A Tale of Two Sultans: Franco-Moroccan ReInventions of Mūlāy Ismā'īl and his Marriage Proposal to La Princesse de Conti

In this article, we explore the Orientalized perception and racialized representation of the Afro-Arab sultan of Morocco MūlāyIsmā' īl(r. 1672 to 1727) as found in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century French sources. We do so by chiefly revisiting the mock "fairy tale love story" of MūlāyIsmā' īl, including his alleged marriage proposal to Marie Anne de Bourbon, la Princesse de Conti, the eldest legitimized and favorite daughter of King Louis XIV of France. After examining the Orientalist tropes of French and European images of MūlāyIsmā' īl, we turn to a number of modern and contemporary Moroccan defenses of MūlāyIsmā' īl, especially as articulated by Moroccan historian and apologist Ibn Zaydān, one of presumably thousands of MūlāyIsmā' īl's descendants. Our aim is to explore how the racially charged Franco demonizations and the discursively loaded Moroccan vindications of MūlāyIsmā' īlhave been reinvented and renegotiated in French and Arabic historical and literary sources from the seventeenth century up to the twenty-first century.