Mosaic Thinking — Carthage as a Proof of Concept

I. Paris Burns, London Celebrates

On the evening of May 30, 2026, Paris Saint-Germain won the Champions League. It was 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 its English Premier League title after a twenty-year wait. Hundreds of arrests, dozens of injuries, images circulating around the world. Once again, the same question arises: Why can’t France celebrate its great victories without chaos anymore?
The answer is uncomfortable, because it forces us to confront what the country often prefers to avoid. It’s not just a matter of public safety; it’s a matter of social cohesion.

This isn’t just a matter of hooliganism; it’s a matter of belonging. Some French youth do 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 recognize 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 world descent can fit.

The False Debate

The usual response takes two equally unproductive forms. The usual response takes two equally unproductive forms. On the one hand, there is the apologetic response: Islam is a religion of peace and tolerance; Muslims in France are citizens just like everyone else; and stigmatization 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.

When it comes to reputation, the battle is lost before it even begins for anyone who wants to defend Islam against its caricatures.
On the other hand, there is the repressive response: more checks, more surveillance, a tougher stance. While this may sometimes address public order concerns, it does not resolve the underlying issues.

On the contrary, it reinforces, among some young people in working-class neighborhoods, the idea that their presence is primarily perceived as a threat. Both of these responses share the same flaw: they treat Islam in France as a problem to be managed rather than as a sense of belonging that is part of 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 fertile testing grounds. It is this project to restore a shared memory that we refer to here as “mosaic thought.”

The Unfair Trial

One might object that Carthage is too localized to address crises as vast as those of contemporary Islam. A young person from Clichy-sous-Bois will not spontaneously feel a connection to Clitomachus of Carthage. An Indonesian from Surabaya has no genealogical ties to Carthage. Jihadism, Salafism, and the divisions in French suburbs stem from historical, social, and theological dynamics on an entirely different scale.

The objection is correct in what it states, but incorrect in what it assumes. Mosaic thinking 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 navigating 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 thinking does not merely assert in the abstract that plurality is possible; it shows that it has already occurred.

II. What Braudel Allows Us to Say

Fernand Braudel has shown that mountains, seas, roads, and trade shape ways of living, trading, and thinking over the long term. Geography does not explain everything. It does not dictate ideas. But it creates frameworks for experience, constraints, patterns of movement, neighboring communities, and tensions that make certain forms of thought more likely.

It is in this spirit that Carthage must be understood: not as the source of an exportable doctrine, but as a historical center where a certain way of inhabiting the Mediterranean world and of conceiving its complexity took shape.

Carthage is not a source of ideas. It is a crucible of intellectual experiences.

This Braudelian perspective is decisive, 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, hybridization without fusion—is found elsewhere, in other forms.

It is not, therefore, a matter of claiming that there is a continuous Carthaginian tradition, transmitted without interruption from Clitomachus to Camus. That would be historically excessive. Rather, the aim is to identify an intellectual constellation: different thinkers, separated by centuries, but all grappling with the same fundamental problem: how to think from a pluralistic standpoint without dissolving into relativism or taking refuge in dogmatism.

Paul Valéry wrote that the Mediterranean is the only sea that has enriched so many different minds with the same light. The phrase is poetic, but it captures something essential: certain places do not determine ideas; they simply expose them to the same light.

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 worlds.

It traded with the Greeks while resisting them, engaged in dialogue with Rome while challenging it, and coexisted with the Berber populations of the interior while integrating them.

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

This is the heart of mosaic thinking. 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 color, their hardness, their origin, but arranges them in such a way as to produce an image that no single fragment contained on its own.
The mosaic is neither purity nor confusion. It is composition.

And this is where Valéry’s phrase takes on its full meaning. But Mediterranean light is not a light that homogenizes. It does not erase contours; it accentuates them. In this light, each tessera retains its own color, 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.

That is why Mosaic thought 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 the tensions visible. It works with contrasts rather than smoothing them over.

IV. The Tesserae: Five Figures of a Constellation

Clitomachus of Carthage — The Foundational Suspension

Clitomachus of Carthage, born Hasdrubal, arrived in Athens in the 2nd century BCE with an already solid philosophical background. A disciple of Carneades, he became the first non-Greek to lead the Academy. His central contribution was the formalization of epochē: the suspension of judgment regarding matters that cannot be affirmed or denied with certainty. But Clitomachus does not stop at skepticism. He shows that one can act on probabilities without claiming to possess absolute truth.

He thus establishes a lucid probabilism: neither dogmatism nor paralysis, but action in the face of uncertainty. This stance comes from a man educated in multiple languages and systems of thought. For him, suspending judgment is not an intellectual retreat. It is a commitment to the complexity of reality. Clitomaque is the foundational tessera: without it, the constellation has no center of gravity.

Augustine of Hippo — Doubt as a Path to Inner Life

He has been hailed as the Father of the Church, the theologian of grace. And he is. But before that, Augustine was a Berber from Thagaste who explored Manichaeism, academic skepticism, Neoplatonism, and then Christianity. This journey is not merely anecdotal: it is the very structure of his thought. The Confessions recount a consciousness that navigates contradictory truths, refuses to settle too soon, and maintains an open-ended uncertainty.

For Augustine, truth does not come as an external, dogmatic boundary. It is sought within the very movement of the subject. Augustine read and discussed academic skepticism; while this is not enough to establish a continuous tradition, it does show that a textual exchange did indeed exist between ancient Carthaginian philosophy and North African Christian thought. It is the piece of the puzzle that proves this constellation spans the centuries and denominations.

Ibn Khaldun — The Science of the Evolution of Civilizations

Ibn Khaldun was born in Tunis in the 14th century to an Andalusian family that had settled in North Africa. With the Muqaddima, he established a philosophy of history that rejects both simplistic providentialism and monocausal explanations. His concept of ‘asabiyya—social cohesion, group solidarity—directly addresses the central question of any mosaic society: what holds disparate fragments together ?

The answer is not the essence, but the bond. A civilization does not endure because it is homogeneous; it endures because its groups manage, for a time, to forge a bond 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 piece without which the constellation remains philosophical without becoming political.

Albert Camus — The Absurd as a Modern Epoché

A Frenchman from Algeria—neither wholly European nor fully Algerian—raised in poverty in Belcourt and trained in Greek philosophy by Jean Grenier, Camus thinks from a place of rupture. His concept of the absurd can be interpreted 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 artificial certainty alike. We must imagine Sisyphus as 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 the mosaic of thought: the rejection of false syntheses, dogmatic consolations, and narratives that offer overly simplistic solutions. For him, plurality is no longer merely a historical condition; it becomes a morality of moderation.

Youssef Seddik — The Contemporary Link

A Tunisian philosopher and Islamic scholar, Youssef Seddik offers an interpretation of the Quran as an open, polyphonic text permeated by layers of meaning. He rejects both literalism, which freezes the text, and Orientalism, which reduces its depth.

His approach is a mosaic-like reading of Islam: it acknowledges the layers, tensions, and openings, and keeps the text alive by refusing to confine it. Seddik does not mechanically follow in the footsteps of Clitomachus, Augustine, or Ibn Khaldun. Rather, from within the same historical context, he revives a shared intellectual approach: reflecting on faith, the text, and identity from the perspective of plurality rather than in opposition to it. He is the missing piece without which the constellation would remain a thing of the past; the one who proves that this intellectual disposition is still alive, still possible, still necessary.

V. The Binding Force: What Forms a Constellation

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

Four traits recur with particular force.

First, the rejection of dogmatic closure. Clitomachus suspends judgment. Augustine seeks before believing. Ibn Khaldun rejects simplistic explanations. Camus is wary of systems. Seddik keeps the text open.

Second, action in the face of uncertainty. None of these thinkers is content merely to doubt.

All are seeking a way to act in the face of the world’s instability: Clitomachus’s probabilism, the Augustinian quest, Ibn Khaldun’s ‘asabiyya, and Camus’s revolt are all responses to uncertainty.
Third, stratification as a source of richness. These thinkers do not seek to erase earlier layers. Augustine retains within himself the Manichaean, the skeptic, and the Neoplatonist he once was. Camus carries within him Greece, France, and Algeria. The mosaic does not melt its tesserae together; she arranges them.

Finally, moderation in the face of excess. In opposition to fanaticism, nihilism, and excess, this constellation upholds a form of Mediterranean wisdom centered on boundaries. Not lukewarmness, but clarity. Not resignation, but a rejection of deadly absolutes.

VI. The Actual Scope: Local and Universal

Mosaic thinking does not resolve Indonesian jihadism, does not by itself address the internal tensions within global Sunni theology, and will not spontaneously transform a young person from the French suburbs. To claim otherwise would be a sham.
Its primary scope is local: to restore to Tunisians, North Africans, and more broadly to North African societies a historical depth that has been taken from them twice.

Through the colonial narrative, which exploits Augustine to portray him as a mere outpost of the West and erases the distinctly Berber contribution to universal thought. And through the Islamist narrative, which tends to make history begin with the Arab conquest of 647, as if everything that came before were insignificant or impure.

Mosaic thinking offers something else: a layered identity rather than a besieged one. It reminds us that this land has produced, both before and after the advent of Islam, forms of thought of universal richness. It allows North African societies to view themselves not as peripheries of the East or the West, but as historic centers of intellectual production.

Its universal significance is indirect. If Tunisia—and, more broadly, the Maghreb—reclaim this constellation and use it as a foundation to build a coherent intellectual modernity, they can 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 its strength: not to proclaim pluralism, but to embody it. And it is precisely this embodiment that is lacking today, three thousand kilometers from Carthage.

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

These three thousand kilometers bring us back to the Champs-Élysées—not as a metaphor, but as a matter of logic. If the divide visible on the streets of Paris on the evening of May 30 is a narrative divide rather than a security divide, then the question is not: How can we contain the violence? It is: What narrative can replace the one that is missing? This narrative will not come from Brussels or from Place Beauvau.

If it comes at all, it will stem from the ability of Mediterranean societies themselves to produce a worthy genealogy—that is, one that is historically accurate, intellectually rigorous, and not reducible to the ways in which Salafism or the far right might exploit it.
The problem of Islam in France is not merely one of security, social issues, or administration. It is also a narrative issue.

Many young French people of North African or Muslim descent today have little more than a limited and polarized sense of identity.

On the one hand, Salafism offers them a clear sense of identity: you belong to a pure, universal, millennia-old tradition that transcends national borders and social humiliations. It doesn’t matter if you face discrimination, live in poor housing, or are looked down upon—you are the heir to a civilization.

This appeal is powerful because it addresses a real need: to belong to something greater than oneself.
On the other hand, official republican Islam often puts forward a defensive, almost bureaucratic narrative: proving one’s loyalty, reassuring others, condemning, and apologizing for one’s very existence. Between the closed genealogy of Salafism and the defensive integration of official Islam, there is a void.

Mosaic thinking can help fill this void. It draws on a different lineage: not a pure, closed, or literalist one, but a pluralistic, Mediterranean, and historically rooted one. It tells a young French person of North African descent: 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, and Camus the Algerian. They have reflected on a world of tensions, transitions, and diverse languages and beliefs. They did not view this as a wound to their identity, but rather as a philosophical strength.

This genealogy does not erase Islam. It places it within a longer, richer continuum that is more difficult for literalists to exploit. It offers a sense of belonging that is compatible with republican complexity. Of course, a narrative does not eliminate unemployment, discrimination, racial profiling, or urban divides. These realities demand political, social, and economic responses. But societies are not held together solely by public policies. 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 perceive France as a foreign land. A young person who sees himself as the heir to a mosaic-like cultural matrix—where Islam coexists with Berber Christianity, North African Judaism, Greek philosophy, and Mediterranean history—can more easily ground his sense of French belonging in a depth that does not diminish it.

This isn’t naivety. It’s cultural policy in the most serious sense of the term: the battle over narratives that precedes and shapes many other battles.

Why doesn’t this narrative exist yet? Because no one has actually 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 state of perpetual otherness. The republican elites, for their part, have too often reduced the issue to an abstract defense of secularism, without understanding that a nation is not transmitted solely through principles but also by a shared heritage.

To restore mosaic thinking, then, is to fill a narrative void with something real: names, places, dates, texts, and a homeland.
Carthage won’t heal the Champs-Élysées in a single generation. But it can offer a portion of French youth of Maghrebi descent what they sorely lack: a dignified, pluralistic, and unyieldingly Mediterranean heritage.

VIII. Conclusion

The land does not dictate ideas. But certain places create the conditions that make certain forms of thought possible. They offer a horizon of shared experiences, encounters and common problems which, across the centuries, are found in the works of very different authors.

Carthage is one such place. Not the source of a single doctrine. Not a continuous tradition in the strict sense. A matrix: a historical cradle where, on several occasions, a particular way of inhabiting Mediterranean plurality was developed, without turning it into either a wound or a dissolution.

Clitomachus, Augustine, Ibn Khaldun, Camus and Seddik do not all say the same thing. They do not form a school of thought. But they trace out a constellation: that of a way of thinking which rejects dogmatic confinement, embraces uncertainty, acts in the face of doubt, preserves the layers of identity, and seeks moderation in the face of excess.

This constellation is not a utopia. It has already produced works. It has spanned religions, languages and centuries without becoming fixed in any one of them. This is precisely what utopias cannot claim about themselves.

But a proof of concept only becomes a political resource on one condition: that a decision is made to pass it on. Salafism has had access to funding, networks and platforms. It is in the far right’s interest to keep Islam in a state of perpetual otherness. Between these two symmetrical endeavours to exclude, mosaic thinking has nothing more to offer than what it has always had: the truth of its soil, the richness of its names, and the quiet strength of things that have already taken place.

The Carthage mosaic is not waiting to be invented. It is waiting for those who will pass it on.

(Article published by Ghazi Ben Ahmed in “Le Club de Mediapart”)