Modern prose literature in Morocco encompasses a wide range of genres that raise the question of whether many of the contemporary forms of narrative generally considered novels in the Maghreb should, in fact, carry this genre signification. Instead, it may be possible to read many of these texts in terms of their continual contrapuntal engagement with the larger Arabic literary tradition, as texts marked by generic hybridity, apocryphal discourse, and intertextual significations. This type of reading holds the potential to disrupt dominant paradigms of literary evolution which view the Arabic novel as the result of the importation of a hegemonic form that caused the erasure of the indigenous genres that preceded it. In this spirit, this paper will offer a close analysis of Muhammad ibn Abdallah al-Muwaqqit’s (1893-1949) al-Rihlah al-Marrakushiyyah (1930). As one of the most prominent writers of the Moroccan nahda, al-Muwaqqit’s work merits considerable attention; the text itself is notable for its evocation of a number of traditional genres. Beyond the ‘rihla’ that gives the work its title, the tension between tradition and modernity is grafted onto Marrakech’s cityscape through a discourse that borrows heavily from classical works on both the ideal and the corrupt city. It is, moreover, Morocco’s most canonical authors from as far back as the fifteenth century that are given a new literary life in order to alternately voice the city’s virtue or dissolution in al-Muwaqqit’s text.