“...essentially virgin area ...so far as high culture is concerned...”———LOL
Glad you caught that obviously ignorant belief of Geertz’s - apparently swallowed whole by kaplan.
You should contact him about that. I will too.
Saint Augustine was from North Africa.
To be fair, North Africa was definitely going backwards from the Roman peak, civilization-wise, when the Muslims showed up, as indeed was Western Europe. But the idea that the area was virgin territory is kind of silly.
Many of the best-preserved and most impressive Roman ruins are to be found in what is now Tunisia, Algeria and Morocco.
To some considerable extent this is because the area never rebounded and rebuilt, as Italy and Western Europe did. Nobody was building massive new cities and fortifications, so the ruins didn’t get “mined” like they did in Europe.
You can make a decent case that the reason they never did bounce back has a good deal to do with Islam.