So firstly, your question about Italy. Medieval Arab writers generally liked Italy, even those who hated Christians. One of the best examples of this is Ibn Jubayr, a pilgrim and traveller from Iberia in the twelfth century who decided to visit Sicily on his way back from the Middle East. He hated Messina for its crowdedness, poor treatment of Muslims, and its slave market (though he did like the regular market), but he marvelled at Mt Etna's eruptions and genuinely liked the city of Palermo:

"It is the metropolis of these islands, combining the benefits of wealth and splendour, and having all that you could wish of beauty, real or apparent, and all the needs of subsistence, mature and fresh. It is an ancient and elegant city, magnificent and gracious, and seductive to look upon. Proudly set between its open spaces and plains filled with gardens, with broad roads and avenues, it dazzles the eyes with its perfection. It is a wonderful place, built in the Cordova style, entirely from cut stone known as kadhan [a soft limestone]. A river splits the town, and four springs gush in its suburbs."

He was also very complementary of Sicily's lush fields, beautiful landscapes, and even of the Christian churches which impressed him from an artistic and architectural perspective:

"One of the most remarkable works of the infidels that we saw was the church known as the Church of the Antiochian. We examined it on the Day of the Nativity [Christmas Day], which with them is a great festival; and a multitude of men and women had come to it. Of the buildings we saw, the spectacle of one must fail of description, for it is beyond dispute the most wonderful edifice in the world. The inner walls are all embellished with gold. There are slabs of coloured marble, the like of which we had never seen, inlaid throughout with gold mosaic and surrounded by branches {formed from) green mosaic. In its upper parts are well-placed windows of gilded glass which steal all looks by the brilliance of their rays, and bewitch the soul."

So yes, Italy and Sicily were no backwater and people who had been there knew it. However, Italy is not in northern Europe and therefore not what the quote is talking about, so moving on.

When we do move north of the Alps, and even further north toward the Baltic, the opinions of medieval Arab writers tend to degrade, but they often express no opinion at all. Instead, they marvel at natural wonders and customs they sometimes find too strange to form an judgement about.

Their opinion on France tended to be that it was a lovely country blemished by the people that lived there. For example, Al-Bakri, a historian and geographer from eleventh century Iberia, praises France for its well built towns, pleasant countryside, and the quality of Frankish craftsmanship. But he also refers to the French as simplistic beasts, a caricature common to Muslim accounts of the Franks influences strongly by their experiences during the crusades where Franks are often stereotyped - not entirely without merit under the circumstances - as gawking tourists who don't really know what's going on. The idea that medieval Arabs saw Europe as a backwater likely owes a lot to Usama ibn Munqidh, a twelfth century writer whose humorous memoirs have been a go-to reference for how medieval Muslims saw the Franks since the nineteenth century. One of his stories is about a French knight who he got to know, but Usama was very dismissive when the knight offered to show France to Usama's family. His opinion of France, based on the stories he had heard from French immigrants to the Holy Land, was that it was a backwater. But he has a sample bias problem, because the people he met were people who had already decided France was not worth staying in. Other sources complain that they did not bathe as much as Arabs (France did not have the same level of bathing culture or infrastructure as the great baths of Middle Eastern or Al-Andalusian cities) and that their clothes were not as colourful. Medieval Arabs weren't that keen on France.

Of German and eastern European lands, our sources tend to be geographers, who dispassionately discuss the rivers and wildlife, or merchants who imitate the geographers. A common theme of medieval Arab discussions of Europe is regarding a place as civilised or not based on how well it treats local Muslims (if there are any), and how those local Muslims adhered to the rules of Islam as it was practised in their homeland. The further they went from Baghdad, the worse it tended to get. Even as close as Kyiv, the practise of Friday prayers was apparently unheard of and this was seen as a sign of diminished cultural sophistication. But many Muslims travelled to north-east Europe for trade, to the extent that there were significant Muslim populations in cities along the route typically taken north from Syria, like Kyiv and Bolghar. In the tenth century, Ahmad Ibn Fadlan travelled north bearing messages from the Caliph of Baghdad and encountered many eastern European peoples, few of whom he liked. Of the Rus, he says:

They are the filthiest of God's creatures. They do not clean themselves after urinating or defecating, nor do they wash after having sex. They do not wash their hands after meals. They are like wandering asses.

He definitely regarded northern and eastern Europe as a barely civilised backwater.

Going further north, we reach what was often referred to as "the land of darkness" on account of the short days, and six months of darkness if they went north enough. Ibn Fadlan went there, but he primarily discusses the northern lights and how stupid the locals thought he was when he panicked and started frantically praying because he thought the lights were spectres coming for him. It is perhaps telling that so few Arab sources discuss northwestern Europe, but do discuss travelling so far north that they saw the aurora borealis far more often. It suggests that north-west Europe was either avoided entirely or not worth talking about. Anyway, north of the Rus, Ahmad al-Biruni wrote of trade customs c. 1030:

"The land is sparsely populated and the inhabitants live like wild beasts. The furthest region [to the north] is that of the Yūrā, whose villages can be reached from Īsū [Wīsū] in twelve days. Men travel from Bulghār in wooden sleighs and reach Īsū in twenty days. They load [the sleighs] with provisions and either drag them over the surface of the snow by hand or use dogs to pull them. They also use skates made of bone, with which they can travel long distances quickly. The people of Yūrā exchange their products by placing them on the ground in a certain area and then retiring, like shy, wild things. The same thing is done by people from the land of Sri Lanka when they barter cloves."

And when Ibn Battuta, one of the more famous Muslim travellers, inquired about going to the far north in the fourteenth century, he was warned against it:

I wanted to enter the Land of Darkness. This can be done by passing beyond Bulghār, a journey of forty days. But I gave up my plan because of the great difficulty of the journey, and the small profit it offered. One can only travel to this country by small carts pulled by large dogs, for this wilderness is covered with ice and the feet of men and hooves of animals slip and slide, while dogs have claws and their paws do not slip on the ice. Only rich merchants enter this wilderness, men who each have forty or more carts, filled with food, drink, and firewood. There are no trees, stones, or dwellings to be found. Dogs who have already made the trip a number of times guide the travellers... When the travellers have journeyed for forty days, they make camp near the Land of Darkness. Each of them puts down the merchandise he has brought, then retires to the camp ground. The next day they return to examine their merchandise and find set down beside it sable, squirrel, and ermine pelts. If the owner of the merchandise is satisfied with what has been placed beside his goods, he takes it. If not, he leaves it. The inhabitants of the Land of Darkness might add to the number of pelts they have left, but often take them back, leaving the goods the foreign merchants have displayed. This is how they carry out commercial exchanges. The men who go to this place do not know if those who sell and buy are men or Jinn, for they never glimpse anyone.

Ibn Battuta decided to go east rather than north.

It wouldn't be wrong to say that medieval Arab sources did not really care much about, say, the Danes or the Flemings and Dutch. It's not worth talking about to them. There is far more literature discussing the Arctic Circle than northern Germany, because the natural wonders and unfamiliar customs of the people grabbed their interest. If a place is more obscure in medieval Arab sources than the Arctic, that does probably indicate that they didn't care about it. And it does mean that the average medieval Arab's experience with Germans (if they had any) came from crusaders and other pilgrims, which may not have made the best impression. But north-east of Germany, they found a lot to be interested in.

Sources:

Attar, Samar. "Conflicting accounts on the fear of strangers: Muslim and Arab perceptions of Europeans in Medieval geographical literature." Arab studies quarterly (2005): 17-29.

Hermes, Nizar. The [European] Other in Medieval Arabic Literature and Culture: Ninth-Twelfth Century AD. Springer, 2012.

Fadlan, Ibn. Ibn Fadlān and the Land of Darkness: Arab Travellers in the Far North. Penguin UK, 2012.

Kassis, Hanna E. "Images of Europe and Europeans in Some Medieval Arabic Sources." From Arabye to Engelond: Medieval Studies in Honour of Mahmoud Manzalaoui on His 75th Birthday (1999): 9-24.

König, Daniel G. "Arabic-Islamic Perceptions of Europe in the Middle Ages." Christian-Muslim Relations. A Bibliographical History. Volume 5 (1350-1500). Brill, 2013. 17-34.

I personally have never encountered the two mentioned authors, but their claim about Europe (or, to be exact, Northen Europe, if I've read your quote correctly) seems a bit misleading in the broader context your question offers.

The footnote you mention talks about Frankish Europe. I assume he wishes to indicate the continent as intended by the Arab sources, where "Frank" is a catch-all term to indicate Western Europeans similarly to the "Gaul" term Byzantine princess Anna Komnene adopts in his own accounts of French and Norman crusaders passing through Constantinople during the First Crusade. The lack of interest attributed to these Muslim writers could possibly refer to the lack of direct informations Islamic chroniclers might have provided about continental Europe during the years following the XI and XII centuries, whereas some accounts of European travelers and merchants do speak about the Near East and other important centers (most famous of all, even if mixed with poetic licenses, Marco Polo's account of his journey towards China which passed through the Near East and Central Asia).

Aside from this, I strongly oppose the claim that Europe was an "obscure and uninviting backwater". If we consider the years which open a direct albeit violent contact with the Muslim world in the Middle East, so the XI-XIII centuries, already at the dawn of the 1000s Europe was gaining a lot of economic, demographic and institutional strength. Interregional trade expanded and "international" trade restarted alongside an expansion of the population within the cities and the rural areas, two aspects linked to the possibly larger availability of provisions and foodstuffs required to sustain a demographic growth.

By the years 1095-1099, the Papacy and the Holy Roman Empire had clashed in a vicious political and ideological brawl which weakened both institutions on a legitimacy level within the discussion of which of the two was the real leading power in the Catholic world (this is a wildy shortened explanation). The Holy See was also reorganized by pope Gregory VII on an administrative and doctrinal and political scope, to the point of having the moral and material authority needed to promote the armed pilgrimage of all good Christians towards the holy places of the Middle East.

In the next two centuries, trade and production increased exponentially alongside a further strengthening of the instituions of European monarchies and republics. The centralization of government started by Holy Roman Emperor and king of Sicily Frederick II Hohenstaufen on the wake of earlier attempts made by his grandfather Frederick I Barbarossa fifty years earlier, the founding or expansion of universities to provide legal experts for the oligarchic republics of Center and Northern Italy (for example Bologna, active already in 1088) and the aforementioned kingdom of Sicily (the university of Naples was founded by imperial decree in 1224).

The cities of Tuscany, Romagna, Lombardy and other regions north of Rome were deeply embroiled in international trade of both luxury goods and other commodities, often in the shape of expensive cloths, oils and wines and banking services. Florence stands as a shining example of such dynamic, having structured its political body over its social one, creating an oligarchy of merchants and craftsmen organized in trade organizations. Textile trade was intense to and from southern France, whereas wine and other food commodities were traded towards Germany and Northen Europe. Banking services were a virtual monopoly of Italian merchants within Europe for a good part of the Middle Ages, especially Lombard ones. A clue of this is found in London's Lombard Street, a place known for the presence of Italian bankers collectively called "Lombards". Said merchants had branches in major trading centers such as Bruges, Hamburg and others like the Florentine Francesco Datini da Prato (1335-1410). The Florentine banker family of the Cerchi had the monopoly over papal finances and Genoese bankers during the 1300 and 1400s had virtually become the private bankers of the Castillian monarchy. Said bankers also had fingers in huge pies such as loans to kings and sovereigns which when were repaid (if they were repaid) provided immense wealth. This period was called by Jacques Le Goff the «long XIII century», lasting well into the 1300s.

The 1300 and 1400s also saw, at least in Italy, the expansion and reform of the hospital institutions of the peninsula to the point of having created a recent historiographic category of "welfare before welfare". Hospitals and orphanages of the Annunziata, organized and administrated by lay confraternities or lay councils, spread in the kingdom of Naples starting in 1318/1320, creating a network of 28 structures by the second half of the XV century. Similarities are found with the Ospedale Maggiore of Milan and the Hospital of the Holy Cross of Barcelon.

Medieval Scholastic philosophy was greatly studied and prolific within both religious and lay academies during the XII and XIII centuries in places like Paris, Bologna and other university cities. Literature in both prose and verse began to structure itself in Provence through travelling poets and performers (the troubadours) already in the 1100s to be then adopted and adapted in Northern and southern Italy in the early decades of the XIII century, creating the first novels in Old French and Medieval Occitan. Not to mention the dozens and dozens of architectural projects and engineering feats achieved by Medieval architects and builders throughout the High, Middle and Late Middle Ages (as a reference, the Chartres cathedral, 130 m long and 115 m tall at its highest point, was built with most of its current features between 1194 and 1220). Platonic texts were discovered and studied by Latin translation of Arab versions and modern philology took its first step forwards when poet Francesco Petrarca (also known as Petrarch) created the first philologically restored edition of the Ab Urbe Condita of Livy between the 1320s and 1330s.

I hope this broad overview helps your inquiry.

Sources:
Musarra, A. 2021, Medioevo marinaro. Prendere il mare nell'Italia medievale, Il Mulino, Roma;
Montanari, M. 2012, Gusti nel medievo. I prodotti, la cucina, la tavola, Laterza Editore, Bari;
Marino, S, 2014, Ospedali e città nel regno di Napoli. Le Annunziate: istituzioni, archivi e fonti (secc. XIV-XIX), Leo S. Olschki Editore, Firenze;
Marino, S. 2015, Late Medieval Hospitals in Southern Italy. Civic patronage and social identity in Mediterranean Chronicle, vol. 5 (2015), Diavlos;
Gazzini, M. 2018, Ospedali e reti. Il Medioevo, in Villanueva Morte, C., Conejo da Pena, A., Villagrasa-Elías R. (coordinators), Redes Hospitalarias: historia, economía y sociología de la sanidad, Zaragoza;
Barbero, A. 2015, Benedette guerre. Crociate e jihad, Laterza Editore, Bari;
Alfano, G., Italia, P., Russo, E., Tomasi, F. 2018, Letteratura italiana. Manuale per studi universitari. Dalle origini a metà Cinquecento (vol. 1);
Le Goff, J. 2012, Lo sterco del diavolo. Il denaro nel medioevo; Laterza Editore, Bari;

While u/ConteCorvo makes many interesting points about the evolution of European politics, as well as the upswing of European economies and especially institutional complexity in the latter half of the Middle Ages, I think that there's more to be said about this topic. While it is a strong apology against the argument that Europe was a downtrodden, poor, and dysfunctional place, it doesn't speak much to non-European perceptions of it, or to Europe's(especially Northern Europe's) place in the larger world during the period. I also think that that answer, nor any of the follow-ups do enough of a job putting together just what is happening in the Graeber and Wengrow book, as well as the source for their claim there. So, to start off, I took a look at the relevant passage in the Graeber/Wengrow book, which I am otherwise unfamiliar with. It is in a chapter called "Wicked Liberty: The indigenous critique and the myth of progress," in a section called, "In which we show how critiques of Eurocentrism can backfire , and end up turning aboriginal thinkers into sock-puppets." I write this because it provide context to the selection quoted.

In this chapter, they use the essay contest and discussion around social inequality in 1754 as a synecdoche for the broader changes in European thinking in the 16-19th centuries. Specifically, Graeber and Wengrow are interested in challenging a common meta-narrative of the period: that European thinkers progressed into Enlightenment ideas of equality and natural rights, primarily through some intra-European exchange. Instead, the pair argue that interactions with the broader world brought about by the expanding trade, exploratory, missionary, and imperial efforts of various European powers, which led to interactions with a variety of different ideologies of governance, rights, economy, and so on.

In the text specified, they are attempting to demonstrate that the broader world did not pay much attention to Europe during the Medieval period, and that Europe(especially Northern Europe) did not have significant impact on global trade and politics in that period. They do so to contrast the Early Modern period, in which Europeans were consistently and intimately interacting with many different peoples and governments, and we therefore met with critiques of their own and alternative examples of how to organize a state and a society. Context is important because it does not in any way speak to intra-European relations and influences, nor does it speak towards Europe being in fact an, "obscure and uninviting backwater." What it is speaking towards is that there is a paucity of external critiques and counterexamples of European societies and nearly none that would have been produced in a way that European people would have any access to. That claim, about external perceptions and interest in Europe, is a very sound one.

Before any more discussion of Graeber, let's look at the text they cite. As you note Europe through Arab Eyes, 1578-1727 is speaking about a period that no historian would call the Middle Ages, despite periodization being a fraught and frustrating topic. However, I went and found the book and was able to read through the relevant passage, which is a literature review of discussions from modern historians about Arabic writers writing about Europe from roughly the 9-17th centuries. I read through the whole section, though the parts that Graber and Wengrow are likely looking toward are in the first half. To give a sense of why they feel comfortable with their line, I will start by posting the introductory sentence of the section.

​

Historians of the medieval period have argued that Muslim Arabs and non-Arabs (but writing in Arabic) did not show interest in Latin Christendom as they did in the Far East, since no comprehensive surveys of medieval Christendom have survived as they have about China and India.

Matar, Nabil I. “A Survey of the Literature.” Essay. In Europe through Arab Eyes: 1578-1727, 6. New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 2009.

Matar largely takes for granted that there are not extant comprehensive works on Europe, and as he discussed throughout this lit review section, there aren't really. There are certainly parts of Europe that are discussed by people in the Arab world. From my own study, Ibn Fadlan is a good example of someone who wrote about areas in what is considered Europe today, along the Volga, and is writing about the recently settled Norsemen there. However this is not an account of the type that Graeber and Wengrow are discussing, nor is it discussed anything in the Northern Europe that the pair are discussing as the center of the Enlightenment. Throughout this literature review, Matar brings up multiple times that there simply isn't much in the way of Arabic writings on Europe itself. There are discussions of Europeans who are in the Near East, as well as European Arabic writings from Al-Andalus, though Matar notes that these are not of comprehensive quality:

Aziz al-ʿAzmeh reentered the debate by turning scholarly attention to the Muslim West and arguing that when the Muslims were in cheek-by-jowl proximity with the Christians in the Iberian Peninsula (before 1492), their discourse about the Christian adversary was derived not from their actual contact with them but from poetical and literary stereotypes. The images were uniformly denigrating, ranging from descriptions of Christian men as descendants of drunkards and uncircumcised pig breeders to characteriza- tions of Christian women as lascivious and voracious.

ibid. 7.

Suffice it to say, as Matar reads the literature on the era's Arabic historiography, it is a pretty accurate statement that the Arab speaking world paid Europe little mind and what mind they did, particularly in Al-Andalus, was more demagogic than academic. This leads me to conclude that Graeber and Wengrow are citing this piece because it effectively demonstrates part of the point they make. However, I think that this source on its own does not do enough of a job. I suspect that the pair suggest here that the Arab speaking world, being the closest "external"(which honestly I through a whole lot a doubt on. The externalizing of the Islamic "East" from the Christian "West" is sort of bread and butter Saidian Orientalism) social organization to Europe, not taking much interest demonstrates that the world at large didn't. From a textual perspective, this is a fair point. If neighbors don't much care about what's going on across on the north side of Europe, who else has the technology to interact in the Medieval period?

​

Cont. Part II

While u/ConteCorvo's answer is excellent, some people have been asking about whether Northern Europe, rather than Europe as a whole, would be more relevant.

Firstly, I would argue that, from context, that Graeber and Wengrow have a weird relationship with the term "Northern," linking it to the Crusades, which were quite famously originally called by Pope Urban II, a Frenchman based in Italy, at Clermont, in the duchy of Aquitaine in southern France. While there is Crusading fervor in the North, i.e. Scandinavia and Northern Germany, it is both later than Graeber and Wengrow talk about (starting in the 13th century and continuing to at least be called into the 15th century) and focused on the Baltic coast rather than the "other parts of the world" (i.e. the Dar al-Islam) that they seem to be discussing. In fact, only one major Scandinavian ruler, Sigurd Jorsalafari of Norway, actually travelled to Jerusalem and engaged in things that look like Crusades in the Levant (in his case, Armenia. According to his saga, he then immediately gave the wealth he earned away to the Roman Emperor in Constantinople). It's hard to draw any serious conclusions from this, but it is worth acknowledging that there is some tricky conflation of northern and southern Europe in The Dawn of Everything here, that has at least shadows of "Barbarian Vikings" lurking in the middle distance.

That being said, if we restrict ourselves to Northern Europe, which is to say Scandinavia, there genuinely doesn't seem to be a lot of knowledge about it! Certainly, Scandinavia is important - since at least the Bronze Age it was a really primary source of amber, lumber, furs, and enslaved people to lands outside of Europe, and there are no shortage of Norse raids in Iberia, Morocco, and in at least one case Georgia. However, much of the knowledge in Arabic sources in it come from a few travel accounts, most notably by Ahmed Ibn Fadlan and Abraham al-Tartushi (who visited Hedeby in Schleswig). Both of these accounts are preserved in manuscripts from much later with few emendations or elaborations (the main manuscript preserving Ibn Fadlan merely adds that the Rus' are now Christian instead of pagan), which does not guarantee but does at least suggest that they aren't really learning new knowledge or complicating this vision. Al-Tartushi, also, describes many things that are possible but also fire-worship in Hedeby, which reads to me like recording things that demonstrate the Norse people are "pagan" - i.e. Zoroastrian (the Arab-Iberian word for a Norse person, majus, is the same word as used for Zoroastrians in Levantine Arab sources and is a borrowing eventually back to the term for Zoroastrian priests that gives us "mage" in English).

There is a lot of genuine information in these early (notably, long pre-Crusade) sources, but there's a lot that suggests these places were barely-known in Arabic culture and in need of exoticizing description.

I do want to close with something that suggests a much more positive view of Islamic knowledge of Northern Europe. Muhammed al-Idrisi completed around 1160, after literally decades of research, an atlas for Roger of Sicily (admittedly a Christian) called Nuzhat al-mushtaq fi ikhtiraq al-afaq, or the Tabula Rogeriana. The atlas contains seventy small maps with commentary, which were later compiled into a single world map. It's a remarkable work that unfortunately doesn't have a good English translation, but largely compiles Islamic sources, many of which don't survive! The text itself was also highly influential in the Islamic world, so even its sources from travelers in the ports of Italy end up being part of the Islamic tradition.

Just from a look at that map, it's clear that there's a fairly robust knowledge of the North! While it is portrayed as an island, you can see at the very bottom of the map (South is up), that Norway and Sweden are portrayed, Denmark is named correctly, and Sjaelland and Gotland both appear to be represented. There is also an intriguing text note about "Greater Ireland" a day away from Iceland, which... is maybe Greenland? Greenland was exporting walrus ivory to Europe and so it's very plausible, though where al-Idrisi gets that info from is unknown. What is clear, though, is that there is a really genuine interest in that part of the world (as there is genuine interest in Africa, Sri Lanka, and the cities of Malaysia named on the map). I can't really sustain an interpretation that suggests a universal cultural disdain from non-Europeans looking in by the 12th century or so in light of that, as while the Tabula is a near-unique text in the medieval world, it wouldn't be possible if there weren't many people with active experience or interest in Europe in the Islamic world as well as in Italian ports. Whether or not that interest was backed up by current information, as I hope I've shown, is sometimes a little less clear.

Not quite answering the question but I can tell you with 99% certainty why Graeber describes Northern Europe as a “backwater.”

Listening to the audiobook The Patterning Instinct by Jeremy Lent. I’m 99% sure this is where Graeber and Wengrow got impression of Northern Europe at that time. The reason I got the book in the first place is because Graeber mentioned it somewhere. From Chapter 17 (The Enigma of the Scientific Revolution) of The Patterning Instinct....

Lent first cites The Book of Roads and Kingdoms by Abdallah ibn Khordadbeh (not to be confused with a similar book of the same name ) ~870 (earliest surviving Arabic book of administrative geography). Lent provides a quote where ibn Khordadbeh trashes Western Europe, whereas apparently ibn Khordadbeh has plenty of good things to say about the Middle East, Far East, Japan, South India. Lent goes on to state, “The following century another Muslim scholar concurred, writing that ‘Europeans are dull in mind and heavy in speech’ and the ‘farther they are to the north the more stupid, gross, and brutish they are.’ While the few Europeans who could read at the time might have differed with these opinions, the fact remains that until the last few hundred years the north and west parts of Europe were a BACKWATER to the great currents of civilization that swept across Eurasia.”

So there you go, blame Lent. Also had fun reading the responses of those disputing Graeber’s/Lent’s characterization.