South-South Linkages and Social Change: Moroccan Perspectives on Army Reform in the Muslim Mediterranean in the Nineteenth Century

This article looks at Moroccan perspectives on army reform in the Middle East as expressed in nineteenth-century scholarly writings. It questions the common assumption that the reluctance of the Moroccan elite to embrace military reform was, so to speak, a "natural" consequence of Morocco's isolation from the Middle East coupled with the prevailing religious conservatism. For that purpose, this article first demonstrates that there did exist an awareness of and certain knowledge about Middle Eastern reformist experiences. Second, starting from how these experiences were viewed by Moroccans, it argues that attitudes toward army reform were not uniquely determined by religious concerns. The texts analyzed below actually reveal a much more pragmatic and at the same time complex level of debate where issues of efficiency and feasibility were raised. The ways these issues were presented helps shed light on the social and political embedding of army reform as well as on its potential appropriation. At the same time, the very fact that new techniques and organizational models were—and were seen to be—interpreted in quite different ways indicates the contingency as well as the creativity of processes of transfer from the "West." Being a first endeavor in this direction and given the absence of any archival material documenting the point of view of actual political agents, the article is limited to analyzing selected sources that document the respective points of view of individual observers.

The article picks up on new trends in the study of Moroccan history that break with earlier scientific isolationism. Traditionally, Morocco has been—and still partly continues to be—studied separately, cut off from the broader Muslim world in general and the Muslim Mediterranean in particular. Until recently, the only exception to this was studies of translocal religious phenomena—most notably, the diverse revivalist and/or reformist movements that have developed since the end of the seventeenth century.¹ Social and institutional change in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries has commonly been interpreted as being the result of the more or less successful adaptation of Western models. In opposition to this, more recent studies endeavor to shed light on the connectedness of Morocco to larger regional dynamics of change.² Yet the concrete working of this connectedness—that is, how ideas and techniques circulated and how experiences made elsewhere were perceived as well as referred to by historical agents—remains largely understudied. As far as army reform is concerned, it has of late been argued that Moroccan efforts at reorganizing the military have to be interpreted in the context of similar developments in the southern and southeastern Mediterranean.³ However, while studies on military reform in Morocco do indicate examples of elite circulation and, at some points, of political and technical cooperation with the Ottoman Empire and its Arab provinces, little is known about Moroccan perceptions of developments in the region.

Moroccan Army Reform—European versus Muslim Expertise?

The empirical background to questioning South-South linkages in the realm of army reform is the temporal and spatial proximity of processes of military reorganization in the region. During the nineteenth century, measures to create a regular army organized along European lines were actually taken first in Egypt (1820, 1822), then in the heartlands of the Ottoman Empire (1826), and later in Tunisia (1830)—not to mention the reformist experience in the 1830s of the leader of resistance to the French conquest in western Algeria, 'Abd al-Qadir al-Jaza'iri (1807–83).⁴ Thus, when the Moroccan sultan Maulay 'Abd al-Rahman (r. 1822–59) first took the initiative to reorganize his army after the famous battle of Isly (1844), where Morocco had suffered a disastrous defeat against a French expeditionary force, he could and actually did have recourse to Middle Eastern and North African expertise. Especially during the first decades of army reform, most of the officers of the newly created Moroccan forces either came from Tunisia or had been combatants of 'Abd al-Qadir. Books on internal military regulations as well as on training the new troops had...