Moroccan historical fiction has generally used fictionalized past events to suggest new acts of rereading and reinterpreting history. However, some of the writers such as Hassan Aourid use past political successes and failures, especially in times of tensions, as palimpsests to address crucial current crises. As a Moroccan intellectual, Palace Spokesman and the Kingdom’s historian, Aourid reads contemporary political upheavals as possible iteration of conflictual historical moments in which strong governance and established statecraft experience internal and external threats that usher uncertainties and possible decline. Such is the case in his novel Rabee’ Qortoba (2017) in which he reimagines the last days of al-Hakam al-Mustansir bi Allah, the strong ruler and second Umayyad Caliph of al-Andalus, as he narrates his final testimony combined with reflections and memories of his rule and the trajectory of his ancestral political achievements now that he is bedridden. In my paper, I argue that Hassan Aourid deploys testimonial discursive modes and rhetorical strategies of witness and testimony genre in this novel to comment on the social upheavals and political uncertainties of the Arab spring and its aftermath in Morocco and the Maghrib. Aourid rehabilitates the role of the Moroccan native historical perspective by reimagining the uncertainties faced by the second Umayyad Caliph of Córdoba in al-Andalus in the form of an end-of-life testimony and as a confessional will to Ziri, an Amazigh historian scribe from Morocco. In addition to signaling possible symmetries between past and present, I also argue that the author reinvents 'Mirrors for Princes" genre through the role of witness and testimony by focusing on how the discursive strategies the author employs suggest a more complex and multi-lateral engagement with historical fiction in relation to advice literature.