarian. ... On the basis of these questions, and looking at the case of Islamic embassies to Western Europe, particularly Moroccan embassies, I shall try to identify, if only roughly, a few components of the grammar of same and other operative in such situations, trying to see how relevant “mediation” was to those contacts and what meaning it had in them.

Jocelyne Dakhlia is Professor at the École des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (Center for Historical Studies), in Paris. In 1998 she has published a book on the Mediterranean Lingua Franca, Lingua franca. Histoire d’une langue métisse en Méditerranée, Arles, Actes Sud, 2008. She is currently editing with B. Vincent and W. Kaiser the two volumes of a collection, Vol 1: Les Musulmans dans l'histoire de l'Europe . Une intégration invisible, Albin Michel, 2011; Vol 2, Les Musulmans dans l'histoire de l'Europe, Passages et contacts en Méditerranée, forthcoming, october 2012. She is currently working on the history of despotism and the Harem in Morocco from the 16th to the 19th century. She has recently published Tunisie. Le pays sans bruit, Arles, Actes Sud, 2011.