Abstract
This thesis draws on the rich primary and secondary literature that highlights and analyzes how Muslims and Islamic institutions encountered the West in a period of intense confrontations. It offers a glimpse of how Muslim writers of the 11th/ 12th century interacted with nations such as the Franks, the Galicians, the Slavs and others and how these interactions were imagined and represented. These nations and their communities were imagined and represented in very interesting ways especially as juxtaposed against the ways of the Islamicate world. It argue that, for the most part, northern Europe, the home of Latin Christendom, was viewed with a curious indifference and neglect and that the main reason for this was the belief that there was little or nothing to be learned from their civilization. Nevertheless, when encounters between the Islamicate world and the “lands of the north” we recognize today as Europe became difficult to ignore, explicit disapproval and derogation was common on the Muslims’ part. These patterns when placed in their historical context of trade, cultural exchanges, war and truce seem less peculiar and more a product of struggles and motivations that can only be partially uncovered.