The thirteenth and fourteenth centuries witnessed a great displacement of populations across the Muslim-Christian frontier in the Iberian Peninsula and across the Strait of Gibraltar to the Maghrib. The arrival of Andalusis in the Maghrib was especially influential. As elite immigrants they competed successfully for scholarly and administrative positions on the basis of their cultural capital. The encounter between Andalusis and Maghribis, furthermore, exerted long-term influence on the articulation of cultural identities in the western Mediterranean and, as Ramzi Rouighi has argued, on the historiography of the Maghrib as a whole (Rouighi 2011, 116-119). Andalusi identity itself, especially as later preserved in the Maghrib, was, in many ways, forged in this encounter (the need for definition arising with displacement). Coming from an illustrious participant – exiled for several years to the Maghrib – Ibn al-Khat?b’s works shed much light on this process. This paper explores how Ibn al-Kha??b’s historiographical perspective informed an Andalusi vision of the history of the western Mediterranean and how it articulated an Andalusi identity vis-à-vis the Maghrib, where it became deeply rooted. Through an examination of Ibn al-Kha??b’s epistolary, biographical, and historiographical work, and considering his own experience of exile and encounter in the Maghrib, I argue that Ibn al-Kha??b was both illustrative of a larger trend whereby Andalusis argued for their cultural value as a displaced community in the Maghrib and a crucial actor in articulating and informing the long-term historiographical perspective on the history of the Maghrib (and al-Andalus’s place in it). This is clearly attested by a foundational work for the history of al-Andalus: al-Maqqar?’s Naf? al-??b, a seventeenth-century text based on Ibn al-Kha??b’s own works, which was central to nineteenth and twentieth-century retellings.