In 1933, Muḥammad al-Ḥajwī (1874-1956), the minister of education in the French Protectorate and an avid reformer of Islam and Moroccan society, wrote a very long essay entitled “Girls’ Education does not Promote Unveiling.” In it, al-Ḥajwī encouraged schooling for girls, but insisted on women’s very limited access to the public sphere, arguing that a division of gender roles is needed for the progress and strengthening of the Muslim community even if it compromised equality. In this presentation, I analyze al-Ḥajwī’s text, while paying close attention to the changes he proposed in female education and the claims he made in order to justify the restriction of women’s rights and public visibility. I argue that in navigating his new world, al-Ḥajwī was conscious of Moroccan predicaments and European achievements, but also, wanted to conceive Morocco in national and Islamic terms. For him, the moral survival of his community was at stake and his reform project had to engage colonial policy and discourse, Islamic tradition and legal thought, and Moroccan custom and politics in order to fashion his vision for Morocco. Within the world he occupied, al-Ḥajwī’s modestly reformist vocabulary was decisive, even transgressive. In conceptualizing the colonial encounter, this paper seeks to offer an analytical framework that transcends the colonizer/colonized binary, typically framed in terms of cultural domination. By exploring relations of power within colonial Moroccan society and interactions between Moroccan society and the colonial state, my analysis demonstrates that Moroccan modernists did not merely emulate French ideas and standards. Instead, they articulated a complex and nuanced discourse intended to empower Moroccan society in the face of an invasive secular government, older forms of authority, and corrupt religious practices.

The Spanish war on Tetouan (1859-60) and the subsequent occupation of the northern Moroccan city by the Spanish army (1860-62) have widely been considered to have constituted landmarks in the end of Morocco’s independence. In this paper this interpretation will not be completely neglected, for Spain achieved to consolidate its influence in the Sharifian Empire along the second half of the nineteenth century thanks to the favorable conditions established in the several treaties that followed the peacemaking. However, such thesis –which reifies the power of “the colonizers” and undermines that of “the colonized”- will be nuanced by accounting for the many anxieties and obstacles that permeated in the Spanish discursive and material colonization, on the one hand, and by complying with the means by which Moroccans limited such colonization, on the other. I will show that the Spanish authorities, through both material and symbolic associations, intended to depict the occupation of Tetouan as a recreation of Reconquista. As inferred from Ahmed ibn Khalid al-Nasiri’s work -informed by oral testimonies of the war and the occupation- it is likely that part of the Tetouani population, amongst whom there were many of the descendants of expulsed Morisco and Sephardic Jews, did perceive the defeat and the seizure of Tetouan as a repetition of Reconquista. However, I will argue that such Spanish acts and representations shall be understood not as the sign of Spanish colonial power, but rather as the requisite by which colonial power was asserted and constructed. Consequently, I will hold that recreating Reconquista was one major tool by which Spanish colonial power –neither real not evident- was to be performed. Key to this understanding are the limits that Spain faced in both the European and the Moroccan realms. While Great Britain was an essential actor in constraining Spain’s advancement in the Sharifian Empire, I will mostly concentrate in the way in which Moroccan politics as well as the makhzenian diplomacy restrained Spain’s colonial ambitions, in general, and the conditions to the peace treaty which included the incorporation of Tetouan to the Spanish monarchy, in particular. These diplomatic strategies sometimes built upon as well as reinforced Europeans’ prejudices that historiographical (post)colonial narratives have often reproduced -amongst the most widespread tropes, that precolonial Morocco was immersed in an uncontrolled ‘anarchy’, and that Moroccans were characterized by ‘savagery’ and extreme religious ‘fanaticism’.

This paper proposes a revision of the chronological, geographic, and discursive boundaries of Moroccan colonial history. I contend that Moroccan colonial history has largely been narrated from the perspective of French colonialism and the diverse reactions that it elicited among Moroccans living in the French zone. Rather than treating Spanish colonialism in Morocco as an appendix to the history of French colonialism, my paper asks: what new insights come into focus if we flip the perspective of modern Moroccan history by re-telling it through the lens of Spanish colonialism and the Moroccan subjects who lived through it? I hope to illuminate the differences between the Spanish colonial project and the French colonial project, and then to show how these differences can change our understanding of when the colonial period begins and ends, where it takes place, and what it means. Conventional accounts of colonial Moroccan history take the “colonial period” to be coterminous with the Protectorate period (1912-1956). Nevertheless, for Spanish historians and for Moroccan historians from the former Spanish zone, the colonial period starts in 1859-1860, with the Spanish-Moroccan War. In turn, nineteenth-century Spanish and Moroccan texts represent the Spanish-Moroccan War as an extension of the medieval Christian Reconquest of al-Andalus. I will therefore ask what it means to cast the Protectorate period as part of a longer colonial history, which dates back to 1859 and evokes long-standing interactions between Morocco and Iberia. Spanish writers and scientists promoted the idea that Spain’s “natural” southern border was not the Strait of Gibraltar but rather the Atlas mountains. While French colonial intellectuals famously tried to distinguish between Moroccan Arabs and Berbers, the Spanish posited a different distinction: between Spanish Moroccans, who descend from al-Andalus, and African Moroccans. Indeed, the idea of “resurrecting” al-Andalus in Morocco formed the basis of Spain’s cultural policies in Morocco. After the Spanish Civil War, General Francisco Franco founded several colonial institutions that fomented the academic study of al-Andalus and codified the elements of Morocco’s “Andalusi” culture. Today, Morocco’s Andalusi identity and the cultural practices associated with it (such as Andalusi music) are essential components of Moroccan national identity. My paper will therefore conclude by showing how Spanish colonial discourses about Morocco’s connection to al-Andalus inadvertently sowed the seeds of the Moroccan national culture that supplanted colonial rule and that continues to define Morocco today.

This paper presents new research on the environmental history of early Protectorate-era Morocco and explores more generally how environmental research can provide opportunities to rethink the social, cultural, and political histories of the period. Between 1912 and 1940, French reformers sought to “civilize” the landscape of rural Morocco by privatizing communal and shared-use rangeland and forests for sale to European settlers, wealthy indigenous landowners and international agribusiness, forestry and mining corporations. Reformers were self-consciously intent on repurposing, “disciplining” or destroying many features of the rural environment in hopes of creating new ecologies conducive to increased capital flows, intensive monocrop agriculture and a profitable export market. The ecological disequilibrium and social fracture caused by these and other modernization projects contributed to the economic collapse of the agricultural sector in the 1930s, while the long-term consequences (primarily desertification and sinking water tables) continue to affect Morocco today. Beyond helping to understand the long-term consequences of changes to the Moroccan biosphere, this paper presents new ways of conceptualizing the colonial priorities that led to such widespread changes to the environment.