Mosaic thinking — Carthage as a proof of concept!

In the face of divisions over French identity and fruitless debates on Islam, this essay proposes a third way. From Clitomachus to Youssef Seddik, via Augustine, Ibn Khaldun and Camus, it reinterprets the Maghreb and Mediterranean borderlands as the cradle of a mosaic-like way of thinking, useful for reflecting on our contemporary complexities.

I. Paris burns, London celebrates

On the evening of 30 May 2026, Paris Saint-Germain won the Champions League. A victory that should have been a national celebration: the second consecutive European title for a club at the peak of its powers. A few days earlier, in London, Arsenal had celebrated winning the English Premier League title after a twenty-year wait. Supporters had taken to the streets, drinking, singing and weeping with joy, before heading home. No cars were set alight. No smashed shop windows. No police charges. Elsewhere in Europe, in Poland, Wisła Kraków supporters also celebrated their club’s promotion in the streets of Kraków, in a lively, festive atmosphere without any major disturbances: no significant incidents, no scenes of chaos, none of that sense of a celebration immediately threatened by violence.

In Paris, the celebrations have turned into clashes. The Champs-Élysées has become a battlefield. Hundreds have been arrested, dozens injured, and the images are being seen around the world. Once again, the same question arises: why is France no longer able to celebrate its great victories without violence?

The answer is uncomfortable, because it forces us to face up to what the country often prefers to avoid. It is not merely a question of public safety; it is a question of social cohesion. It is not merely a question of hooliganism; it is a question of belonging. A section of French youth does not experience these victories as moments of national unity, but as opportunities to symbolically settle scores with a country in which they do not fully recognise themselves.

France is divided. And at the heart of this divide lies an issue that neither the left nor the right knows how to address honestly: that of Islam in France, its place in the national identity, and, even more profoundly, the narrative into which the millions of French people of Maghreb and Muslim heritage can fit.

The false debate

The usual response takes two equally fruitless forms.
On the one hand, the apologetic response: Islam is a religion of peace and tolerance; Muslims in France are citizens just like everyone else; stigmatisation is unfair. All of this is true, but politically insufficient. The far right will always respond with images of violence, cherry-picked statistics, and facts—whether real or fabricated. The battle for reputation is a lost cause for anyone seeking to defend Islam against its caricatures.

On the other hand, there is the repressive response: more checks, more surveillance, a tougher stance. Whilst this may sometimes address public order concerns, it does not resolve the underlying issues. On the contrary, it reinforces, amongst some young people in working-class neighbourhoods, the idea that their presence is perceived first and foremost as a threat.
Both these responses share the same flaw: they treat Islam in France as a problem to be managed rather than as a sense of belonging to be embedded within a shared history.

The third way

There is a third way, one that is more intellectually demanding and politically fruitful. It does not consist of convincing people that Islam is ‘acceptable’. It consists of showing that Islam, Christianity and Judaism share the same Mediterranean roots, a common historical depth, and ancient connections that predate modern categories of identity and transcend them.
Not Islam versus France. Not Islam tolerated by France. But Islam, Christianity and Judaism as three expressions of the same Mediterranean world, of which Carthage was, for centuries, one of the most fruitful testing grounds. It is this project to restore a shared memory that we refer to here as ‘mosaic thinking’.

The misguided argument

It may be argued that Carthage is too local an example to address crises as vast as those facing contemporary Islam. A young person from Clichy-sous-Bois will not automatically feel a connection to Clitomachus of Carthage. An Indonesian from Surabaya has no genealogical link to Carthage. Jihadism, Salafism and the divisions in the French suburbs stem from historical, social and theological dynamics on an entirely different scale.

The objection is correct in what it states, but mistaken in what it assumes. Mosaic thought does not claim to be a comprehensive cure for political Islam. It offers something more modest and more solid: a proof of concept. It reminds us, through actual history, that a certain way of living with plurality has existed, that it has produced major works, that it has spanned languages, religions and centuries, and that it can therefore once again become an intellectual resource.

Mosaic thought does not assert in the abstract that plurality is possible; it shows that it has already taken place.

II. What Braudel allows us to say

Fernand Braudel has shown that mountains, seas, roads and trade shape, over the long term, the ways in which people live, trade and think. Geography does not explain everything. It does not dictate ideas. But it creates frameworks of experience, constraints, flows, neighbourhoods and tensions that make certain forms of thought more likely.

It is in this spirit that we must understand Carthage: not as the source of an exportable doctrine, but as a historical centre where a certain way of inhabiting the Mediterranean world and of thinking about its complexity was developed.
Carthage is not a cause of ideas. It is a matrix of intellectual experiences.

This Braudelian perspective is crucial, as it allows us to reconcile two seemingly contradictory assertions: Carthage is unique, rooted in a specific geography, history, languages and proper names; yet it is universally instructive, because the structure of experience it reveals – plurality, circulation, conflict, hybridisation without fusion – is found elsewhere, in other forms.

III. Carthage as an epistemological laboratory

Why Carthage rather than Athens, Rome or Alexandria?

Because Carthage occupies a unique position. Founded by Phoenicians from Tyre in the 9th century BCE on Berber soil, it quickly became the major commercial and cultural hub of the western Mediterranean. Neither East nor West, neither Asia nor Europe, it was a point of tension and exchange between the worlds. It traded with the Greeks whilst resisting them, engaged in dialogue with Rome whilst challenging it, and coexisted with the Berber populations of the interior whilst integrating them.

This position creates a particular epistemological condition. Anyone thinking from the perspective of Carthage cannot easily take refuge in absolute certainty. They see too many competing truths being asserted with equal conviction. They therefore develop, through experience even before turning it into a doctrine, a tolerance for uncertainty.

This is the very heart of mosaic thought.

Like the mosaic itself – this art of assembled fragments – this way of thinking does not merge differences. It does not dissolve the tesserae into a uniform mass. It keeps them distinct, with their colour, their hardness, their origin, but arranges them in such a way as to produce an image that no single fragment contained on its own.

A mosaic is neither purity nor confusion. It is composition.

And it is here that Valéry’s phrase takes on its full significance. But Mediterranean light is not a light that homogenises. It does not blur the contours; it accentuates them. In this light, each tessera retains its own colour, its hardness, its origin. It is not the light of fusion, but that of clear distinction; the light that allows us to see, precisely, that the fragments are different, and that it is their combined difference that produces the image.

This is why mosaic thinking is not syncretism. It does not dissolve religions into a vague spirituality, languages into a cultural Esperanto, or identities into an abstract ‘Mediterranean-ness’. It keeps tensions visible. It works with contrasts rather than softening them.

IV. The tesserae: five figures of a constellation

Clitomachus of Carthage — The founding suspension

Clitomachus of Carthage, born Hasdrubal, arrived in Athens in the 2nd century BCE with an already solid philosophical grounding. A disciple of Carneades, he became the first non-Greek to head the Academy. His central contribution was the formalisation of epoché: the suspension of judgement in the face of that which one can neither affirm nor deny with certainty. But Clitomachus did not stop at scepticism. He demonstrated that one can act on the basis of probabilities without claiming to possess absolute truth. He thus established a lucid form of probabilism: neither dogmatism nor paralysis, but action amidst uncertainty. This stance stemmed from a man educated across multiple languages and systems of thought. For him, the suspension of judgement is not an intellectual retreat. It is a commitment to the complexity of reality. Clitomachus is the founding tessera: without him, the constellation has no centre of gravity.

Augustine of Hippo — Doubt as a Path to Inwardness

He has been made the Father of the Church, the theologian of grace. He is. But before that, Augustine was a Berber from Thagaste who passed through Manichaeism, Academic skepticism, Neoplatonism, and finally Christianity. This journey is not incidental: it is the very structure of his thought. The Confessions tell the story of a consciousness moving through contradictory truths, refusing to settle too early, keeping uncertainty open until an inner certainty imposes itself. For Augustine, truth does not arrive as an external dogmatic closure. It is sought within the very movement of the self. Augustine read and engaged with Academic skepticism; it is not enough, in itself, to establish a continuous tradition, but it shows that a textual circulation did indeed exist between ancient Carthaginian philosophy and North African Christian thought. He is the tessera that proves the constellation crosses centuries and confessions.

Ibn Khaldun — The Science of the Becoming of Civilizations

Ibn Khaldun was born in Tunis in the fourteenth century into an Andalusian family settled in North Africa. With the Muqaddimah, he founded a philosophy of history that rejects both simplistic providentialism and monocausal explanations. His notion of ‘asabiyya — social cohesion, group solidarity — speaks directly to the central question of every mosaic society: what holds disparate fragments together? The answer is not essence, but the bond. A civilization endures not because it is homogeneous, but because its groups are able, for a time, to produce a solidarity strong enough to transcend their divisions. Ibn Khaldun is the most political thinker in this constellation: he transforms the mosaic intuition into a science of historical becoming. He is the tessera without which the constellation remains philosophical without becoming political.

Albert Camus — The Absurd as a Modern Epoché

French Algerian, neither entirely European nor fully Algerian, raised in the poverty of Belcourt, trained in Greek philosophy by Jean Grenier, Camus thinks from a place of fracture. His notion of the absurd can be read as a modern reformulation of the epoché: faced with a world that does not answer the questions posed to it, he rejects resignation, nihilism, and the leap into an artificial certainty alike. One must imagine Sisyphus happy, not because his condition is a good one, but because lucidity is already a form of freedom. Camus adds an irreplaceable ethical dimension to mosaic thought: the refusal of false syntheses, dogmatic consolations, and narratives that resolve things too easily. In his work, plurality is no longer merely a historical condition; it becomes an ethic of measure.

Youssef Seddik — The Contemporary Link

A Tunisian philosopher and scholar of Islam, Youssef Seddik proposes a reading of the Qur’an as an open, polyphonic text, traversed by layers of meaning. He rejects both the literalism that freezes the text and the Orientalism that reduces its depth. His approach is a mosaic reading of Islam: it embraces layers, tensions, and openings, and keeps the text alive precisely because it refuses to imprison it. Seddik does not mechanically extend the thought of Clitomachus, Augustine, or Ibn Khaldun. But from the same historical space, he reactivates the same intellectual disposition: to think faith, text, and identity through plurality rather than against it. He is the tessera without which the constellation would remain in the past; the one who proves that this intellectual disposition is still alive, still possible, still necessary.

V. The Binding Agent: What Makes a Constellation

These figures do not constitute a school in the strict sense. They did not all read one another. They do not belong to a continuous and institutionalized tradition. What connects them, therefore, is not linear transmission, but recurrence: the recurrence of certain intellectual attitudes produced by the same kind of historical experience.

Four traits return with particular force.

First, the refusal of dogmatic closure. Clitomachus suspends judgment. Augustine seeks before he believes. Ibn Khaldun rejects simplistic explanations. Camus distrusts systems. Seddik keeps the text open.

Second, action under uncertainty. None of these thinkers is content merely to doubt. All seek a way of acting despite the instability of the world: Clitomachus’s probabilism, Augustine’s quest, Ibn Khaldun’s ‘asabiyya, Camus’s revolt are all responses to uncertainty.

Third, stratification as a source of richness. These thinkers do not seek to erase the layers that came before. Augustine carries within himself the Manichaean, the skeptic, and the Neoplatonist he once was. Camus carries Greece, France, and Algeria within himself. The mosaic does not melt down its tesserae; it arranges them.

Finally, measure against excess. Against fanaticism, nihilism, and immoderation, this constellation maintains a form of Mediterranean wisdom of limits. Not tepidness, but lucidity. Not resignation, but a refusal of murderous absolutes.

VI. The Real Reach: Local and Universal

Mosaic thought will not solve Indonesian jihadism, nor by itself answer the internal tensions of global Sunni theology, nor spontaneously transform a young person from a French banlieue. To claim otherwise would be a deception.

Its primary reach is local: to restore to Tunisians, Maghrebis, and, more broadly, North African societies a historical depth that has been confiscated from them twice.

First, by the colonial narrative, which instrumentalizes Augustine, turning him into a mere outpost of the West and erasing the specifically Berber contribution to universal thought. And second, by the Islamist narrative, which tends to make history begin with the Arab conquest of 647, as though everything that preceded it were insignificant or impure.

Mosaic thought proposes something else: a stratified identity rather than a besieged one. It recalls that this soil produced, before and after Islam, forms of thought of universal richness. It enables North African societies to think of themselves not as peripheries of the East or the West, but as historical centers of intellectual production.

Its universal reach is indirect. If Tunisia, and the Maghreb more broadly, rehabilitate this constellation and build upon it a coherent intellectual modernity, they may become a visible precedent. Not a model that can be mechanically exported, but a living demonstration: a Muslim and Mediterranean society can embrace its Islamic heritage without erasing its Christian, Jewish, Berber, Punic, Greek, and Roman layers. That is where its strength lies: not in proclaiming plurality, but in embodying it. And it is precisely this embodiment that is missing today, three thousand kilometers from Carthage.

VII. The Bridge: From Carthage to the Champs-Élysées

Those three thousand kilometers bring us back to the Champs-Élysées. Not by metaphor, but by logic. If the fracture visible in the streets of Paris on the evening of May 30 is a narrative fracture before it is a security fracture, then the question is not: how do we contain the violence? It is: what narrative can replace the one that is missing? That narrative will not come from Brussels or the Place Beauvau. If it comes at all, it will come from the ability of Mediterranean societies themselves to produce a genealogy worthy of them — historically true, intellectually demanding, and irreducible to the uses that both Salafism and the far right might make of it.

The problem of Islam in France is not merely security-related, social, or administrative. It is also narrative. Many young French people of North African or Muslim background today have access to little more than a poor and polarized range of identities.

On one side, Salafism offers them a clear genealogy: you belong to a pure, universal, thousand-year-old tradition, superior to national borders and social humiliations. Never mind that you are discriminated against, poorly housed, looked down upon: you are the heir to a civilization. This offer is powerful because it answers a real need: the need to belong to something greater than oneself.

On the other side, official republican Islam often puts forward a defensive, almost administrative narrative: prove your loyalty, reassure, condemn, apologize for existing. Between the closed genealogy of Salafism and the defensive integration of official Islam, there is a void.

Mosaic thought can help fill that void. It unfolds another genealogy: not pure, closed, and literalist, but plural, Mediterranean, and historically rooted. It says to a young French person of North African origin: your intellectual ancestors are not only the Companions of the Prophet or the jurists of Medina; they are also Augustine the Berber, Clitomachus the Carthaginian, Ibn Khaldun the Tunisian, Camus the Algerian. They thought from within a world of tensions, crossings, languages, and multiple faiths. They did not turn this into an identity wound, but into a philosophical strength.

This genealogy does not erase Islam. It places it within a longer, richer continuity, one that is more difficult for literalism to instrumentalize. It offers a form of belonging compatible with republican complexity.

Of course, a narrative does not eliminate unemployment, discrimination, racial profiling, or urban fractures. These realities demand political, social, and economic responses. But societies are held together not only by public policy. They are also held together by shared narratives.

A young person who sees himself as the heir to a closed and besieged tradition will more readily experience France as a foreign space. A young person who sees himself as the heir to a mosaic matrix — in which Islam stands alongside Berber Christianity, North African Judaism, Greek philosophy, and Mediterranean history — may more readily inscribe his French belonging within a depth that does not require him to amputate any part of himself.

This is not naïveté. It is cultural politics in the most serious sense of the term: the battle of narratives that precedes and conditions many other battles.

Why does this narrative not yet exist? Because no one has truly constructed it. Salafism has had access to funding, networks, mosques, satellite channels, and digital platforms. The French far right has an interest in keeping Islam in a position of permanent otherness. Republican elites, for their part, have too often reduced the question to the abstract defense of laïcité, without understanding that a nation is transmitted not only through principles, but also through a shared inheritance.

To rehabilitate mosaic thought, then, is to fill a narrative void with something true: names, places, dates, texts, a soil.

Carthage will not heal the Champs-Élysées in a single generation. But it can offer part of the French youth of North African origin something they are sorely lacking: a genealogy that is dignified, plural, and irreducibly Mediterranean.

VIII. Conclusion

The soil does not dictate ideas. But certain places create conditions of possibility for certain forms of thought. They offer a horizon of experiences, encounters, and shared problems that reappear, across the centuries, in authors who may otherwise seem profoundly different.

Carthage is one such place. Not the source of a single doctrine. Not a continuous tradition in the strict sense. A matrix: a historical locus in which, at several moments, a particular way of inhabiting Mediterranean plurality has been forged without turning it either into a wound or into dissolution.

Clitomachus, Augustine, Ibn Khaldun, Camus, and Seddik do not say the same thing. They do not constitute a school. But they draw a constellation: that of a form of thought that refuses dogmatic closure, embraces uncertainty, acts despite doubt, preserves the layers of identity, and seeks measure against excess.

This constellation is not a utopia. It has already produced works. It has crossed religions, languages, and centuries without becoming fixed within any one of them. That is precisely what utopias cannot say of themselves.

But a proof of concept becomes a political resource only on one condition: that we decide to transmit it. Salafism has had access to funding, networks, and platforms. The far right has an interest in keeping Islam in a position of permanent otherness. Between these two symmetrical enterprises of closure, mosaic thought has only what it has always had on its side: the truth of its soil, the richness of its names, and the quiet strength of things that have already happened.

The mosaic of Carthage is not waiting to be invented. It is waiting for those who will carry it forward.