In the announcement of the shortlist of the 2020 Arabic Booker prize, the chair of the judging panel Muhsin al-Musawi described the majority of the novels on the list as being “historical fiction” and being “occupied with the oppressive effect of history, past and present, but they do not merely retell this history or current reality.” This illustrates the fact that the genre of historical fiction that appeared with the Nah?a and has seen a surge in recent decades, continues to hold sway over MENA literary production, reconfiguring notions of history, its frameworks and the archive and offering competing discourses of what constitutes historical consciousness. In this paper, I will be examining the historical fiction of the Morrocan intellectual and writer ?asan ?r?d (1962) specifically Rab?? Qur?uba (Cordoba’s Spring) 2018 and al-M?risk? (The Morisco) 2011 that was originally written in French Le Morisque and was translated into Arabic by ?Abdel-Kar?m al-Juwe??. I will be situating his historical fiction within his larger intellectual production and the various roles in which he has engaged with history and the production of historical knowledge, as he was the official historian of the kingdom of Morocco (November 2009-December 2010).Other ways he has engaged with historical knowledge production is by via his position as the director of the ?ariq bin Ziy?d studies and research centre, and as a consultant and frequent contributor to the Moroccan magazine Zamane that specializes in “historical research”. Positioning him in conversation with the Moroccan historian, intellectual, novelist and theorist ?Abdall?h al-?Arw? (1933-) and his historical epistemology of history, I argue that while both intellectuals’ positions stem from both a postcolonial critique of the “West” and its epistemes as well as a critique of Arab thought and a call for reform, ?r?d’s position calls for a greater engagement with notions of indigeneity.