Disorienting Encounters: Travels of a Moroccan Scholar in France in 1845-1846: The Voyage of Muhammad as-Saffar (review)

Although the Moroccan scholar Muhammad as -Saffār (d. 1881) completed the account of his visit to France in 1846, his manuscript lay for many years in the royal archives at Rabat; it was not until 1973 that Susan Gilson Miller began its translation into English, and not until 1992 that his work was finally published. It is a counterpart to the earlier and better known Takhlīs al-ibrazīz fī talkhī Bārīz of the Egyptian scholar Rifā'a Rāfi' a - Tahtāwī, first published in Paris in 1834, a work whose influence Miller traces in as -Saffār's own account. Both men were products of the long-established Islamic scholarly tradition, sent by their respective governments to accompany official missions to Paris, acting both as observers and as chaplains.

Miller's very readable translation is accompanied by sixty-nine pages of introduction, aimed somewhere between the general reader and the Middle East area specialist. Together with her explanatory notes to the main text, this makes as -Saffār's work accessible to the nonspecialist reader. Her introduction places the work in its historical context, de-scribes the 1845-46 mission of Ambassador 'Abd al-Qadir Ash'ash to which as -Saffār was attached, and recounts what is known of as -Saffār's life. The introduction ends with a brief examination of the significance and meaning of as -Saffār's account, pointing the reader in a variety of interesting directions (significant theoretical works since fieldwork was completed in 1976 are also included). The examination of as -Saffār's experience of disjunctions of time and space is interesting (and gives rise to the book's title), but the application of concepts of sacred and profane space drawn from Victor Turner's problematic theory of pilgrimage is perhaps less illuminating.

As -Saffār's and at - Taht āwi's works are the counterparts to the great mass of accounts of the Muslim world produced by a variety of Western travelers. Such accounts are interesting cultural documents in their own right, sometimes telling us more about the culture that produced the accounts than about what they portray. As sources, they areoften invaluable because they document matters that writers from the culture in question took so much for granted that they seemed unworthy of comment; at the same time, they must be handled with care, since cultural misunderstandings or plain ignorance can produce startling misrepresentations of reality. As the continued republica-tionof certain Western travel writers shows, these accounts have a considerable appeal as a literary genre irrespective of their usefulness for scholars.

As -Saffār's book, taken as a whole, is not especially entertain-ing.This is at least partly to as -Saffār's credit as an observer: a pain-staking description of a rail track or of the manner of using a knife and fork would only amuse if the observer got something seriously wrong, and as -Saffār is clearly wrong on only one point (draconian penalties for trespass). His work, however, is of no value as a source on nineteenth-century France, since there are already many descriptions of zoological gardens and theaters, and as -Saffār provides no stunning insights into French society. This is hardly surprising, since he spoke no French and spent only fifty days in Paris, as a member of a delegation that stayed indoors as much as possible to preserve French respect, on the basis that "the boldest one with the lion is he who sees him the most." The work also contributes nothing to our understanding of Franco-Moroccan diplomatic history; for the origins, progress, and effects of...