This paper will address the role of the historical novel in Moroccan literary culture from the 1950‘s to the current day. The Arabic literary canon is, in a sense, founded on the evocation of the past. The classical qasidah turns back to the abandoned campsite, the reconstruction of memory embedded in the poem’s structure. The weight of the past, then, is already felt in all its intensity in the pre-Islamic tradition. Subsequently, as a genre with an eye always turned toward the past, the historical novel holds the potential to establish significant links to the tradition. The genre first appears in Morocco in 1950. One of the earliest novels published in Arabic in Morocco, Abd al-Hadi Bu Talib’s Wazir ghirnatah (1950), while historical fiction, differs little from social realism, the mimetically faithful image of the epoch less important than the idiosyncrasies of atmosphere it provides. An example of the growing “sameness” of the world literary system, it has an imported plot similar to European models coupled with an indigenous style. The following decades, however, have witnessed significant development in the genre. More recent publications like Bensalem Himmich’s Majnun al-hukm (1989) and Hadha al-andalusi (2009) exhibit a different engagement with the past and the premodern literary tradition. By drawing on the classical relationship between authorship and genre, Himmich’s narratives are not quite simply fiction; rather, he writes in a discourse that leans toward the apocryphal. Abdelfattah Kilito has noted that the type of narrative fiction in which the author loses his voice in the speech of imaginary characters was highly limited in classical Arabic literature. The attribution of speech, however, not to imaginary characters but to real persons of unquestioned historical existence creates an apocryphal discourse characteristically different than fiction, a type of discourse rooted in the classical tradition. Akin to forgery, it is a type of pastiche so convincingly executed as to be essentially indistinguishable from the original. By utilizing this narrative mode, Himmich disrupts the polarity generally considered characteristic of the novel in its imported forms, with a plot from the core (i.e. Europe) and a style from the periphery, turning the historical novel into an ideal vehicle for bridging the gap between literary tradition and modernity. The questions addressed here are how and why the genre has steadily evolved from Bu Talib’s writing to Himmich’s recent novels.