The colonial encounter between France and Morocco took place not only in the political realm but also in the realm of medicine. Because the body politic and the physical body are intimately linked, ...French efforts to colonize Morocco took place in and through the body. Starting from this original premise,Medicine and the Saintstraces a history of colonial embodiment in Morocco through a series of medical encounters between the Islamic sultanate of Morocco and the Republic of France from 1877 to 1956.
Drawing on a wealth of primary sources in both French and Arabic, Ellen Amster investigates the positivist ambitions of French colonial doctors, sociologists, philologists, and historians; the social history of the encounters and transformations occasioned by French medical interventions; and the ways in which Moroccan nationalists ultimately appropriated a French model of modernity to invent the independent nation-state. Each chapter of the book addresses a different problem in the history of medicine: international espionage and a doctor's murder; disease and revolt in Moroccan cities; a battle for authority between doctors and Muslim midwives; and the search for national identity in the welfare state. This research reveals how Moroccans ingested and digested French science and used it to create a nationalist movement and Islamist politics, and to understand disease and health. In the colonial encounter, the Muslim body became a seat of subjectivity, the place from which individuals contested and redefined the political.
Post-colonial theory recognizes that European and American scholars have traditionally defined the themes that are of interest in literary criticism; in Moroccan studies, these themes have tended ...toward questions of migration, identity, secularism, and religious fanaticism typically questions regarding Morocco in its relationships with colonizing nations. This book intends to re-define the themes of interest in Moroccan studies, looking toward more local themes and movements and relationships of sub-cultures and languages within Morocco. Questions in this volume regard concepts of the self, conflicting discourses, intersections of self-identity and community, and Moroccan reclamation of identity in the post-colonial sphere.
Alone among Muslim countries, Morocco is known for its own national form of Islam, "Moroccan Islam." However, this pathbreaking study reveals that Moroccan Islam was actually invented in the early ...twentieth century by French ethnographers and colonial officers who were influenced by British colonial practices in India. Between 1900 and 1920, these researchers compiled a social inventory of Morocco that in turn led to the emergence of a new object of study, Moroccan Islam, and a new field, Moroccan studies. In the process, they resurrected the monarchy and reinvented Morocco as a modern polity. This is an important contribution for scholars and readers interested in questions of orientalism and empire, colonialism and modernity, and the invention of traditions.
The epic battle for control of the Strait of Gibraltar waged by Castile, Morocco, and Granada in the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries is a major, but often overlooked, chapter in the ...history of the Christian reconquest of Spain. After the Castilian conquest of Seville in 1248 and the submission of the Muslim kingdom of Granada as a vassal state, the Moors no longer loomed as a threat and the reconquest seemed to be over. Still, in the following century, the Castilian kings, prompted by ideology and strategy, attempted to dominate the Strait. As self-proclaimed heirs of the Visigoths, they aspired not only to reconstitute the Visigothic kingdom by expelling the Muslims from Spain but also to conquer Morocco as part of the Visigothic legacy. As successive bands of Muslims over the centuries had crossed the Strait from Morocco into Spain, the kings of Castile recognized the strategic importance of securing Algeciras, Gibraltar, and Tarifa, the ports long used by the invaders. At a time when European enthusiasm for the crusade to the Holy Land was on the wane, the Christian struggle for the Strait received the character of a crusade as papal bulls conferred the crusading indulgence as well as ancillary benefits. The Gibraltar Crusade had mixed results. Although the Castilians seized Gibraltar in 1309 and Algeciras in 1344, the Moors eventually repossessed them. Only Tarifa, captured in 1292, remained in Castilian hands. Nevertheless, the power of the Marinid dynasty of Morocco was broken at the battle of Salado in 1340, and for the remainder of the Middle Ages Spain was relieved of the threat of Moroccan invasion. While the reconquest remained dormant during the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries, Ferdinand and Isabella conquered Granada, the last Muslim outpost in Spain, in 1492. In subsequent years Castile fulfilled its earlier aspirations by establishing a foothold in Morocco.
This article examines the ways in which two prominent Nigerian playwrights, Wole Soyinka and Esiaba Irobi, re-envision common perceptions of the Nigerian armed forces as portrayed in literature. ...Despite nearly two decades of often-tumultuous democratic rule, Nigeria is yet to attain full membership of the league of democratic nations. In The Beatification of Area Boy and Cemetery Road, Soyinka and Irobi respectively look at the ways in which authoritarian regimes have sought to repress and subjugate hapless indigenous populations. The country increasingly finds itself between two psychological dispositions: the traumatized psyche occasioned by the military in the past, and the democratic dispensation which represents the present. Soyinka's artistic commitment is ostensibly demonstrated in constant questioning and an accusatory historicization of the role of the military in the tragedy of Nigeria's decadence in his play, The Beatification of Area Boy, while Irobi dramatizes the weaving together of the historical massacre of the peasants of Bakolori by the army in Northern Nigeria. The important question raised by this article is: How does the Nigerian nation-state atone for the evils of brutality, torture, forceful evacuation and displacement perpetrated by the military on its citizens, especially the Ilaje 'Maroko evacuees' and the Fulani victims of the 'Bakolori massacre'? The article concludes that Soyinka's and Irobi's deft appropriations of historiography have been utilized to explore the inherent complexity of the interplay of Nigeria's political anomie for the interrogation of military dehumanization of defenceless Nigerians in The Beatification of Area Boy and Cemetery Road.
This study argues that Paul Bowles is more perceptive than many American travelers in Morocco. The book provides us with what are perhaps the most sustained meditations to date on Bowles’s ...translation work and his autobiography, as well as perceptive analyses of key stories such as “A Distant Episode” and “Here to Learn” and his second novel, Let It Come Down, set primarily in Tangier. The chapter on translation dwells on the complex interactions between Moroccan storytellers and Bowles. The work considers translation as a site where the oral and written, colonial and post-colonial scene, and English and Maghrebi come face to face; it is a place where things are worked out in dynamic interaction. The chapter on Bowles’s autobiography Without Stopping, urges us to take this piece of self-writing (famously dubbed Without Telling by William Burroughs) more seriously, drawing our attention to baroque architectural features of mind and external landscape, worlds distorted by mirrors, dreams, and fluid transit where forms morph. The work also highlights difference between experience and representation of experience through language, transformed through the prism of memory. In the chapter on Without Stopping as well as in my discussions of Bowles’s fiction, I provide useful elaborations of connections between Bowles’s work and that of Edgar Allan Poe. My reading of one of Bowles’s best-known stories, “A Distant Episode,” brings to the surface a recognition that the tragic fate of the Professor, the story’s protagonist, is an outcome of his inability to admit that cultures are not static. The academically trained linguist demonstrates an unwillingness or inability to adapt to change, or to read cultural signs accurately. The message is that Morocco is not stuck in time, and cannot be held in place by Orientalist fantasies or preconceived, externally derived intellectual constructs and assumptions. The book concludes that against the grain of Samuel Huntington’s notion ofClash of Civilizations, Bowles’s poetic and geographical journey forcefully projects cosmopolitanism and transnational attention confirming that civilizations and ‘identities’ open up rather than shut down, war or clash.
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