Jamal Mahjoub’s novel The Carrier is set in both seventeenth-century and present-day Denmark. It traces the genealogy of academic freedom through the story of Rachid, who travels from Algiers to Denmark in search of the astronomer Tycho Brahe’s telescope. Mahjoub says in an interview that he wanted to “point out the distance from Denmark to what was considered the centre of the world, namely the Mediterranean area” (Tervonen 2002). In this reading I want to focus on how the novel addresses the construction and consolidation of Europe through the new ideals of knowledge that developed in Europe at this time.
By using the Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe (1546 -1601) the novel illustrates the vital importance of international connections to the development of new knowledge. Medieval Europe was characterised by intolerance and repression of scientific knowledge in stark opposition to the flourishing intellectual activity of the Arab world at the time. The marked change that came with the Renaissance, the development of scientific inquiry in Europe and the division of science and religion was unprecedented in other parts of the world, but it also built on and developed exclusionary ideas of classification of peoples and nations. Tycho Brahe’s contribution to astronomy was part of a complex interaction between different scientific traditions and cultural contexts.