-
Epilogue. Epistemologies Embodied: Islam, France, and the Postcolonial
- University of Texas Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
Epilogue epistemologies embodied: islam, france, and the postcolonial In 1999, I interviewed elderly Moroccan patients at a public health clinic in the Lamtiyyin neighborhood, a working-class area in the traditional city (madina) of Fez. “Do you want to meet a real hero?” asks Mawlay Ali, in his seventies. “My mother is ninety-five years old, and she gave birth by herself.” I became a frequent guest at the home of his mother, My Khaddouj, a tiny woman who explained to me that the powers of baraka (blessing) given to her by God protect her from illness, keep her hennaed hair free of grey, and allow her to deliver babies safely. At the same time, she describes “falling down” with typhus fever in the 1940s and shows me the milky cataracts spreading in her eyes. The paradox of a body at once healthy and sick, impervious and diseased, spiritual and biological, suggests the multiple frameworks through which Moroccans understand the human body. This fragmented body expresses different and layered ways of knowing—Sufi and positive epistemologies—and the competing models of sovereignty they evoke. It is a historical artifact of the Moroccan experience with French colonialism and an emblem of the Islamic postcolonial condition. The legacy of French colonial science is most visible in Moroccan nationalism and state public health. To defend Morocco from colonialism, early twentieth-century Moroccan reformers, scholars, and court officials imported the salafi thought of Oriental scholars and introduced state reforms guided by European scientific, technological, military, and financial advisors. Salafiyya, often misnamed “Islamic orthodoxy” or “juridical Islam,” was an intellectual attempt in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to reconcile positive science, modernity, and secular law with Islam . A salafi definition of Moroccan modernity was normative by 1919– 1926; thus, the Rif Moroccan nationalist Abd al-Karim al-Khattabi led a 210 medicine and the saints revolution against Spanish rule to create an independent “Islamic republic ” rather than a traditional Moroccan (makhzan) state. When Morocco became an independent country in 1956, the King Muhammad V asked many of the protectorate’s French doctors and social workers to stay on as employees of the new Moroccan Ministry of Health. A precolonial Sufi polity is difficult to imagine in modern Morocco, because the diffuse, invisible, miraculous Sufi knowing from which it arises is difficult to reconcile with the extension of a modern, liberal, centralized state. Moroccan nationalists attempted to purge the political arena of Sufi knowing and to substitute positive ideas of law, civilization, nation, social solidarity, and self. Yet Moroccan politics cannot escape Sufism. The Moroccan nationalist movement called itself a zawiya, the Islamist Shaykh Yassin of the Adl wa Ihsan Party (Justice and Righteous Conduct) claims the Sufi Muhammad ibn Abd al-Kabir al-Kattani as a spiritual forefather, and King Muhammad VI uses Sufi language in his public speeches and maintains official connections with Sufi orders. How then is Sufi knowing embodied and reproduced in the postcolonial era? There is no longer a connection between the built environment and a public memory of the saints. In 2005, I retraced al-Kattani’s footsteps through the city of Fez with the help of Ali Filali, a teacher at the Qarawiyyin secondary school, photographing the saints’ graves in the mosques, houses, gardens, and shrines of Fez. Saint shrines of important families like the Sqalli and al-Kattani are maintained, but most graves have become workrooms, storage areas, or garbage dumps. In Saba Luyyat (Seven Curves) neighborhood, we ask for al-Miyara, a nineteenth-century legal scholar of the Qarawiyyin Islamic University. A shopkeeper opens a small door in the wall and we enter a shady courtyard; sacks of cement and drifting plastic bags obscure the broken graves of Qarawiyyin scholars . Across the alley, al-Kattani writes that we should find the scholar Sidi al-Aziz Tajibi, but all we see is a leatherworking shop. When I ask for Sidi al-Aziz, the proprietor opens a sliding metal cabinet to reveal a stone surface—a saint in the closet. Most of the Sufi zawiyat (brotherhoods ) are closed or sealed over with cement; a poor family squats in the crumbling zawiya of Ibn Suwwal and washes laundry in the marble basin of prayer ablutions. A twenty-eight-year-old Moroccan friend from a sharifian Fez family lives in the Fez madina but has little knowledge of Fez saints: “Yeah, we have a sayyid [wali, saint] buried in the floor of our house, but nobody knows who it is. My...