The Maghreb

al-Maghrib (المغرب) is the noun of place from the root gh-r-b, “to set (of the sun)”: the west, the sunset-land, paired in Arabic geography with its mirror al-Mashriq, the sunrise-land of the east. Applied to Africa west of Egypt from the conquests onward, it became the fixed name of the region in Arabic geography, subdivided by the geographers into the near, middle, and farthest west, with al-Maghrib al-Aqṣā, the farthest, roughly modern Morocco, which still bears the name as a state: al-Mamlaka al-Maghribiyya, the western kingdom. The name remains in full living use.

The entry is the atlas’s clearest case of a name that is purely a bearing. Libya was a people’s name and Africa a province’s; al-Maghrib is neither, only a direction from a center, and the center was new, the Arabia and Iraq of the caliphate. To accept the name was to accept the orientation, a whole region defined for thirteen centuries by where it stood relative to someone else’s sunrise. Its exact structural twin sits at the other end of this phase of the atlas: Khurasan, “the land of the sunrise,” named from the same center facing the other way. Between them the two names sketch the caliphate’s mental map in two words, a world with its back to the Atlantic and its face to the dawn, and both edges named by the light.

The westernmost country in the Chinese record of the world, 木蘭皮 Mùlánpí, in Zhao Rukuo’s Zhufanzhi of 1225: a phonetic transcription of al-Murābiṭūn, the Almoravids, the Berber dynasty whose realm ran from the Sahara across the Maghreb into southern Spain. Zhao, superintendent of maritime trade at Quanzhou, compiled his gazetteer from the Arab merchants in his ports, and through their accounts the Chinese learned of a land at the far end of the far sea, reached by the largest ships in the world, where wheat grew in grains of extraordinary size and the sheep were as tall as donkeys; the marvels grew with every stage of the relay.

The entry belongs to the same harvest as the atlas’s Wùsīlí, Ègēntuó, and Sījiālǐyě, the Egypt, Alexandria, and Sicily that Zhao’s Arab informants gave him, and it shows the naming pattern at its limit. China did not name the Maghreb; it named what the Arabs called their own far west, a dynasty rather than a place, heard across the full width of the world. The one Chinese name for northwest Africa is thus a Berber confraternity’s Arabic title worn as a country: at maximum distance, the difference between a state, a dynasty, and a land disappears, and whatever name survives the journey becomes all three.