Disorienting Encounters

Muhammad as-Saffar

3 ideas

1. Moroccan embassy to Paris after Isly

   After Morocco's defeat by France at the Battle of Isly in 1844, Sultan Abd al-Rahman sent an embassy under Abd al-Qadir Ash'ash to Louis-Philippe's court in late 1845 and early 1846. Its secretary, the Tetouani scholar Muhammad as-Saffar, kept a detailed travel account for the Moroccan government covering railways, gaslight, theatres, the Chamber of Deputies, newspapers and military schools. It is a documented case of a defeated society's elite inspecting the victor's modernity at first hand, shortly after the defeat and with official purpose.

2. Admiration fenced by ritual disavowal

   The observer praises the foreign society's accomplishments in detail but brackets that praise with pious formulas and reminders of the infidels' spiritual error. The disclaimers work as a license: they let dangerous admiration be recorded and carried home without seeming to betray one's own community. The resulting text is both a report and a quarantine.

3. Reverse gaze on European modernity

   Reading Paris through a Muslim scholar's categories of Islamic law, adab and the rihla travel genre makes the ordinary features of Western life look strange. Examples include open newspapers criticizing rulers, unveiled women in public, and theatre as a civic institution. The lens reveals modernity as a particular set of customs that need explaining rather than as the natural default, much as Orientalist writing did in the opposite direction.

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