A Moroccan Faqih in France and Britain: A Translation of Mohamed Al Hajwi’s Ar-Rihla Al Urobiya and a Study of His Ambivalent Occidentalism

Abstract

The present dissertation is a translation and study of Mohamed al Hajwi’s Ar-Rihla Al Urobiya, an account of his ambassadorial journey to France and touristic visit to Britain in the summer of 1919. As a faqih, a Makhzen functionary, a merchant and a traveler, al Hajwi is a very controversial figure in the Moroccan political history and Islamic thought. His travelogue is a complex and multilayered text that occupies an important place in Moroccan and Arab Occidentalism. This is the first time it appears in an English translation. The translation is as literal as possible, adopting foreignization method advocated by postcolonial theorists, namely Bassnett, Lefevere, Asad and Venuti, with the hope of capturing the intention and style of the author and the multivocal worldviews of the source text. The European Journey has been routinely simplified as al Hajwi’s reform project based on France as the paragon of modernity and technological progress. Travelling in a Europe ravaged by war and economic crisis and being handicapped by language, al Hajwi must have found himself in Jakobson’s intersemiotic condition described by Michael Cronin as a “adrift in a world of alien, threatening signs.” His narrative tries to cope with this intersemiotic situation by engaging with complex forms of translations and representations of the alien realities of Europe. The present reading highlights the ambivalence, paradoxical, and sometimes conflicting views of the Europe Otherness in the narrative, and how the emergence of the American Other undermines al Hajwi’s confidence in the greatness of France. Another important argument in the dissertation is that with the implementation of the Postcolonial double critique, we become aware that in the second half of the narrative as the journey shifts from a diplomatic to a tourist one, al Hajwi’s goes through a radical revision of his ideas about Europe and a rediscovery of his cultural Selfhood.