Spanish-Maghribi (Moroccan) relations beyond exceptionalism: a postcolonial perspective^*

* This article is part of the broader research project ‘Islam 2.0: cultural markers and religious markers in Mediterranean societies in transformation’ (FFI2014–54667-R). The research leading to this paper received funding from the European Research Council under the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007–2013) ERC—grant agreement 323316—project CORPI, ‘Conversion, Overlapping Religiosities, Polemics, Interaction: Early Modern Iberia and Beyond.’ Special thanks for their support to Bernardo Antonio González, Elena Arigita and David Stenner.

ABSTRACT

Spanish-Maghribi relations can be considered within a very unique framework of geographical and historical confluences. This paper explores how the interwoven pasts of Spain and the Maghrib generated a particular rhetoric of exceptionalism that not only fostered colonial intervention in North Africa, but still permeates current institutional and academic literature. By problematising past and present from a postcolonial perspective, we would like to transcend the rhetoric of a splendorous shared past and a unique colonial experience.

KEYWORDS:

• Spain
• Morocco
• Western Sahara
• Maghrib
• colonialism
• Africanism
• postcolonialism
• Al-Andalus
• shared past
• exceptionalism
• ambivalence

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

* This article is part of the broader research project ‘Islam 2.0: cultural markers and religious markers in Mediterranean societies in transformation’ (FFI2014–54667-R). The research leading to this paper received funding from the European Research Council under the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007–2013) ERC—grant agreement 323316—project CORPI, ‘Conversion, Overlapping Religiosities, Polemics, Interaction: Early Modern Iberia and Beyond.’ Special thanks for their support to Bernardo Antonio González, Elena Arigita and David Stenner.

1 As in Inmigración magrebí en España: el retorno de los moriscos (López García 1993); The Return of the Moor: Spanish Responses to Contemporary Moroccan Immigration (Flesler 2008), or El retorno/el reencuentro: La inmigración en la literatura hispano-marroquí (Rueda 2010). In his Diario de un ilegal, Moroccan author Rachid Nini wrote: ‘Jokingly, I told him we were coming back. It is true that this time we were neither soldiers of an army, nor did we have a leader like Tariq Ibn Ziyad, but we were invading Al-Andalus again.’ (2002, 98). In Immigration, Popular Culture, and the Re-routing of European Muslim Identity, Dotson-Renta has argued that Al-Andalus is also being revisited by immigrants in Spain and Europe as ‘a means by which to claim insider status’ (2012, 11).

2 For continuities between the colonial and the Civil War see for instance Los moros que trajo Franco: La intervención de tropas coloniales en la guerra civil (Madariaga 2002), Deadly Embrace: Morocco and the Road to the Spanish Civil War (Balfour 2002), or La guerra que vino de África (Nerín 2005).

3 The relational nature of this ambivalent discourse and its manifestation beyond traditional metropolitan/colonial boundaries was brilliantly formulated by James Baldwin in his novel Another Country: ‘They keep you here because you’re black, the filthy, white cocksuckers, while they go around jerking themselves off with all that jazz about the land of the free and the home of the brave. And they want you to jerk yourself off with that same music, too, only, keep your distance’ (Baldwin [1960] 1993, 351). As underlined by Mateo Dieste, in the Spanish colonial context, the racial theories in vogue at the time led to a particular taxonomy of Moroccan subjects as ‘inferior brothers’ (2003, 29).

4 Very recently, Stuurman (2017) has shown that assimilationist narratives are not an exception but a recurrent feature of the ambivalent nature of discourses in situations of cultural contact.

5 A critique of the anthropological dimension of this ideological system, which claimed a common origin for the North-African and Iberian populations in antiquity, was presented in the early years of the Francoist regime by the Spanish anthropologist Caro Baroja ([1946] 2003, vol. 1, 107–128). Years later, the archaeologist Tarradell (1965) developed this critique further. For a more recent discussion of the anthropological dimension of Africanism see: Fernández Martínez (2001).

6 Though it is certainly more balanced and even calls for the need of a ‘revision’ of this historical period, in El Protectorado español en Marruecos a los 100 años de la firma del Tratado: fondos documentales en la Biblioteca Islámica Félix Mª Pareja, we can still find classic formulations of the ‘fascinating period of the shared history between Spain and Morocco’ by government officials (5).

7 In addition to mostly military personnel, this collective publication includes academics as well.

8 Side by side with the idea of the pacification, meaning indeed direct army intervention, the colonial discourse also developed the idea of the ‘penetración pacífica’ (peaceful penetration), which is the nonviolent action through education and culture, as advocated by journals such as España en África that had been launched in 1905 by the Centros Comerciales Hispano-Marroquíes. According to González González, ‘the discourse on Spanish-Arab friendship led to the creation of a series of cultural institutions designed to foster a shared past between the two peoples’ (2015, 162) within the broader framework of Hispano-Arab fraternity that had been developed by Francoist regime. See also Hernando de Larramendi, González González, and López García (2015).

9 In many current writings about the colonial era, we can still find examples of the colonial Africanist discourse in its purest form: ‘The overall result of the Spanish Africanism during its golden decade, the forties, is impressive: the dissemination of African culture in Spain, the contributions to the exploration of that continent, and the educational and cultural actions in Morocco and in Western and Equatorial Africa’ (Molina 2006, 75). Darías Príncipe in the foreword to Al-Andalus: una identidad compartida: arte, ideología y enseñanza en el protectorado español en Marruecos (1999, 11–12), written almost on the centennial of the Spanish-American war of 1898, still proclaimed the ‘excellence’ of Spanish colonialism (acción civilizadora).

10 See also the prologues to Aaiún: gritando lo que se siente. Madrid: Revista Exilios y Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, 2006, edited by Generación de la Amistad Saharawi – the most articulate group of Sahrawis writing in Spanish – published to commemorate the thirtieth anniversary of the withdrawal.

11 Defenders of the Sahrawi cause claim that the Sahrawis are the only real ‘Hispano-Árabe’ people (Moya 2015, 298).

12 These attempts to broaden the horizons of the academic research on the history of the Protectorate can be traced back to works such as El ‘moro’ entre los primitivos: el caso del protectorado español en Marruecos (Mateo Dieste 1997), El Protectorado español en Marruecos. Gestión colonial e identidades (Rodriguez Mediano and de Felipe 2002) and Ángel Cabrera: Ciencia y proyecto colonial en Marruecos (De Felipe, López-Ocón, and Marín 2004). The XIII Congreso de la Asociación de Historia Contemporánea, celebrated in 2016, and its proceedings published in 2017 as Historia, lost in translation?, each devoted one panel to ‘Las relaciones hispano-marroquíes en perspectiva: el legado científico y cultural’, González Madrid, Heras, and Pérez Garzón 2017.

13 In Immigration, Popular Culture, and the Re-routing of European Muslim Identity, Dotson-Renta naïvely claims that ‘Islam has never been foreign when viewed through the lens of Spanish history’ (2012, 49). Even worse, in so doing she relies on one of the most reactionary anti-Muslim writers, César Vidal and his España frente al Islam. De Mahoma a Ben Laden (2004).

14 Mourad Zarrouk just published another work: Cerdeira. Intérprete, diplomático y espía al servicio de la Segunda República (2017).

15 In Crestomatía de árabe literal con glosario y elementos de gramática (1939), the prominent arabist Miguel Asín Palacios declared that his book's ultimate purpose was to help students interpret texts in Arabic, mainly of ‘Spanish Islam’, which is to say Al-Andalus.

16 González González (2010) has rescued Pequeño Vocabulario Hispano-Marroquí ([1913] 2010), one of the colonial treasures dealing with the urgent need to collect the Spanish-Moroccan vocabulary. The book had originally been composed by two prominent Spanish Arabists in the service of the Junta de Enseñanza en Marruecos.

17 The Moroccan Hispanophone writer Mohamed Chakor poetically argued that ‘between Morocco and Spain flows an interior river that has been uniting both countries since the dawn of time’ (Chakor and López Gorge 1985, 27).