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THE BEGINNING (OR END) OF MOROCCAN HISTORY: HISTORIOGRAPHY, TRANSLATION, AND MODERNITY IN AHMAD B. KHALID AL-NASIRI AND CLEMENTE CERDEIRA

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 July 2012

Eric Calderwood
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Abstract

This article analyzes two accounts of the Hispano-Moroccan War of 1859–60 in light of scholarly debates about historiography, translation, and modernity in the colonial context. The first text is Ahmad b. Khalid al-Nasiri's Kitab al-Istiqsa (1895), which explores the organization of the Spanish army in an effort to understand the military technology and state apparatus behind colonial domination. The second text, Clemente Cerdeira's Versión árabe de la Guerra de África (1917), is framed as an annotated Spanish translation of al-Nasiri's text, but Cerdeira suppresses key passages from al-Nasiri's account in order to undermine any hint that the Moroccan historian's thinking is reformist or modern. By comparing these two accounts of the same war, the article aims to situate al-Nasiri's text within the reform movements that spread through the Muslim Mediterranean in the 19th century and to use al-Nasiri's historical thinking as a model for theorizing Moroccan modernity.

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International Journal of Middle East Studies , Volume 44 , Issue 3 , August 2012 , pp. 399 - 420
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Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2012

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References

NOTES

Author's note: I thank the following colleagues for their insightful feedback on previous drafts of this article: William Granara, Brad Epps, Luis Girón, Susan Miller, Sahar Bazzaz, and Gregory White. I also thank the editors of IJMES and the four anonymous reviewers for their incisive and helpful comments. Finally, I thank the following organizations for their generous financial support, without which the research for this article would not have been possible: the Michigan Society of Fellows, the Department of Education, the American Institute for Maghrib Studies, the Harvard Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, and the Harvard Divinity School.

1 Al-Nasiri is often known in Western studies and library catalogues as al-Salawi, a nisba that simply means “from Salé.” In Arabic texts, however, the historian is invariably known by his family name, al-Nasiri. Throughout this article, I refer to this author as al-Nasiri, which is the accepted convention among Arabists.

2 Though al-Nasiri first published Kitab al-Istiqsa in a four-volume edition in Cairo (n.p., 1895), large parts of the book were written in the late 1870s and early 1880s in Marrakesh and El-Jadida, where the author was a mid-level bureaucrat for the financial department of the Moroccan makhzan. As Lévi-Provençal has shown, the book had an immediate impact in the Arab world and in Europe: see Lévi-Provençal, Evariste, Les historiens des Chorfa (Paris: Larose, 1922), 349–68Google Scholar. In 1954, the author's two sons, al-Nasiri, Jaʿafar and al-Nasiri, Muhammad, reedited Kitab al-Istiqsa in nine volumes (Casablanca, Morocco: Dar al-Kitab, 1954–56)Google Scholar. In 2001, the Moroccan Ministry of Culture published a new nine-volume edition, based on the 1954 edition, with new footnotes, prologues, and appendices (edited by Ahmad al-Nasiri, Ibrahim Abu Talib, Muhammad Hajji, and Ahmad Tawfiq). The 2001 edition includes the introduction to the 1954 edition, in which al-Nasiri's sons give valuable biographical and bibliographic information about their father's life and work, based on their research in the family archive (in Salé). All of my references to al-Nasiri's text are to the 2001 edition. All English translations are mine.

3 Al-Ashʿari was the Moroccan minister of culture when the 2001 edition of Kitab al-Istiqsa was published. I have taken this quote from his preface to the edition (1: I).

4 Ibid.

5 Gibb, Hamilton A. R., “Tarikh,” Studies on the Civilization of Islam, ed. Shaw, Stanford J. and Polk, William R. (Boston: Beacon Press, 1962), 135Google Scholar.

6 Lévi-Provençal, Historiens des Chorfa, 355.

7 Ibid.

8 Ibid.., 364.

9 Ibid.., 355, n. 3.

10 al-Nasiri, Jaʿafar and al-Nasiri, Muhammad, eds., Kitab al-Istiqsa, 1:IXLGoogle Scholar.

11 Ibid., VII–XIX.

12 The Hispano-Moroccan War has been taken as the starting point for the study of precolonial Morocco by many historians, including, most notably, Burke, Edmund III, Prelude to Protectorate in Morocco: Precolonial Protest and Resistance, 1860–1912 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976)Google Scholar.

13 “Intiqad al-Sulh maʿa al-Isbanyul wa-Istaylaʾuhu ʿala Titawin,” Kitab al-Istiqsa, 8:101–118.

14 The most important contemporary accounts of the war of 1859–60 are by the Tetouani poet and religious scholar Mufaddal Afaylal, who wrote two texts on the war, an elegy and a chronicle. Mufaddal Afaylal's elegy on fallen Tetouan is reproduced in full within al-Nasiri's chapter on the Hispano-Moroccan War: Kitab al-Istiqsa, 8:108–10. His chronicle of the war circulated as a manuscript in Tetouan in the 19th and 20th centuries, but it did not appear in print until the recent edition of Benaboud, Muhammad: “Harb Titwan min khilal Masdar Jadid,” ed. Benaboud, Muhammad, in al-Maghrib wa-l-Andalus (Tetouan, Morocco: ʿAbd al-Malik al-Saʿdi University, 2008), 179–203Google Scholar.

15 Al-Nasiri, Kitab al-Istiqsa, 8:119–23.

16 Al-Nasiri does not identify the Lebanese writer by name but rather refers to him as ṣāhib “Miṣbāḥ al-Sārī.” Ibrahim b. Khilal al-Najjar was born in the Lebanese village of Deir el-Qamar. He studied medicine in Cairo before being appointed a military doctor in Beirut. His book Kitab Misbah al-Sari was published in Beirut in 1858. See al-Nasiri, Ahmad et al. ., eds., Kitab al-Istiqsa, 8:119, n. 197Google Scholar.

17 The bibliography on the Ottoman Tanzimat and on Muhammad ʿAli's reform efforts in Egypt is too extensive for me to give an exhaustive account here. Excellent introductions may be found in Hanioglu, M. Sukru, A Brief History of the Late Ottoman Empire (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2008), 72–108Google Scholar; and Fahmy, Khaled, All the Pasha's Men: Mehmed Ali, His Army, and the Making of Modern Egypt (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997)Google Scholar. The Moroccan reform (iṣlāḥ) era has received far less critical attention, though Sahar Bazzaz provides an excellent summary in Forgotten Saints: History, Power, and Politics in the Making of Modern Morocco (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2010), 1–49. Clancy-Smith, Julia gives a compelling overview of the Tunisian state reforms in Mediterraneans: North Africa and Europe in an Age of Migration, c. 1800–1900 (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 2011), 315–41Google Scholar.

18 Clancy-Smith, Mediterraneans, 321–24.

19 Burke, Edmund, “Morocco and the Middle East: Reflections on Some Basic Differences,” Archives Européenes de Sociologie 10 (1969): 70CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

20 Bazzaz, Forgotten Saints, 30.

21 See Di-Capua, Yoav, Gatekeepers of the Arab Past: Historians and History Writing in Twentieth-Century Egypt (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 2009)Google Scholar; Youssef Choueiri, M., Arab History and the Nation–State: A Study in Modern Arab Historiography, 1820–1980 (London: Routledge, 1989)Google Scholar; and Crabbs, Jack A. Jr., The Writing of History in Nineteenth-Century Egypt: A Study in National Transformation (Cairo: American University in Cairo Press, 1984)Google Scholar.

22 Choueiri, Arab History, 3.

23 The Egyptian translation movement has generated an extensive bibliography in both English and Arabic. For an English-language summary of the translation movement with further bibliographic references, see Cachia, Pierre, “Translations and Adaptations, 1834–1914,” Modern Arabic Literature, ed. Badawi, M. M. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 23–35Google Scholar. The role of the translation movement in the formation of the modern Arab world is a central motif in Hourani, Albert, Arabic Thought in the Liberal Age, 1798–1936 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1962)Google Scholar.

24 Cerdeira, Clemente, Versión árabe de la Guerra de África (años 1859–60) por el historiador y jurisconsulto musulmán Xej Ahamed ben Jaled En-Nasiri Es-Selaui (Madrid: Tipografía Moderna, 1917)Google Scholar. A facsimile of this book appears in a recent anthology of Cerdeira's work: Traducciones y conferencias (Ceuta, Spain: Archivo Central, 2006), 15–99. All of my quotations of Cerdeira's text refer to the pagination of the 2006 Ceuta edition, not that of the 1917 Madrid edition. Cerdeira, like all Spanish historians, refers to the war as the “War of Africa.” In the French and English historiographic traditions, however, the war is known as the “Hispano-Moroccan War of 1859–60.” In this article, I have opted for the latter title, which I find more neutral and which is more common outside of Spain.

25 Said, Edward, Orientalism (New York: Vintage, 1994), 230–31Google Scholar.

26 Di-Capua, Gatekeepers, 7. See also Clancy-Smith, Mediterraneans, 319.

27 Di-Capua, Gatekeepers, 36.

28 Choueiri, Arab History, 4.

29 Jameson, Fredric, Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1991), 310Google Scholar.

30 Schorske, Carl E., Thinking with History (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1998), 3Google Scholar. See also Di-Capua, Gatekeepers, 29.

31 Dirks, Nicholas B., “History as a Sign of the Modern,” Public Culture 2 (1990): 25CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

32 White, Hayden, foreword to Reinhart Koselleck, The Practice of Conceptual History: Timing History, Spacing Concepts, trans. Presner, Todd Samuel et al. . (Palo Alto, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2002), xiiGoogle Scholar.

33 Koselleck, Practice, 76.

34 Therborn, Goran, “Routes to/through Modernity,” Global Modernities, ed. Featherstone, Mike, Lash, Scott, and Robertson, Roland (London: Sage, 1995), 126Google Scholar.

35 Koselleck, Practice, 120. See also Di-Capua, Gatekeepers, 3.

36 Al-Nasiri, Kitab al-Istiqsa, 8:105. My italics.

37 Ibid., 111.

38 Ibid.., 104.

39 Burke, Prelude, 8, 31–32; and Laroui, Abdallah, Les origines sociales et culturelles du nationalisme marocain, 1830–1912 (Casablanca: Centre Culturel Arabe, 1997), 81–87Google Scholar.

40 For the etymology of this erudite reference, see the entry for “Sabā” in Lane's Arabic-English Lexicon (London: Williams & Norgate, 1863).

41 Al-Nasiri, Kitab al-Istiqsa, 8:106.

42 Wehr, Hans, A Dictionary of Modern Written Arabic, ed. Cowan, J. Milton (Urbana, Ill.: Spoken Language Services, 1979), 1045Google Scholar.

43 Littré's Dictionnaire de la langue française appears in the ARTFL project's “Dictionnaires d'autrefois” database: http://artfl-project.uchicago.edu/content/dictionnaires-dautrefois (accessed 1 March 2012).

44 Al-Nasiri, Kitab al-Istiqsa, 8:106.

45 Ibid., 8:106, n. 180.

46 Anderson, Benedict, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, rev. ed. (London: Verso, 1991), 7Google Scholar.

47 Al-Nasiri, Kitab al-Istiqsa, 8:106.

48 Ibid., 8:105. My italics.

49 Ibid.., 107.

50 Elinson, Alexander, Looking Back at al-Andalus (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 2009), 1–13CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

51 Al-Nasiri, Kitab al-Istiqsa, 8:107.

52 Ibid., 107–108.

53 Afaylal, “Harb Titwan,” 202.

54 Al-Nasiri, Kitab al-Istiqsa, 8:108.

55 Ibid., 117–18. My italics.

56 The Moroccan army underwent a radical period of reform between the Battle of Isly (1844) and the establishment of the French and Spanish protectorates in Morocco (1912). For a detailed analysis of these military reforms, see Simou, Bahija, Les reformes militaires au Maroc de 1844 à 1912 (Rabat: Faculté des Lettres et des Sciences Humaines, 1995)Google Scholar. For a summary, see Laroui, Origines, 278–82.

57 Cerdeira, Versión árabe, 98–99. My italics.

58 Al-Nasiri, Kitab al-Istiqsa, 8:117.

59 The protégé system has received significant scholarly attention, but the best book on the topic is Kenbib's, MohammedLes protégés (Rabat: Université Mohammed V, 1996)Google Scholar. In Arabic, the best source is Mansur's, ʿAbd al-Wahhab b.Mushkilat al-Himaya al-Qunsuliyya bi-l-Maghrib (Rabat: Royal Printing Press, 1977)Google Scholar, which clarifies some of the Arabic terminology associated with the “protection” system—including the fact that the Arabic word ḥimāya was used to describe it.

60 Kenbib, Protégés, 51–52.

61 The most concise summary of this four-tier system is in Rassam, Amal and Miller, Susan, “Moroccan Reactions to European Penetration during the Late Nineteenth Century,” Revue de l'Occident musulman et de la Méditerranée 36 (1983): 54–55CrossRefGoogle Scholar. I also thank Susan Miller for helping me to reflect on the semantic complexity of the word ḥimāya and Mustapha Kamal for helping me to analyze the morphology of the Arabic terms associated with the ḥimāya system.

62 Kenbib, Protégés, 17.

63 For the origins of the French Protectorate in Tunisia, see Ganiage, Jean, Les origines du Protectorat français en Tunisie (1861–1881) (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1959)Google Scholar.

64 al-Bustani, Butrus, Kitab Daʾirat al-Maʿarif (Beirut: n.p., 1883), 7:171Google Scholar.

65 Ganiage, “La rivalité franco-italienne (1878–1880),” in Les origines, 521–88.

66 Leclerc, Max, Au Maroc Avec Lyautey (Paris: Armand Colin, 1927), 116Google Scholar.

67 See Villanova, José Luis, El Protectorado de España en Marruecos (Barcelona: Edicions Bellaterra, 2004), 53–70Google Scholar; and Dieste, Josep Lluís Mateo, La ‘hermandad’ hispano-marroquí (Barcelona: Edicions Bellaterra, 2003), 55–78Google Scholar.

68 Said, Edward, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Knopf, 1994), 9Google Scholar.

69 Cerdeira, Versión árabe, 98, n. 2. My italics.

70 Gabriel de Morales, “Prólogo,” in Cerdeira, Versión árabe, 23–24.

71 Al-Nasiri, Kitab al-Istiqsa, 8:103; and Cerdeira, Versión árabe, 43.

72 Cerdeira, Versión árabe, 43, n. 1. My italics.

73 Ibid., 89, n. 1.

74 Al-Nasiri, Kitab al-Istiqsa, 8:113.

75 Cerdeira, Versión árabe, 85, n. 1. My italics.

76 Ibid., 70–71, n. 2.

77 Ibid.., 86–87, n. 1.

78 For the “unreliable narrator” motif and, more broadly, the influence of Arabic frametale narratives on the development of Spanish prose fiction, see Wacks, David A., Framing Iberia: Maqamāt and Frametale Narratives in Medieval Spain (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 2007)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

79 Morales, “Prólogo,” 25.

80 Cohn, Bernard, Colonialism and Its Forms of Knowledge: The British in India (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1996), 16–56Google Scholar.

81 Cerdeira, Clemente, Gramática de árabe literal (Beirut: n.p., 1911)Google Scholar. For a biography of Cerdeira, see Zarrouk, Mourad, Los traductores de España en Marruecos (1859–1939) (Barcelona: Edicions Bellaterra, 2009), 102–34Google Scholar.

82 Zarrouk, Traductores de España, 102–13.

83 Morales, “Prólogo,” 21.

84 Menocal, María Rosa, “Visions of al-Andalus,” The Literature of al-Andalus, ed. Menocal, María Rosa, Scheindlin, Raymond P., and Sellis, Michael (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 14CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

85 The bibliography on convivencia—as a cultural and a scholarly concept—is immense. For an introduction, see Thomas Glick, F., Islamic and Christian Spain in the Early Middle Ages (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1979), 6–13Google Scholar; and Nirenberg, David, Communities of Violence (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1998), 8–10Google Scholar.

86 Cerdeira, Versión árabe, 16. For a biography of Rinaldy, see Zarrouk, Traductores de España, 11–93.

87 Rinaldy plays a particularly prominent role in Pedro Antonio de Alarcón's Diario de un testigo de la Guerra de África (1860) and Benito Pérez Galdós's Aita Tettauen (1905).

88 Cerdeira, Versión árabe, 17.

89 Ibid.

90 Ibid.., 18.

91 Ibid.., 28.

92 Ibid.., 18–19.

93 Jameson, Postmodernism, 310.

94 Said, Orientalism, 230–31.

95 Di-Capua, Gatekeepers, 29.

96 Ibid., 99. Emphasis in original.