At the end of the 19th century, the Moroccan historian Ahmad b. Khalid al-Nasiri set out to do what no one had done before: write a comprehensive history of Morocco as an independent political entity.Footnote ¹ The result was his colossal Kitab al-Istiqsa li-Akhbar Duwal al-Maghrib al-Aqsa (The Book of Investigation about the Dynasties of Morocco; hereafter, Kitab al-Istiqsa), published in Cairo in 1895.Footnote ² Previous Maghribi scholars had folded the history of Morocco into that of other regions (such as al-Andalus or Ifriqiyya) or had “reduced” Moroccan history to the chronicle of a specific dynasty or the history of a specific city (particularly Fes and Marrakesh). Al-Nasiri, in contrast, treated Moroccan history as a unique and independent discipline. In so doing, he produced a text that has become a monument of national memory, culture, and identity. If Kitab al-Istiqsa was novel when it appeared in print in 1895, it remains today the most comprehensive history of Morocco, in the opinion of Muhammad al-Ashʿari.Footnote ³ Indeed, for al-Ashʿari, Kitab al-Istiqsa “forms the base of our national memory and the defining characteristics of our culture that has its sources in the manifestations of Moroccan identity through time and space.”Footnote ⁴

Depending on how you look at it, al-Nasiri is either the “end” or the “beginning” of Moroccan historiography. In his landmark study of tārīkh (Arabic historiography), Hamilton A. R. Gibb calls al-Nasiri the “last worthy representative” of “the old Arabic historical tradition” in the Maghrib after the 17th century.Footnote ⁵ What Gibb means by this contentious claim is that al-Nasiri is the last Moroccan historian to present himself as a descendent of the Maghrib's great Arab-Islamic culture, whose primary representative, in Gibb's genealogy, is Ibn Khaldun. According to Gibb, al-Nasiri is at the end of a narrative of cultural decline whose beginning was the fall of Islamic Granada in 1492 and whose “natural” conclusion was the colonial subjugation of the Maghrib to Europe.

In contrast with Gibb, Evariste Lévi-Provençal, perhaps the most important European historian of Islamic Spain and the Maghrib during the first half of the 20th century, hailed al-Nasiri's Kitab al-Istiqsa as a beginning on at least three fronts. The first novelty was one of audience: the publication of al-Nasiri's text was an “événement sans precedent” because he was the first living Moroccan historian to be read by both his compatriots and a foreign audience (both Muslim and non-Muslim).Footnote ⁶ The second novelty was one of scope: al-Nasiri does not write a chronicle limited to a specific dynasty, reign, or city but rather a general history of Morocco from the arrival of Islam through the end of the 19th century.Footnote ⁷ The third and final novelty was that al-Nasiri was the first Moroccan historian to use European texts as sources for Moroccan history.Footnote ⁸ Lévi-Provençal attributes the immediate and extensive European readership of Kitab al-Istiqsa to these three innovations.Footnote ⁹

Thus, despite al-Nasiri's status (in his lifetime and to this day) as a monument of national remembrance and national historiography, he was also Morocco's first international historian. With this epithet, I refer not only to his European readership but also to his abiding curiosity about and knowledge of foreign affairs. Al-Nasiri was the first Moroccan to write for foreign newspapers, publishing regularly in Thamarat al-Funun in Damascus and al-Jawaʾib in Istanbul.Footnote ¹⁰ His interest, moreover, was not limited to the Arab or Islamic worlds. Al-Nasiri's biographers insist upon his lifelong engagement with European languages, European science, and European diplomats living and working in Morocco. They also emphasize his study of Spanish and French and his subscriptions to scientific magazines from Spain and France, including magazines devoted to modern military science and technology.Footnote ¹¹ These magazines fomented al-Nasiri's admiration for the organization of European armies.

Al-Nasiri's admiration for European military science shapes his understanding of the Hispano-Moroccan War of 1859–60, the event that catalyzed Morocco's slow decline into colonial subjugation.Footnote ¹² Al-Nasiri's account of the war appears in the final volume of Kitab al-Istiqsa under the macaronic title “The Breakdown of the Peace with the Español and His Seizure of Tetouan.”Footnote ¹³ In this chapter, al-Nasiri attributes the Spanish army's decisive victory over the Moroccan army and subsequent occupation of Tetouan to Spain's superior military technology and strategy. Al-Nasiri therefore distances himself from previous Moroccan accounts of the Hispano-Moroccan War, which had cast it as part of a millennial struggle between Muslims and Christians.Footnote ¹⁴ In contrast, al-Nasiri's text is consumed with a meditation on the nature of modern warfare and on the technological advantages of modern European armies. It is no coincidence, then, that al-Nasiri follows his chapter on the Hispano-Moroccan War with a chapter titled “The Undertaking, Organization, and Customs of Armies.”Footnote ¹⁵ This chapter borrows extensively from the work of the Lebanese writer Ibrahim b. Khilal al-Najjar, a military doctor whose Kitab Misbah al-Sari wa-Nuzhat al-Qari (1858) details the mid-19th-century reforms of the Ottoman army.Footnote ¹⁶

Al-Nasiri's chapter on the organization of armies demonstrates his familiarity not only with modern European military science but also with the reform movements that spread through the Muslim Mediterranean world in the 19th century. While the Ottoman Tanzimat (1839–76) and the reform efforts of Muhammad ʿAli (r. 1811–48) in Egypt have received the lion's share of scholarly interest, historians such as Julia Clancy-Smith and Sahar Bazzaz have recently examined the flourishing of similar reformist movements in the Maghrib.Footnote ¹⁷ A notable example from Tunisia was the Bardo Military Academy established by Ahmad Bey in 1840. The academy's faculty featured such figures as Shaykh Mahmud Qabadu (1812–71), a distinguished Qurʾanic scholar who was famous for his attempts to reconcile Western science with Islam.Footnote ¹⁸ Despite the scholarly tendency to view 19th-century Morocco as, in the words of Edmund Burke, “a slightly more backward and weaker version of the Near East,”Footnote ¹⁹ the country was not immune to the reformist spirit sweeping the region. Morocco experienced its own era of reforms, known as the iṣlāḥ, in which the Moroccan sultanate sought to transform society from above through the modernization of the country's administration, military, and economy. It is not a coincidence that al-Nasiri wrote his Kitab al-Istiqsa during the rule of Mawlay Hasan (r. 1873–94), the most energetic of Morocco's 19th-century reformist sultans.Footnote ²⁰

Yet al-Nasiri's admiration for European science, his interest in European languages, and his participation in Pan-Arab journalism are not merely symptoms of his reformist spirit; they also align his Kitab al-Istiqsa with important trends in 19th-century Arabic historiography. After all, as Yoav Di-Capua, Youssef M. Choueiri, and Jack A. Crabbs have shown, many of the pioneering Arab historians of the 19th century were also translators and journalists.Footnote ²¹ Choueiri insists on the pivotal role that translation in particular played in the formation of modern Arabic historiography, which he claims “began as a translation movement.”Footnote ²² In fact, scholars have devoted so much energy to studying the relationship between the 19th-century Egyptian translation movement and the nahḍa (the 19th-century Arab cultural renaissance) that they run the risk of passing off the nahḍa itself as a derivative phenomenon, a mere “translation” of European cultural splendor.Footnote ²³ Meanwhile, the 19th- and 20th-century translation of Arabic historiography into European languages has received far less critical scrutiny. This scholarly omission is particularly striking in the case of al-Nasiri's Kitab al-Istiqsa, which enjoyed a vibrant afterlife as a translated text in Spain.

It is al-Nasiri's chapter on the Hispano-Moroccan War that has earned him an indelible place in Spanish historiography and letters. From the beginning of the 20th century, and particularly after the establishment of the Spanish Protectorate in Morocco (1912), Spanish Arabists, novelists, and politicians eagerly read al-Nasiri's text in order to understand the “Other's” version of the war. It is fitting, then, that Clemente Cerdeira entitles the only published Spanish translation of al-Nasiri's text Versión árabe de la Guerra de África (1917).Footnote ²⁴ Yet in presenting al-Nasiri's text to a Spanish audience, Cerdeira obfuscates as much as he clarifies. He overwhelms al-Nasiri's text with a large apparatus of footnotes that contradict the Moroccan's account and undermine his authority as a historian. The objective of this critical apparatus is to emphasize that al-Nasiri's “version” of the war is little more than that: a subjective and, at times, “fantastical” telling of the war rather than an objective “history” of it.

Cerdeira's subversive footnotes are not the only weapon he uses to problematize the “historical” character of al-Nasiri's text. Throughout the translation, Cerdeira omits key words and sections that al-Nasiri uses to stress the historical contingency of the war. Cerdeira, for example, omits the chapter “The Undertaking, Organization, and Customs of Armies,” which follows al-Nasiri's chapter on the war of 1859–60. Cerdeira even truncates the chapter devoted to the war, eliminating al-Nasiri's concluding discussion of the modernization of Morocco's army. Cerdeira's elisions and omissions exemplify one of the most potent topoi of European Orientalist scholarship: that of Arab “timelessness,” or, as Edward Said puts it, the notion that Arabs are “exempt from history.”Footnote ²⁵ Al-Nasiri's analysis of the war aspires to explain the material and technological causes of Morocco's defeat, but Cerdeira's translation of al-Nasiri effaces this historicist program and projects onto the Arabic text the European perception and presumption of “Arab timelessness.” That is, Cerdeira strives to undermine any hint that al-Nasiri's thinking is progressive, reformist, or modern.

History's vexed relationship with the modern is at the center of my argument. This article joins a growing body of scholarly work, exemplified most notably by Yoav Di-Capua's Gatekeepers of the Arab Past, that insists upon the unstable, hybrid nature of late 19th-century Arabic historiography and that links this hybridity to theories of modernity. While an earlier generation of scholars, which included Crabbs and Choueiri, was able to make a clear distinction between “traditional” and “modern” Arabic historiography, Di-Capua questions whether there was, in fact, “a straightforward, linear transformation from traditional forms of writing to modern ones.”Footnote ²⁶ Instead, he asserts that instability and hybridity were the hallmarks of late 19th-century Arabic historiography.Footnote ²⁷ Al-Nasiri's work illustrates this hybridity by using both religion and the nation–state as organizing principles. Although al-Nasiri's account of the war emphasizes the superior military technology and strategy that led to Spain's humiliating victory over the Moroccan army, it is still peppered with Qurʾanic citations and references to the warring parties as “the Christians and the Muslims.” These residues of a religious worldview are, perhaps, what led Youssef Choueiri to dismiss al-Nasiri as a “traditional historian.”Footnote ²⁸ Yet it is precisely this hybridity that leads me to emphasize the modernity of al-Nasiri's text rather than simply drawing attention to his admiration of modernization. As Fredric Jameson has noted, “modernity is characterized by a situation of incomplete modernization” and by “the conviction that we ourselves are somehow new, that a new age is beginning, that . . . nothing can ever be the same again.”Footnote ²⁹

Al-Nasiri's fascination with the ongoing and incomplete modernization of the Moroccan army and the Moroccan state are not the only factors that underwrite my designation of his text as “modern.” Rather, al-Nasiri's modernity resides primarily in his ability to “think with history,” in the sense posited by Carl Schorske: “‘Thinking with history’ . . . implies the utilization of elements of the past in the cultural construction of the present and future.”Footnote ³⁰ Indeed, Nicholas B. Dirks has famously argued that history itself is one of the most important signs of the modern: “We are modern not only because we have achieved this status historically but because we have developed the consciousness of our historical depths and trajectories.”Footnote ³¹ What characterizes al-Nasiri's account of the war—and what distinguishes it from Cerdeira's problematic translation—is his achievement of what Reinhart Koselleck has called a “concept of history.” In an illuminating preface to a translation of Koselleck's essays on history, Hayden White has observed that the “concept of history” and the historiography that it produces often derive from “the kinds of conflicts in which defeat is experienced as an ethical failure requiring reflection on ‘what went wrong’ in order to determine the historical significance of the conflict itself.”Footnote ³² Koselleck has similarly claimed that “if history is made in the short run by the victors, historical gains in knowledge stem in the long run from the vanquished.”Footnote ³³ Indeed, it is from within the crucible of defeat that al-Nasiri discovers, in the words of Goran Therborn, “the future as an open, unbuilt site never visited before, but a place reachable and constructible.”Footnote ³⁴ Faced with the Moroccan defeat in 1860, al-Nasiri envisions a national future that is, in Koselleck's words, “a horizon of planning, not only of days, weeks, or even years, but of the long-term kind in terms of changes.”Footnote ³⁵ In effacing al-Nasiri's emphasis on long-term social transformation, Clemente Cerdeira not only hides al-Nasiri's historical thinking; he also hides al-Nasiri's modernity.

* * *

In al-Nasiri's chapter on the Hispano-Moroccan War, the most common description for the movement of the Spanish army is shayʾan fa-shayʾan (little by little), as when the historian says: “The enemy continued moving along in such a way, little by little, until it reached the river known as the Asmir River.”Footnote ³⁶ The phrase appears three times in the chapter on the war, often alongside other phrases that underline the steady and orderly advance of the Spanish army: “Then the [Spanish] troops gush forth in this order, line by line, and they advance, little by little, one after another, as if they were waves of the sea.”Footnote ³⁷ Here, the expression “little by little” combines with the nouns “order” (tartīb), “lines” (ṣufūf), and “waves” (amwāj) and with the verbs “to gush forth” (tandafiʿu) and “to advance” (tataqaddim) to represent the Spanish army as an unstoppable force of progress (understood both as movement and as modernity). Alongside this constellation of meaning, the anaphoric repetition of ṣufūf (lines), shayʾan (thing, a little), and baʿḍ (one, some) creates a wave of sound, which turns over itself, gaining momentum as the sentence goes on. Thus, the sentence mimics, on a phonetic level, the wave imagery that it evokes.

While the text figures the Spanish army as a gushing wave, implacably moving forward, it describes the Moroccan army as a scattered and undisciplined force:

The text juxtaposes the dispersion of the Moroccan army with the lines and order of the Spanish army. The Moroccan historian refers here to the jaysh system (in French historiography, guich) that characterized the Moroccan army before and during the Hispano-Moroccan War. Although the word jaysh simply means “army” in classical Arabic, it took on a specialized meaning in the context of precolonial Morocco, as Edmund Burke III and Abdallah Laroui have demonstrated: the jaysh were the heterogeneous mercenary contingents, often composed largely of black slaves, who, in return for land use and tax exemptions, protected the sultan's road and fought on his behalf. Both Burke and Laroui observe that the Hispano-Moroccan War signals the end of the jaysh system in the Moroccan army.Footnote ³⁹

Al-Nasiri relies on the lexicon of classical Arabic poetry to describe the Moroccan army's fighting style. Twice in one sentence, the historian uses the root f-r-q to describe them: “They fought while spread out [mutafarriqūn] . . . they dispersed [tafarraqū].” The paronomasia with the root f-r-q evokes the classical poetic topos of the firāq, the tragic separation of lovers from the abandoned encampment. Al-Nasiri bolsters the classical substrate of this passage by using the phrase aydī sabā to describe the spread-out formation of the Moroccan soldiers. I have translated the clause in question as “they fought while spread out, every which way,” but it literally means “they fought while spread out, in the ways of the people of Saba.” The Saba were a tribe from pre-Islamic Arabia who were scattered from their homeland after their famous dam burst and flooded their lands.Footnote ⁴⁰ In classical Arabic poetry, the Saba stand as metaphors for dispersion and exile. This reference in al-Nasiri not only reinforces the image of the Moroccans as a “scattered people” but also—through its allusion to a burst dam—proleptically anticipates the image of the Spanish as “waves” gushing forth against the feeble Moroccan forces.

Just as al-Nasiri constructs a binary between the Moroccan fighting style and the Spanish fighting style, he distinguishes between two kinds of Moroccan soldiers:

This is one of the richest and most difficult passages in al-Nasiri's account of the war. Although the passage is in fuṣḥā (classical Arabic), it represents the author's attempt to mimic the dialectal speech of two kinds of Moroccans. These two “types” of Moroccan soldiers, as we will discover, are marked not only by their zeal for battle but also by language, class, and region. Al-Nasiri calls the Moroccan soldiers “volunteers” (mutaṭawwiʿa), though this term obfuscates the condition of rural poverty that led most of the Moroccan soldiers to enroll in the makeshift army defending Tetouan.

The first exemplar—of the “resolute” (hāzimūn) soldiers—identifies himself as a cultured and elite Moroccan by the word he uses for “machine guns,” mitāruzāt. This neologism is an Arabicized version of the French mitrailleuse (machine gun) onto which the imaginary speaker has appended the generic Arabic plural suffix, -āt. The neologism does not appear in Lane's Arabic–English Lexicon (1863), but a related form, mitrāliyoz appears in Hans Wehr's 20th-century dictionary.Footnote ⁴² The reason for this lexicographical gap is simple: the word mitrailleuse did not come into use in French until the 1870s, after the publication of Lane's Lexicon. Émile Littré's Dictionnaire de la langue française (1872–77), the first dictionary to define mitrailleuse, gives evidence of the word's recent vintage: “Mitrailleuse. Name recently given to a firearm, also known as a bullet-gun, which can, with the help of a special mechanism, shoot bullets at a great distance and with lots of speed.”Footnote ⁴³ Presumably, al-Nasiri came across the new French word while perusing the French scientific magazines to which he subscribed. What is interesting is not so much al-Nasiri's familiarity with what was still a rare French word at the time he was writing but rather his anachronistic decision to put it in the mouth of an imaginary Moroccan soldier: Francophone or not, no Moroccan soldier in 1859 knew the word mitāruzāt because its French root, mitrailleuse, had not yet come into existence.

The symbolic importance of this word choice becomes clearer when it is compared to the speech of the second Moroccan soldier: “What's in it for me [mā lī] to walk into their gunfire?”Footnote ⁴⁴ It is clear that we are hearing a different sociolinguistic register from that of the first soldier: mā lī (literally, “What is it to me?”) is colloquial almost to the point of sassiness. The word that the soldier uses for the enemy's gunfire, al-sharshama, reaffirms his colloquial register: al-sharshama is a Moroccan dialect word (not present in fuṣḥā) meaning “bursts of gunfire.” Indeed, the word is uncommon enough for a non-Moroccan Arab that the modern editors of Kitab al-Istiqsa define it in a footnote.Footnote ⁴⁵ The contrast between the first soldier's Francophonic Arabic and the second soldier's colloquial Arabic signals, at first glance, a difference of social class. The first soldier's use of French suggests that he is from the Moroccan aristocracy or merchant class, which had contact with European diplomats and businesspeople throughout the 19th century. In contrast, the second soldier, by using al-sharshama and mā lī, comes across as a country bumpkin.

Yet, the comparison of the two soldiers also points to dissensions within the Moroccan army that cut much deeper than language, implicating notions of self, belonging, and collectivity. The second soldier's self-reference (“What is it to me?”) suggests an individualistic principle that is fundamentally at odds with the collective abdication of selfhood implicit in the formation of a national army. For the nation, as Benedict Anderson has famously argued,

In fact, the second imaginary soldier explicitly states his unwillingness to participate in a Moroccan imagined community, perhaps because it does not include him: “Let the people of Tetouan fight for their Tetouan. As for me, until they arrive to my tent in ʿAbda or in Dukkala . . . ” The comment underlines the soldier's rural poverty: he lives in a tent in Dukkala-ʿAbda, a region on the Atlantic coast of Morocco, roughly 700 kilometers south of Tetouan. The comment also signals that the soldier does not consider himself responsible for Tetouan's well-being because he is from a different part of Morocco. That is, he does not feel a “deep, horizontal comradeship” that would allow him to ignore the “inequality and exploitation” that define his participation in the war.

Instead, the poor rural soldier has a localist view of the war: “Let the people of Tetouan fight for their Tetouan.” This comment illustrates the lack of national cohesion that plagued Mulay al-ʿAbbas's troops, whose primary source of identification was tribe or region, not nation. The contrast between the two “types” of Moroccan soldiers thus reveals a crisis not only within the Moroccan army but also within the Moroccan nation itself. Al-Nasiri frames this crisis in religious terms by saying that the second soldier talks “as if he didn't believe that it was incumbent upon him to help the Muslims to victory.”Footnote ⁴⁷ Nevertheless, al-Nasiri's text also dramatizes—whether or not the Moroccan historian realized it—one of the most conflictive fault lines of precolonial and, indeed, contemporary Morocco: class conflict between a Francophile urban elite and an impoverished and illiterate rural population. This class conflict, in turn, is directly related to the outcome of the Hispano-Moroccan War, because the Moroccan army at Tetouan was largely composed of heterogenous jaysh contingents of rural mercenaries and slaves, who, like al-Nasiri's second soldier, asked themselves: “mā lī?”

The absence of a strong Moroccan protagonist in al-Nasiri's account of the war perhaps explains why Leopoldo O'Donnell, the commander of the Spanish troops, emerges as the hero of the text. O'Donnell functions as a foil for the Moroccan commander, Mulay al-ʿAbbas, whom al-Nasiri portrays as both incompetent and weak. In a text that is virtually devoid of individualized actors, in which the opposing forces are usually referred to in generic terms (“the Muslims,” “the Christians,” “the enemy,” etc.), O'Donnell and Mulay al-ʿAbbas stand out for the frequency with which they are mentioned by name and for the vividness of their individual characterizations.

The most striking example of Mulay al-ʿAbbas's incompetence comes during the account of the Spanish march on Tetouan. After the Spanish troops crossed the Asmir River in January 1860, a storm cut them off from their supply chains and trapped them between the overflowing banks of the Asmir and Negro rivers. Here is al-Nasiri's description of the storm and of the havoc it created in the Spanish camp:

The text moves subtly from natural disaster to human error. The missing “strong hand” (al-yad al-bāṭisha) is a clear synecdoche for Mulay al-ʿAbbas, who is unable to take advantage of the Spanish army's vulnerable position.

The emblematic moment of Mulay al-ʿAbbas's weakness comes when al-Nasiri narrates his passage through Tetouan, just a few days before the Spanish occupy the city: “It was during this retreat of his that [Mulay al-ʿAbbas] entered the city and passed through its center, placing a handkerchief over his eyes while he cried, lamenting [the loss of] the Faith and the deficiency of its defender.”Footnote ⁴⁹ Mulay al-ʿAbbas's tearful passage through the center of soon-to-be occupied Tetouan evokes a foundational scene in the Arab-Islamic imaginary: the story of Muhammad XII's departure from Granada in 1492. As the legend goes, when the deposed ruler of Nasrid Granada left the city with his entourage, he took a final look back at the Alhambra and wept for the loss of Islam's last stronghold in western Europe. Although the story—known in Spanish as “The Moor's Last Sigh” (el último suspiro del Moro)—is probably apocryphal, the image of the weeping Muslim king departing his fallen city has remained indelible in Arab and Hispano-Christian representations of the fall of Granada.Footnote ⁵⁰ The scene that al-Nasiri paints of the weeping Moroccan commander passing through fallen Tetouan is certainly meant to evoke and echo the fall of Granada for his Moroccan readers, steeped as they were in Andalusi literature and lore. Thus, in one sentence, al-Nasiri draws two symbolic connections: first, Tetouan in 1860 is symbolically aligned with Granada in 1492; second, Mulay al-ʿAbbas is compared with Muhammad XII, the Nasrid ruler unable to protect his kingdom against a Christian assault.

Leopoldo O'Donnell's triumphal entrance into Tetouan forms a dramatic diptych with Mulay al-ʿAbbas's abject departure from the city. When the people of Tetouan realize that their commander has given up on the city, looting and rioting break out. In desperate straits, the people of Tetouan look to the Spanish leader O'Donnell to save them from their own civil strife:

Al-Nasiri's account positions O'Donnell as the de facto savior of Tetouan. His subsequent depiction of O'Donnell's entrance into the city solidifies the Spaniard's role as savior:

The scene of O'Donnell's entrance into Tetouan through the locked cemetery gate is absent from previous Moroccan accounts of the war, such as Mufaddal Afaylal's eyewitness account of the siege of Tetouan.Footnote ⁵³ Whether or not al-Nasiri's addition is apocryphal, it describes, with incredible symbolic economy, O'Donnell's dual role as savior and occupier. He marches on Tetouan as an occupier but finds the city's residents locked within the gates of their own city. The Tetouanis cannot open the city gates without O'Donnell's strong hand.

The Spanish announce their capture of the city with a salvo of cannon fire from the citadel of Tetouan:

This passage encapsulates the ambivalence of al-Nasiri's account of the war. Once again, al-Nasiri relies on symbols of disobedience and mastery: the Moroccan looters are like “untethered goats” (al-naʿam al-shurud); the Spanish army's cannon brings their pillage to an end. Al-Nasiri frames the Christian occupation of Tetouan as a tragedy for Islam (al-dīn), yet he also implies that the Spanish army saves the people of Tetouan from themselves.

Throughout this chapter in Kitab al-Istiqsa, the Moroccans are figured in terms of disorderliness (“untethered goats”) and dispersion (“They fought while spread out, in the ways of the people of Saba”). In contrast, the noun most frequently associated with the Spanish army is tartīb, “order.” It is no coincidence, then, that al-Nasiri returns to this key word in the conclusion of his chapter on the war of 1859–60. After describing the peace agreements between the Spanish and the Moroccan governments, al-Nasiri explains Sultan Muhammad's initiative to modernize the Moroccan army:

This passage bears witness to nothing less than the birth of the modern Moroccan state, heralded by a modernized army and a regulated tax code.Footnote ⁵⁶ To characterize these initiatives, al-Nasiri relies on the verb rattaba (to regulate, order) and its gerund tartīb (order), which were formerly reserved in the text for describing the Spanish army and its commander, O'Donnell. Now, however, the “strong hand” of order—so lacking in the Tetouan campaign—is the head of state himself, the sultan Muhammad, rather than the foreign occupier. Indeed, this passage makes explicit what had been tacitly understood throughout the text: that, for al-Nasiri, “order” (tartīb) and “modernization” (iḥdāth) are synonymous and interdependent. The chapter on the war of 1859–60 ends on this ambivalent note, casting the war as both the end of Moroccan independence and the beginning of Moroccan modernity.

* * *

Al-Nasiri's account of the war of 1859–60 casts the conflict as an encounter between Spain's “order” and Morocco's “dispersion.” The final section of the chapter, in which the historian describes the modernization of the Moroccan army, plays the role of a moral: in light of the ignominious loss to the Spanish army, the Moroccan state adopts “European-style” military and tax regulations in order to “modernize.” This final section—so important to al-Nasiri's causal understanding of the war—is surprisingly absent from the Versión árabe de la Guerra de África, Clemente Cerdeira's Spanish translation of al-Nasiri's text.

Without explanation, Cerdeira decides to end his translation of al-Nasiri's text with the paragraph that precedes the previously quoted passage on the modernization of the Moroccan army:

The Arabic word that Cerdeira translates as “foreign protections” (las protecciones extranjeras) is ḥimāyāt, the verbal noun of the root ḥ-m-y.Footnote ⁵⁸ In classical Arabic, ḥimāya simply means “protection,” but it is one of the most vexed and ambiguous terms of late 19th-century Moroccan history. The word underwent a profound semantic transformation (or diversification) during the late 19th century, in Morocco and the Arabic-speaking world more broadly. Both the national (that is, Moroccan) and the international (that is, Pan-Arab) destinies of ḥimāya's rich semantic field exert pressure on al-Nasiri's use of the word, which in this context can and indeed must be read in multiple directions. Cerdeira's inattention to the word's polyvalence mirrors his broader disregard for the historical context in which al-Nasiri is writing.

In the national context of late 19th-century Morocco, ḥimāya refers to the system of consular and diplomatic “protection,” whereby European consular authorities could confer a “protected” status on their Moroccan political and business associates. These protégés, as they are known in modern scholarly literature, enjoyed extraterritorial privileges, which exempted them from paying Moroccan taxes and put them under the legal jurisdiction of the European consulates.Footnote ⁵⁹ The protégé system in Morocco originated with the Franco–Moroccan commercial treaty of 1767 but expanded exponentially after the Anglo–Moroccan Treaty of 1856 and especially after the Hispano-Moroccan War. The Spanish consular authorities, for example, claimed roughly 90 Moroccan protégés in 1859 and over 1,000 by 1861.Footnote ⁶⁰

After 1860, the protégé system grew not only in number but also in kind. While the system was originally conceived to give special privileges to Moroccan interpreters and secretaries who worked in European consulates, during this period it expanded to comprise four distinct categories: the ahl al-basbūr (people of the passport), Moroccans who acquired foreign nationality (usually French or Spanish) but continued to reside in Morocco; the protégés (or the mahmīs, a colloquial Moroccan Arabic word derived from ḥimāya), who were generally clerks, translators, or domestic servants in European consulates; the simsars, brokers who acted as intermediaries between foreign merchants and Moroccan business interests; and the mukhālits, rural associates who formed joint farming ventures with Europeans.Footnote ⁶¹ Over time, the protégés came to resemble a “state within a state,” the embryo of the contemporary Moroccan bourgeoisie.Footnote ⁶² Yet the emergence of the protégé class also contributed to the precipitous decline of the Moroccan government in the late 19th century, both because its extraterritorial privileges presented a serious challenge to Moroccan sovereignty and because its tax-exempt status deprived the government of an important revenue base precisely at a time when the Moroccan government's financial solvency was collapsing under the weight of the war indemnity owed to Spain. This is perhaps the “great damage” that, according al-Nasiri, Moroccans incurred from “foreign protections.”

Nevertheless, the use of the Arabic word ḥimāya in the 1880s, when al-Nasiri was writing Kitab al-Istiqsa, did not merely reflect the burgeoning protégé system that had taken over the Moroccan society and economy. After the establishment of the French Protectorate in Tunisia in 1881, the word also evolved to mean “protectorate” in the colonial administrative sense.Footnote ⁶³ To take one canonical example of this lexical development, we can look to the influential Lebanese scholar and writer Butrus al-Bustani, who defines the word ḥimāya in his encyclopedia, Kitab Daʾirat al-Maʿarif, perhaps the most important Arabic reference work of the 19th century. Al-Bustani began publication of the encyclopedia in 1876, five years before the foundation of the French Protectorate in Tunisia, but he did not publish the seventh volume, in which the word ḥimāya appears, until 1883. In his definition of ḥimāya, al-Bustani identifies a special category, “political protection” (al-ḥimāya al-siyāsiyya), which reflects the new technical meaning that the word acquired in the early 1880s:

The protectorate, as defined here by al-Bustani, revolves around a constitutive paradox: the “protected” state “exists on its own” but is not fully independent. As such, a protectorate is framed as a liminal moment: a rite of passage through which an unstable or “immature” state passes en route to independence.

Al-Nasiri, who was a bureaucrat in the Moroccan government for two decades and who contributed regularly to the Pan-Arab newspapers Thamarat al-Funun and al-Jawaʾib, must have been painfully aware both of the protégé system that was crippling the Moroccan government and of the rivalry between France and Italy to establish a colonial protectorate in Tunisia.Footnote ⁶⁵ Therefore, his word choice was bound to resonate with both a Pan-Arab and a Moroccan audience. (Kitab al-Istiqsa was, after all, published in Cairo.) For a Pan-Arab readership, the world ḥimāya suggested not only a vague sense of European “protection” over North African sovereignty but also the more specific “Protectorate” system that had taken hold in Tunisia and would be implemented in Morocco starting in 1912. For a learned Moroccan readership in the 1890s (when Kitab al-Istiqsa was published), the word would have had this resonance, but it would also have evoked the eponymous protégé system through which the Moroccan makhzan was gradually abdicating its sovereignty and tax revenue to the European consulates.

While the Arabic terminology to describe a “protectorate” had already been established by the 1880s, the protectorate itself—as an administrative model and a form of colonial domination—was still a work in process. The protectorate model was proposed in Tunisia, and then in Morocco, as a “softer” alternative to direct colonial rule. Lyautey, the first résident général of the French Protectorate in Morocco, provided the classic definition of the system in his 1920 speech “La politique de Protectorat”:

As Lyautey emphasizes, the protectorate system forsakes direct rule and depends instead on control of the “protected” territory. Embedded in this system is the evolutionist and teleological principle that societies and states “mature” over time. Within the protectorate system, the Moroccan state would receive the “tutelage” it “needed” in order to “mature” into a self-sufficient state.Footnote ⁶⁷ Thus, the protectorate system joined other forms of 19th-century imperial culture, whose ideology was based, in the words of Edward Said, on “notions that certain territories and people require and beseech domination.”Footnote ⁶⁸

Whether or not Clemente Cerdeira was familiar with the complex semantics of the word ḥimāya (as “Protectorate” and as protégé system), he certainly was familiar with the cultural logic of the protectorate system. In a footnote to his previously quoted passage on the “foreign protections” that multiplied in Morocco after 1860, Cerdeira perfectly reproduces this cultural logic:

For Cerdeira, the Spanish mission in Morocco is a necessary burden that Spain “inflicts upon itself.” The Protectorate is not so much a system of government as it is a “protective blanket,” which protects Morocco from its own slow decadence (agonía).

My critique of Cerdeira is not merely one of translation sensu stricto. After all, his translation of ḥimāyāt as “protecciones extranjeras” is plausible, even if it does not convey all of the semantic complexity of the word. Rather, my critique is one of interpretative context. Al-Nasiri clearly envisions his Kitab al-Istiqsa—and particularly the chapter on the war of 1859–60—as a historiographic witness to the moment when Europe's long-standing “protection” of the Maghrib consolidates in two historically specific forms: the protégé system of consular privilege and the Protectorate system of colonial administration. It is not by chance, then, that al-Nasiri concludes the chapter with an account of the modernization of the Moroccan army and the regulation of the Moroccan tax system, the two areas of administration most closely associated with the foreign “Protector” in Lyautey's aforementioned definition of the protectorate system. Cerdeira, in his translation, not only omits al-Nasiri's concluding paragraph on the reform of the Moroccan army and tax code but also glides over al-Nasiri's reference to ḥimāyāt without a footnote. These omissions are especially noteworthy in a translation in which virtually every reference to classical Arabic poetry or to the Qurʾan is glossed and identified. Cerdeira's translation and the accompanying apparatus of footnotes work, then, to de-historicize and de-modernize al-Nasiri's account of the Hispano-Moroccan War: they efface the Moroccan historian's efforts to come to terms with the economic exploitation, military technology, and state apparatus behind colonial domination.

Indeed, we could even say that Cerdeira strives to “Protectorize” al-Nasiri's historiographic project: just as Moroccans are not ready to govern themselves so (Cerdeira seems to say) are they not ready to write their own history. In his prologue to Cerdeira's translation, Gabriel de Morales bemoans the “imprecision” and “carelessness” “inherent to Arab authors.”Footnote ⁷⁰ In the footnotes to the translation, Cerdeira builds on Morales's prejudice by relying on the topos of “Arab fantasy.” The key words in Cerdeira's treatment of Arab “fantasy” are fantasía itself and also the verb tergiversar, which means “to twist” and “to misinterpret.” Cerdeira's insistent use of these strategic words bolsters his critique of al-Nasiri specifically and Arabic historiography more generally. According to Cerdeira, al-Nasiri is unable—we might say culturally unable—to distinguish between “truth” and “fantasy” and to narrate events without “twisting” them. As a result, al-Nasiri's account creates an antipodal vision of the war of 1859–60, which Cerdeira must both translate and correct in order to “put it right-side up” again.

Cerdeira resorts to the fantasy motif whenever al-Nasiri's account does not agree with the Spanish sources. One such disagreement emerges when al-Nasiri narrates the march of the Spanish army from Ceuta to Tetouan. According to the Moroccan historian, in early January 1860, one month before the siege of Tetouan, the Spanish troops, unable to withstand the Moroccan army's pressure on their position, retreated to their ships and sailed to Fanidaq, where they established a new base.Footnote ⁷¹ Cerdeira not only vociferously denies this account of a retreat but also attributes it to al-Nasiri's congenital tendency toward fantasy:

Cerdeira calls al-Nasiri “sly” and accuses him of “disfiguring” Spain's “glorious” victory at Castillejos. Cerdeira also compares al-Nasiri's text to the 1001 Nights, thereby blurring the line between fact and fiction. This footnote provides the template for Cerdeira's subsequent marginal assaults on al-Nasiri's integrity as a historian, as when the Spanish translator criticizes the Moroccan historian for calling the Battle of Wad Ras (23 March 1860) a victory for the Moroccans: “With the facts and results completely turned upside down [tergiversados], this amounts to the description of the famous battle of Wad Ras, so favorable for the cause of our arms and in which, once again, victory and glorious success crowned the brave splendor of our Army.”Footnote ⁷³

If Cerdeira characterizes al-Nasiri's historiography as “fantasy,” he opposes it with his own practice, which he grounds in the rigorous “objectivity” of documentation and archival research. Al-Nasiri narrates a nocturnal surprise attack launched by the Moroccans, resulting in many casualties for the Spanish, in the days leading up to the decisive battle at Wad Ras.Footnote ⁷⁴ Cerdeira refutes the existence of this surprise attack:

According to Cerdeira, Al-Nasiri relies on his innate “Maghribi fantasy” to create his “apocryphal” account. Cerdeira, by contrast, provides a clear corpus of documental evidence: the official reports of the operations journal, the chronicles, and the information provided by eyewitnesses.

The other strategy Cerdeira uses to subvert al-Nasiri's authority as a historian is to contradict his account by quoting the marginal annotations of an unidentified Muslim critic:

Cerdeira's subversive footnote turns al-Nasiri into a Cide Hamete, the fictional “Arab historian” of Cervantes’ Don Quixote. Rather than criticize al-Nasiri directly, Cerdeira relies on the (possibly fictional) marginal notations of an unidentified Muslim critic. By introducing this intradiegetic figure, Cerdeira strives to “divide and conquer” the Arabic historiography of the war of 1859–60, showing that Moroccan historians cannot agree amongst themselves about the facts of the war.

Indeed, Cerdeira deploys the authority of this anonymous Muslim critic to justify his own attack of al-Nasiri's “apocryphal account” of the Battle of Wad Ras:

The irony in this passage is that Cerdeira co-opts a classic narrative strategy from Arabic prose fiction, the “unreliable narrator” motif, in order to accuse al-Nasiri of, among other things, basing his historical text on Arabic prose fiction (such as the previously mentioned 1001 Nights). The “unreliable narrator,” whose misleading performances call into question the ontological stability of narration itself, is a stock character in the maqamāt and other forms of Arabic prose narrative. In fact, the medieval translation of Eastern frametale narratives (such as Kalila wa-Dimna and the maqamāt) from Arabic into Spanish is what gave birth to Spanish imaginative prose itself.Footnote ⁷⁸ Thus, not only does Cerdeira draw on the resources of fictional narrative in order to buttress his claim to objectivity, but also, ironically, he draws precisely on the narratological strategies that Spanish prose fiction adopted from Arabic prose fiction. Cerdeira's “unreliable narrator” motif works on two levels. The “unknown Muslim critic,” to whose marginal commentaries Cerdeira has privileged access, has the authority to “give the lie to” al-Nasiri. Nevertheless, the “unknown critic,” who is used to subvert al-Nasiri's authority, is himself unreliable, since he also “twists the facts” (tergiversar los hechos) and is “misinformed.”

If Cerdeira is bent on undermining al-Nasiri's authority as a historian, then why, one might ask, does Cerdeira translate his text in the first place? Paradoxically, al-Nasiri might be of interest to Cerdeira precisely because he is unreliable: if the “protected” Other is inherently unreliable, “misinformed,” and “sly,” then it is important to monitor him for the security of the Protectorate. Indeed, Cerdeira's desire to understand the Moroccan “version” of history inscribes his translation within the larger colonial project of control (the cornerstone of Lyautey's definition of the Protectorate). Gabriel de Morales intimates as much in his prologue to Cerdeira's translation:

For Morales, the translation and reading of Moroccan historiography are strategic necessities, which help to give the Spanish a leg up on their enemies.

Cerdeira's mastery of the Arabic language is just one of the many colonial instances in which, as Bernard Cohn has written, “the command of language” and “the language of command” intersect.Footnote ⁸⁰ It should not be forgotten that Cerdeira's translation of al-Nasiri's Kitab al-Istiqsa was not his first publication. In 1911, Cerdeira published a grammar of classical Arabic, which quickly became the standard textbook for the instruction of Arabic in Spain and in Tetouan's Academy of Arabic and Berber.Footnote ⁸¹ Cerdeira wrote his Arabic textbook while living in Beirut, where he was sent by the Spanish Ministry of State to perfect his Arabic and to study Islamic law.Footnote ⁸²

The sojourn in Beirut was not, however, Cerdeira's first contact with the Arab world: as a Spanish citizen born and raised in Morocco, Cerdeira had privileged access to Moroccan society and culture from an early age. Gabriel de Morales, in his prologue to the Versión árabe, emphasizes the importance of Cerdeira's childhood experiences:

In this brief biographical sketch, Morales mentions Cerdeira's academic experience in Beirut, but he gives pride of place to the translator's childhood, spent “in the bosom of a venerable Muslim family.”

The word Morales uses to describe Cerdeira's childhood is convivencia (literally, “living together”). The term has become, according to María Rosa Menocal, one of the most “contested and vexed terms that . . . have to do with al-Andalus and Spain.”Footnote ⁸⁴ In current academic usage, it refers to the harmonious coexistence of Christians, Muslims, and Jews in medieval Iberia. While there is no etymological reason that the word convivencia should be so positively valorized, it has come to be associated, as an academic term, with an optimistic—perhaps even romanticized—view of medieval Iberian history.Footnote ⁸⁵ Perhaps this insistence on Cerdeira's convivencia, on his ability to live with and within (“in the bosom of”) Moroccan society, explains why the book opens with a portrait of Aníbal Rinaldy, the Spanish army's official translator in the war of 1859–60 and the head of Spain's translation service for several decades afterward.Footnote ⁸⁶ In all of the major Spanish sources on the Hispano-Moroccan War, Rinaldy functions as the prototypical figure of the “go-between,” a cultural agent capable of moving smoothly between linguistic and cultural codes.Footnote ⁸⁷

Cerdeira's treatment of Rinaldy, however, is particularly poignant and intimate. The two figures are brought together by the bond of master and disciple: not only was Cerdeira Rinaldy's prized student but also he went on to occupy his master's post. The first sentence of the dedication that opens Cerdeira's translation illustrates vividly the indebtedness that Cerdeira feels toward his teacher:

The extreme syntactical complexity of this opening sentence interpolates “the Arab soul” (represented here by al-Nasiri, “a Maghribi writer of the decadence”) between the dedication of the book and the interlocutors of the dedication, Cerdeira and Rinaldy. The translation thus opens a historical space “between the clash of glorious battles and diplomatic struggles,” where the two translators, master and disciple, meet. The syntax dramatizes this overlap, by weaving together the translation, the translated author (al-Nasiri), the historical context in which the translators and the Arab author worked, and the relationship of “admiration and respect” between “an obscure disciple” and an “illustrious master.” The stakes of these overlapping layers become clear in the next sentence: “Few Spaniards have played a more transcendental role than Rinaldy in the centuries-old problem of Morocco.”Footnote ⁸⁹ Rinaldy's role in Morocco, this sentence suggests, transcends that of “mere” translator. He was, as Cerdeira goes on to say, “not an interpreter but an adviser to sultans, to ministers, and to generals; Rinaldy's opinion has weighed heavily on the Moroccan scales and in the decisions of European foreign ministries.”Footnote ⁹⁰

If the insistence on Cerdeira's convivencia with Moroccans helps to explain the strategic appearance of Rinaldy's portrait at the beginning of the text, the insistence on Rinaldy's importance as a diplomat and politician (and not merely as a translator) helps to explain the appearance, at the end of the prologue, of another portrait: that of Leopoldo O'Donnell, the commander of the Spanish troops in Morocco, for whom Rinaldy was the chief interpreter.Footnote ⁹¹ Indeed, the front matter to Cerdeira's Versión árabe de la Guerra de África—positioned, as it is, between portraits of Rinaldy and O'Donnell—places the entire project of translation between the dual axes of “arms and letters” (to use a classical dichotomy), or those of “writing and fighting.” In this view, translation is not an auxiliary to foreign combat; it is at the very heart of foreign combat.

Cerdeira emphasizes this imbrication of “writing and fighting” by narrating the last bond that links him to his mentor, Rinaldy:

This passage collapses not only the distinction between translation and combat but also the distinction between Rinaldy and Cerdeira, who are brought together by a historical coincidence. Indeed, the passage strives to collapse the very notion of history itself: Cerdeira is Rinaldy; Gómez Jordana is O'Donnell; a battle at Wad Ras in 1916 is also the Battle of Wad Ras of 1860. “History repeats itself: only time and people change.”

Modernity, as Jameson suggests, is characterized by “the conviction that . . . nothing can ever be the same again.”Footnote ⁹³ Yet Cerdeira's text emphatically asserts the contrary—that is, that everything can, indeed, be the same again. Cerdeira's surprising collapse of history inverts the Orientalist topos to which I referred at the beginning of this article: the notion that Arabs are “exempt from history.”Footnote ⁹⁴ Here, instead, it is Spain and the Spanish that are exempt from history. Al-Nasiri's account of the war is emphatically historical and contingent: the Moroccan historian is interested in Spanish military progress, which he symbolizes with his insistent ruminations on the Spanish army's “lines” and “order.” Cerdeira, in contrast, eschews notions of historical progress. While he couches his defense of the Protectorate in the language of the necessary “evolution” and “maturation” of “protected” peoples, he subverts this teleological logic with a circular understanding of Hispano-Moroccan history: Moroccans must “progress” in order to become independent, and yet history does not progress; it merely repeats itself. The evolutionist cultural logic of the Protectorate thereby comes into direct conflict with Cerdeira's circular view of history.

Thus, in translating al-Nasiri's chapter on the war of 1859–60, Cerdeira undermines its fundamental suppositions about historical progress. Al-Nasiri's text argues that the Spanish victory in 1860 was the consequence of Spain's superior military power and sophisticated state institutions. The text bears witness to a transitional moment, when European “protection” (ḥimāya) in Morocco is crystallizing in the historically specific form of the Protectorate. Yet al-Nasiri's text also looks forward to the birth of a modern Moroccan state, with a modern army and a modern tax system. As such, al-Nasiri gives a compelling explanation of the origins of Morocco's colonial subjugation and, at the same time, illustrates the sensibilities of Moroccan proto-nationalism.

While al-Nasiri regards the future as a horizon for planning long-term changes, Cerdeira's text fetishizes the past. Al-Nasiri's view of history is instrumental: he puts history to the service of constructing the present and the future. Di-Capua has observed that the modern idea of history derives from an effort “to understand the past from the point of view of the final outcome of progress: that is, the future.”Footnote ⁹⁵ Cerdeira, in contrast, inverts this process: he understands the future from the point of view of the past. In Cerdeira's closing annotation to his translation of al-Nasiri, he evokes the Arab-Islamic notion of al-maktūb (literally, “it is written,” and by extension, “it was meant to be”): “Some European friend of the sultan [ʿAbd al-ʿAziz], perhaps a Spaniard, told him of the impending disaster and of the inevitable fall of his Empire, which—even before ceasing to be his—would be divvyed up among the civilized Powers. It was all futile . . . It was foreordained. It was written.”Footnote ⁹⁶ Cerdeira appropriates an Arab-Islamic conception of destiny to justify his reading of history, and yet this concept of predestined fate (“It was written”)—presumably a gesture to signal Cerdeira's deep mastery of the “Arab mentality”—is not only absent from the original Arabic text but is also in direct opposition to it. One is thus left with the impression that Cerdeira is not so much translating Kitab al-Istiqsa as he is projecting onto it his own preordained ideas about Moroccans, their history, and their historiography. It was foreordained. It was written.