In From Tripolitania to Tripoli, Hafed Abdouli deals with the transition of Tripolitania from late Antiquity to the early Islamic period. He compares a detailed analysis of all the literary sources with the evaluation of the archaeological, onomastic and toponymic findings. For this purpose, he makes use of various research methodologies.
This approach brings about new results. It confirms that — contrary to what has been so far commonly assumed — the transition from the Latin-Christian Tripolitania to the Arabic-Islamic Tripoli was not sudden. There was no rigorous break that seperated the ancient from the medieval period. On the contrary, as was also the case in the rest of the Maghreb, the transition was progressive and slow at all levels of civilization. The interpretation of how this transition occurred, the mechanisms that determined it, and its reflection on the urban landscape during the early medieval period, are among the most important epistemological concerns that this book tries to answer.