A sixteenth-century Muslim between worlds

Wazzan produced several works, including a text on African geography, which he wrote in Italian. Wazzan's expertise in the theology and politics of the Muslim world were also sought by military strategists in the Vatican who saw him as useful in understanding their Muslim foes.

Perhaps of most interest to readers concerned with supposed clashes of civilisations would be Davis's sixth chapter, which addresses Wazzan's "tension within himself" over his relation to his ancestral and (allegedly) adopted faiths. Unlike most of his contemporaries, Wazzan "was even-handed when it came to the religions of peoples of the book", a lack of bias that some of his "Christian translators found intolerable".

After nine years in Italy and completing numerous scholarly works, including a work on Islamic sacred law and a Hebrew-Latin-Arabic dictionary, Wazzan found himself amid the carnage that accompanied the sacking of Rome in 1527 by soldiers of Charles V. He decided to return to North Africa, settling in cosmopolitan Tunis. Not much is known of his life after that.

Davis's work is an excellent antidote to the flood of allegedly conservative polemics in Western book markets, works that treat conflict between the nominally Muslim and Christian worlds as virtually a foregone conclusion. Having seen both Christian and Muslim camps, Wazzan would have understood the clash to exist more in the imaginations of the antagonists.