Forgive Me Friend: Mohammed and Ibrahim

This essay examines my accidental conversion to Islam and its discomforting consequences for my fieldwork in Morocco. While my conversion and my subsequent efforts to grasp its significance represents an awkward extreme, I use the episode to challenge similar tropes of friendship and obligation, accident and rapport in the American reflexive ethnographic tradition, especially in Morocco—one of the tradition's classic fieldwork sites. Focusing on my friendship with Mohammed (a Moroccan) and his efforts to negotiate my ambivalence, I argue that what remains underexplored in this ethnographic tradition and its thinking on friendship is the act of forgiving.