Speaking about specifically Maghreb here, so Egypt isn't included. Really, I'm curious about the region from Tunisia to Morocco.
Whenever I look at historical sources, they seem to describe that region of Africa as being very prosperous and having many great cities and works of architecture. Also, there were numerous cities from Mediterranean Europe that had close ties with cities in North Africa, including trading and business ties. For example, the Italian city of Pisa was very close to Bejaia in modern Algeria. Fibonacci's father Guglielmo operated a trading post in Bejaia.
Overall, it seems to me that there is no indication that medieval North Africa was more primitive compared to Europe when it came to architecture and city building, at least from the perspective of the Europeans who visited the region.
As for people from the region, neither Ibn Khaldun or Ibn Battuta considered their native regions to be inferior architecturally/culturally compared to those parts of Europe which they visited, even in spite of the fact that from what's been passed down to us, even minor examples of medieval European architecture tend to be far more impressive than anything North Africa has to offer.
However, when we actually look at medieval North African architecture, there's essentially... nothing to look at. I mean, there are a few buildings here and there, but really nothing compared to what Europe has. In Europe you can find whole villages/towns that still look like as they did in medieval/early modern times, coupled with historical landmarks such as medieval churches, castles, administrative buildings, and so on.
For examples, you can look at medieval Italian towns like Montepulciano, Civita di Bagnoregio, Viterbo, etc. You can find examples of places like these in many European countries.
In comparison, North Africa doesn't have anything like these at all. In fact, you'll be hard pressed to even find an example of a castle in North Africa. I could probably easily list names of more castles in Wales alone than you could in all of North Africa. Not to mention how a single Gothic cathedral anywhere in Western Europe alone shows more impressive architecture than all of the (very few) historical landmarks of North Africa combined.
To me, looking at both these regions, I'm tempted to think that medieval North Africa was significantly more primitive than Europe as it failed to produce the type of impressive wonders that Europe did. However, the historical records don't seem to agree with this, and they treat the Maghreb and Mediterranean Europe as being on relatively equal terms.
So, I'm wondering how this contradiction can be resolved? Where is all the North African architecture?
North Africa has plenty of medieval architecture, but it’s much less studied and commercialized than Western European castles and other ruins.
I’ve visited medieval castles in Tunisia, the most famous being the ribat at Sousse, and medieval mosques including the very important site at Kairouan, just to name the two best known. The landscape is full of archaeology, much of it better preserved than in Europe.
So why don’t we know about it?
The answer boils down to colonialism. The first archaeologists in North Africa were French soldiers in the early nineteenth century, and they despised the native culture (as soldiers often do when they’re committing genocide). They believed that they, as Frenchmen, were direct descendants of the Roman Empire—and consequently when they weren’t busy massacring villages they spent their time looking for archaeological evidence of the Roman soldiers who conquered North Africa two millennia before. They found a lot of ruins from antiquity—and used these as ideological justification for their right to rule the land they conquered (a pretty common theme in 19th century colonialism, not unique to the French army).
Consequently, archaeology in North African countries like Algeria and Tunisia started off as military projects—and they remained political until the French were expelled. The French were only really interested in sites that furthered their agendas: Roman sites, or sites that proved the North African people were originally Christians that could be used (some French officials hoped) to convince the locals to abandon Islam and return to their earlier faith (it didn’t). Medieval archaeology was mostly ignored.
Meanwhile, in Europe, aristocrats and wealthy middle class gentlemen were busily restoring medieval ruins, many of which had fallen into disrepair. They valued these sites because they were the heritage of their great empires: the history of the white, Christian peoples who rose from Medieval barbarity to the heights of civilization (so they believed). These ruins proved (they wrote) that European people had done what other peoples around the world could not: they had left the Middle Ages behind them and become modern (this was pure propaganda; but they believed it). Preserving the ruins, and leaving them picturesque and empty, reinforced the idea that the Middle Ages in Europe were done and gone—proof that Europeans were more advanced.
European colonizers neglected medieval buildings in North Africa, however, because they didn’t see the point of preserving them. All the good stuff was classical—Roman. In some places, they actually cleared away the medieval ruins so they could prop up the Roman columns that lay beneath them. Preserving Classical archaeology proved that civilization had collapsed in North Africa; restoring Classical sites proved that European colonizers were bringing civilization back. Ignoring medieval archaeology proved that North Africa’s Islamic, medieval history didn’t matter—in the eyes of European colonizers, these people were basically still medieval anyways. The exception was a few Very important medieval sites like Kairouan—but these attracted limited attention from European archaeologists, and represented only a sliver of the medieval archaeology that these countries contained.
After North Africa escaped from European rule, local archaeologists did begin to excavate medieval sites. But they still do not have as much funding as their European counterparts, so North African medieval archaeology lags behind European studies today. But new work is being published, and it’s a growing field. If anyone is interested in it, it’s a wonderful topic to study for a PhD--working within local institutions, of course.
Sources:
Most of the above can be found in two books:
Bonnie Effros. 2018. Incidental Archaeologists: French Officers and the Rediscovery of Roman North Africa. Cornell University Press.
Glaire D. Anderson, Corisande Fenwick, Rosser-Owen Mariam. 2017. The Aghlabids and their Neighbors: Art and Material Culture in Ninth-Century North Africa. Leiden: Brill. (you should be able to read the intro through google books)