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With reference to Arabic primary sources written in the middle ages, firstly, this paper will account for North African food as a symbolic cultural system expressing local values of hospitality, bravery and manhood. It will also explore the metaphoric and symbolic significance of cynophagy as a customary practice related primarily to the belief in magic by North African Amazigh, Arabs, Christians and Jews. Moreover, the paper will try to contextualise such a practice within the broader North African cultural framework, expressing an awareness of indigenous sociocultural milieu. Secondly, the paper is designed to address the significance of North African body as an articulation of particular socio-cultural and aesthetic values. It will tackle North African gender and sex relations in a medieval Islamic context totally or partially different from the native milieu of Islam, namely Arabia. In this paper, studying and interpreting North African homosexuality as an act of hospitality will be of paramount importance. Finally, the paper will trace the links between anthropophagy, the offering of female flesh for cannibals and hospitality through scrutinising the ideological underpinnings and the socio-cultural interrelatedness. Medieval sub-Saharan anthropophagy is said to be a social behaviour that displays hospitality and kindness.
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This paper addresses the proliferation of prophetic movements and mimetic religions in medieval Islamic North Africa, focusing on the Barghwāṭa and Ghumāra tribes. It critiques medieval Arabic and Orientalist terminologies used to explain this complex issue, arguing that they fail to capture the dynamics of these movements. The paper introduces the concept of mimetic religion to interpret localized prophetic movements that emerged on the periphery of the established religion, namely Islam, retaining its structure while presenting parallel, rather than counteractive, religio-cultural projects. Drawing on primary sources, it highlights how misrule and exploitative practices by early conquerors fueled North African resistance, leading to revolutionary and prophetic movements. It challenges both medieval historiographical reductions of these movements to sectarianism and modern interpretations shaped by French colonial Orientalism, which often reduced them to ethnic or religious conflicts between Arab-Muslim conquerors and indigenous North Africans. By analyzing primary sources and questioning Orientalist biases, the paper emphasizes the interplay of political, economic, social, and cultural factors in shaping North African religious settings. Ultimately, it defines new boundaries for re-contextualizing and re-interpreting mimetic religion as expressive of a complex texture framing religious, cultural, and social nomenclature rooted in local North African indigenous heritage.
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