The prominent Moroccan anthropologist, Hassan Rashiq, says in recalling his life in the research field:
“I spent ten years (1983-1992) in three villages inhabited by three hundred families in order to understand aspects of their daily lives. I would return to my home – three hundred kilometers away – feeling, for the most part, disappointed, because I had not been precise in asking a question, or because I had not understood the meaning of a certain sign or word… Sometimes I found myself forced to talk about cultural vertigo, for I realized that what I had missed among the Amazigh of the High Atlas and the travelers of the eastern Maghreb, it reached a point where I had to learn almost everything. What might an urbanite know about a local language, the rural environment, and pastoral movements? It must be said that my interlocutors were more surprised by what I knew about their culture (which is little) than what I knew. Being Moroccan does not mean that I can walk with my hands in my pocket, sip cups of tea, and engage in conversations that end with the phrase: “I know that…I know it, it’s exactly the way we have it.”1
This clarification, provided to us by one of the most important local anthropologists in Morocco in the post-colonial era, confirms that these perceptions that indigenous anthropology has made a radical difference with the knowledge produced by Western researchers in the colonial era are exaggerated perceptions. We can examine the development of Egyptian anthropologists and geographers in the early 20th century. Alternatively, we can compare the works of contemporary Moroccan anthropologists with those of earlier Western researchers who studied Morocco. In either case, a key finding emerges: the gap between the knowledge produced by these two groups – colonial and indigenous – is not as vast as one might expect. While there may be differences in epistemological assumptions, or even a bent towards ethnographic positivism, the distance is not radical. Also, on the other hand, we will find a shift in the relationship of some Arab anthropologists with the anthropological legacy inherited from the colonial era, from reducing it to a direct colonial tool, to considering it knowledge that can be partially built upon without neglecting its ideological dimension.
Egypt… Ethnic Distinction from Africa
In Egypt, at the beginning of the twentieth century, national intellectuals tried to create their own modernity in the face of what was presented as universal modernity. However, Omnia El Shakry notes that while Egyptian geographers and anthropologists were developing a local anthropology during the colonial period and beyond, they internalized basic categories of colonial knowledge, and the templates for knowledge production were intertwined, in the colonial period and beyond. The first anthropological studies on Egypt centered around the activity of the Royal Geographical Society, which had exploratory goals in Egypt and Africa. The people responsible for its studies and activities were Europeans, and then some local researchers joined it. The establishment of the Geographical Society marked a significant moment. It facilitated the transfer of European social science knowledge to Egypt. But its significance went beyond that. The Society became central to an ethnographic and geographical effort. This effort aimed to “preserve the material culture of Egypt and Africa before their prolonged contact with Europe.” It was part of a larger anthropological project: to catalog the local population’s culture before the arrival of modern civilization. It is essential for the work of the anthropologists in the association according to Orientalist assumptions in the ontological distinction between the European and the Eastern and within a hierarchical perspective.”2
Two main factors contributed to what El Shakry referred to as the internalization of colonial categories in the emerging local anthropology: the expansionist ambitions of Khedive Ismail and the participation of local researchers with their European counterparts in imagining themselves as discoverers and spreaders of civilization in Africa. The work of the Egyptians in the Geographical Society was directed to “discovering the country” nearby, and then the society directed its work to studies on the local population, and some Egyptian intellectuals relied on the idea of civilizational superiority over the “lower civilized” Sudan to demand legislating their right to the modernizing role of Sudan against the British. In fact, Marwa Elshakry, in her book Reading Darwin in Arabic, indicates that Qasim Amin and most of his class had the same attitude towards Sudan, which is “ethnically less.”3 Abbas Ammar, one of the first prominent Egyptian geographers, singled out South Sudan as having “no culture worth preserving” as he argued for the unity of the Nile Valley between Egypt and Sudan. The second factor was the preoccupation of Arab intellectuals, and Egyptians in particular, with the ideas of urbanization and development. On the one hand, some Arab intellectuals linked modernization to the imported Western sciences, including anthropological sciences. Mustafa Amer, who along with Muhammad Awad is considered the first professional Egyptian geographers, believed that the study of archeology and ethnographic studies are a condition for Egypt to enter the modern world, as it is a producer of modern scientific knowledge. On the other hand, the ideas of Pharaonism spread, and the attempt to include Egypt as distinct from its “backward” African surroundings and to be included in a history respected by the West, which prompted some intellectuals to emphasize the ethnological distinction of the Egyptians as descendants of the Pharaohs, and Salama Moussa, one of the most prominent Egyptian intellectuals of that period, participated, in his book Egypt, a Place Where Civilization Began, and influenced by the ideas of Grafton Elliott Smith, he arranged the various human racial types and described Negroes as distinguished by savagery, which was mitigated by the transfer of Egyptian civilization south of the Sahara. In an article in 1926, Muhammad Hussein Heikal appealed to national intellectuals to contribute to establishing strong links between modern Egyptians and their Pharaoh ancestors through the comparative study of literature, rituals, customs, and religion. Al-Muqtataf magazine, the most important magazine concerned with science at the beginning of the twentieth century in Egypt, once published, through the editor of the magazine, that the ancient inhabitants of Egypt were of a white-skinned race like Europeans.
However, this presentation by Omnia El Shakry of the national orientation of Egyptian intellectuals, as they used their ethnic distinction and cultural superiority over the Sudanese to demand the right to “civilize” it, is tainted by a general problem in her thesis, as one of the commentators on her book said in describing her method: “She connects disparate topics like beads on a rosary in a very teleological way,” so contradictory data are only interpreted as an exception, which is a relatively common problem in postcolonial studies. Ammar Abbas, for example, despite his participation in the calls about Egypt’s right to civilize Sudan, rejected the idea of Egyptian racial differentiation, but rather emphasized the common protective origins of the ancient Egyptians and Nubians. For instance, Ammar Abbas, despite participating in discussions about Egypt’s right to urbanize Sudan, rejected the notion of a distinct Egyptian ethnicity. He instead emphasized the shared Hamitic origins of ancient Egyptians and Nubians. Abbas also challenged the idea of ethnic purity, viewing it as a political myth with no scientific basis (aligning with the views of his supervisor, H.G. Fleur, at Manchester). This perspective is further evident in his preface to Yusuf Nahhas’s book. While acknowledging its significance, Abbas doesn’t see it as typical of early peasant studies. Nahhas, unlike many others, presented a different view. He linked the peasants’ conditions to the historical experiences they endured, avoiding romanticization and unfounded attributes. Similarly, when examining colonial writings about the Egyptian peasant, Abbas treated the works of Albert Demangeon, Jean Lozach, and Georges Haig with equal weight. These authors attempted to reconcile the realities of rural life with the realities of the rural economy.
Later, in the middle of the twentieth century, the dominance of Egyptology and studies of Pharaonic history began to decline among Egyptian researchers in favor of sociological studies of modern Egypt, moving beyond the idea that modern Egypt is an extension of ancient Egypt, which deserves to be studied from a non-historical perspective that perpetuates the Egyptians with characteristics inherited from their Pharaonic origins.
The Anthropology of the Colonial Era in Morocco and the Emergence of Local Anthropology
In Morocco, another Arab country grappling with a colonial-era anthropological legacy, local anthropologists debated how to approach this inheritance. The key issue was the legacy’s ideological nature and its role in serving colonial aims. The debate centered on whether to build knowledge upon this foundation or, as some researchers argued, to “decolonize” this knowledge. This decolonization process would involve freeing the knowledge from its colonial biases and uncovering the ingrained ethnic-centric assumptions that distorted the history and culture of colonized countries. Ultimately, the goal was to pursue knowledge production free from colonial influence. But also in other no less important ways, there was a discussion about the objective constraints that characterized this knowledge produced by colonial researchers, such as the ability to communicate with the people and reside among them, the ethnographic situation, and taking the interlocutors seriously.
Hassan Rashiq, whom we referred to above, participated with two other colleagues, Muhammad Al-Ayadi and Muhammad Al-Touzi, in publishing Islam in Everyday Life (2006), a book that represents an interpretation of materials collected thanks to a sociological analysis on a sample of Moroccans. In the introduction to this book, Rashiq and his colleagues described the knowledge related to Moroccan society in its various aspects. They stated that this knowledge had served the political aims of the Protectorate administration during the colonial era. The colonial authority, they argued, made knowledge one of the pillars of its policies to control Morocco. This language is not far from the prevailing trend among Arab anthropologists in their view of the colonial knowledge legacy, which is primarily seen as ideologized knowledge serving political interests.4 Rashiq revisited this debate in his 2012 book Anthropology in the Arab World, a dialogue with Saudi anthropologist Abu Bakr Baqader. He argued for a more nuanced view, defending the need for a structured analysis of the intricate connections between colonial political agendas and the anthropological research they influenced. Rashiq emphasized that advancements in the history of social sciences, particularly the application of the sociology of knowledge, make simplistic explanations outdated. These explanations reduce the history of a discipline solely to its ideological and political context.5 Rashiq further expanded on this critique in his 2012 book, The Near and the Far: A Century of Anthropology in Morocco. This book offers a critical review of anthropological studies on Morocco, conducted by Western researchers during and after the colonial era. Rashiq emphasizes that it is reductive to consider colonial anthropology merely a reflection of colonial ideology. The work done on Morocco, whether colonial or not, falls within different theoretical traditions that come with their own questions, lexicon, and stakes. Rashiq acknowledges the influence of ideology on knowledge production in all contexts, including colonial research. However, he rejects the notion of a single, external “colonial context” impacting every researcher’s findings. This applies regardless of their theoretical background or ethnographic approach. Instead, Rashiq views context as a dynamic interplay of resources and constraints. These factors shape the social standing of the researcher within the colonial system. In his view, the “colonial context” isn’t an objective fact. It’s shaped by both the general conditions of the colonized country and the specific circumstances under which anthropological knowledge is produced. Accordingly, the relationship between a context and a specific discourse is no longer simple or direct. “Researchers, regardless of their interests, are compelled by their social role to position themselves within a theoretical framework. This framework acts as a reference point, guiding their work. They must also adopt the vocabulary, postulates, and hypotheses established by this tradition. Colonial anthropologists, in particular, face this double pressure. They must adhere to the prevailing scientific standards of their time and also find a reference group for their work.” Rachiq exemplifies this with Edmond Doutté. Doutté, who contributed to French colonialism, maintained close ties with Marcel Mauss and the Sociological Yearbook. Similarly, Jacques Berque, another example provided by Rachiq, spent two decades as a colonial employee. Berque, too, was connected to a prominent Parisian circle that included Marcel Mauss and Louis Gardet. This does not mean ignoring the bad uses of the theory and its post-contextual and circumstantial interpretations, which require alertness to the imbalances between theoretical traditions and research results. This aspect of embeddedness in different theoretical traditions and reference groups is what explains some of the transformations in colonial anthropological work. What directed the founders of the Moroccan archives to gradually pass from the position of explorer traveler to resident researcher, a position that facilitates resorting to the monographic approach, is an intellectual readiness, that is, the desire to go beyond positivist sociological reflections, and then integrating within a socio-graphic perspective. However, Rashiq here may be turning a blind eye when he refers to “intellectual preparedness” the colonial administration’s need for closer knowledge that goes beyond the aforementioned contemplations.
On the other hand, Rashiq, commenting on Robert Merton’s research on the impact of the researcher’s different social positions (such as the difference between a researcher who is included or not within a certain bureaucracy), believes that the true positions of researchers are not clear and strict, but rather flexible. Edmond Doughty was a teacher in Algeria and completed precise tasks in Morocco within the framework of the colonial project, and vice versa. Jacques Burke, for example, was a colonial employee and completed his research within an academic orientation.
Dismissing the idea of decolonizing colonial knowledge, something that was never known how to be done, he says, what Rashiq concludes is that “just because a theory is tainted by ideological judgments does not mean that it necessarily leads to wrong descriptions… Colonial anthropological knowledge and postcolonialism should be understood through criticism of its theoretical foundations, and then we clarify, when necessary, that a writer’s interpretations are nothing more than a rational justification for colonial or factional interests.”
Although the issue of ideologicalization of knowledge produced during the colonial era is central, there are other determinants of this knowledge that must not be neglected when evaluating this anthropological legacy. The ethnographic position includes direct relationships between the anthropologist and the subjects studied, such as the length of stay in the field, the extent of the study area, and mastery of the local language. Also taking the people’s words seriously, which Clifford Geertz considers a methodological necessity, is for the researcher to take seriously the point of view of the actors involved, “and accept to ride the adventure of phenomenological analysis and communication with the subjectivity of the actors, in an effort to understand what they feel and what they think, and to gain access to interpretive frameworks, which they use to produce meanings and evaluate events around them.”6
The question here is about all of these determinants, whether related to the ideology of knowledge or the ethnographic positivism: Was it the arrival of local anthropologists, who violated that settled separation, as Rashiq describes, between the observer and the observed, where the former always belongs to a predominantly colonial Western country? Was it the arrival of these local researchers that makes a clear contrast between indigenous anthropology and its colonial predecessor? Rashiq surprises us that although he tried, as a Moroccan anthropologist, to overcome the problems of his predecessors by speaking in the language of the people and living among them for ten years, he found that those elements in common between him and the people are mostly the most superficial elements, even with regard to language, and they are a common element that makes a difference for local researchers. Abdullah Hamoudi says: Few Moroccan scholars know the Berber dialects or even care to study them in detail.7
At the level of choosing topics, the authors of Islam in Everyday Life point out that the works of Moroccan anthropologists in the field of religious phenomena in terms of topics did not differ from colonial anthropology (the zawiya, sacrifice, disguise, visiting shrines, divination, etc.), but the change in these works focused on the theoretical dimension. What is most telling about this, namely the fragility of the encounter between local and colonial anthropology, is that in these works of the Moroccans “the epistemological assumptions will not be reconsidered, despite the harsh ideological criticism, except in a weak way.”
Rashiq points out, however, that about two decades ago, he began to overcome the state of rejection and exaggerated caution towards Morocco’s colonial legacy.
The End of Orientalism?
There have been transformations within the field of anthropology, as studies are no longer about what is outside the “West” only. Thus, the anthropology of city streets was born, which studies, for example, neighborhoods in the United States itself. Arjun Appadurai spoke about the necessity of forming an anthropology for the future, and the book One Discipline, Four Ways: British, German, French, and American Anthropology indicates the extent of vitality and innovation within this field,8 however, Radwan Al-Sayyid believes that the phenomena being studied are still not Western in the common sense of the West, and that it is still important for us to follow what is written about us in this field with the aim of “not being something” and also not something different from the rest of the world, and anthropology, in that sense, is better off than Orientalism.9
Turki Al-Rubaieu points out that Arab intellectuals formed an image of the role of colonial anthropology from Edward Said’s references, then from the translation of Gérard Leclerc’s book, Anthropology and Colonialism, and the widely known book edited by Talal Asad, Anthropology & the Colonial Encounter. Despite this, they, i.e., Arab intellectuals, while aware of the deep connection between anthropology and colonialism – according to Radwan Al-Sayyid – considered anthropology an alternative to Orientalism because, in their view, it is more field-based, and because it is somewhat linked to positivist sociology, which does not allow ideological rooting or the perpetuation of inherited stereotypes.
When we review this introspection of epistemological hypotheses from colonial-era anthropology in the works of Arab anthropologists, whether in the works of Egyptian geographers and anthropologists in the first half of the twentieth century, in the shadow of the formation of a national identity by emphasizing the ethnological distinction of Egyptians over Africans in particular, or in the work of Moroccan anthropologists in the last quarter of the last century, it becomes worth thinking carefully about what Brian Turner emphasizes: “The end of Orientalism requires a radical reform of perspectives and models. But cognitive restructuring can only take place in the context of major transformations in relations between the East and the West.”10 For without a radical questioning of the epistemological perspectives of anthropology, the problem of Orientalism will not be overcome, without this meaning reducing the anthropological legacy of the era of colonialism to its ideological aspect, as we said with Hassan Rashiq.
References
1. Ḥasan Rashīq, 2018. al-qarīb wālbʻyd : qarn min al-antharūbūlūjiyā bi-al-Maghrib. al-Dār al-Bayḍāʼ : al-Markaz al-Thaqāfī lil-Kitāb.
2. Umniyah al-Shākirī, 2016. al-Maʻmal al-ijtimāʻī al-kabīr : mawḍūʻāt al-Maʻrifah fī Miṣr almstʻmrh wa-mā baʻda al-kūlūniyālīyah. al-Qāhirah : al-Markaz al-Qawmī lil-Kitāb.
3. Marwah al-Shākirī, 2017. qirāʼah Dārwīn fī al-fikr al-ʻarabī 1860-1950. Bayrūt : Markaz Namāʼ lil-Buḥūth wa-al-Dirāsāt.)
4. Muḥammad al-ʻAyyādī and Ḥasan Rashīq wa-Muḥammad alṭwzy, 2013. al-Islām fī al-ḥayāh al-yawmīyah : baḥth ḥawla al-Qayyim wa-al-mumārasāt al-dīnīyah bi-al-Maghrib. al-Dār al-Bayḍāʼ : Manshūrāt muqaddimāt.)
5. Abū Bakr Bāqādir and Ḥasan Rashīq, 2012. al-antharūbūlūjiyā fī al-waṭan al-ʻArabī. Dimashq : Dār al-Fikr.
6. Muḥammad al-Ṣaghīr Jinjār, 2014. “ilm ijtimāʻ al-adyān wbārādyghm al-ʻAlmanah,” in al-ʻUlūm al-ijtimāʻīyah al-taṭbīqīyah fī al-Maghrib. al-Dār al-Bayḍāʼ : Muʼassasat al-Malik ʻAbd al-ʻAzīz Āl Saʻūd lil-Dirāsāt al-Islāmīyah wa-al-insānīyah”.
7. Bāqādir and Rashīq, ibid.
8. Turkī al-Rabīʻū, the article ‘al-ʻArab wa-tārīkh al-anthrūbūlūjiyā.’
9. Raḍwān al-Sayyid, 2000. ‘al-anthrūbūlūjiyā wa-al-tārīkh wa-al-istishrāq’. Al-Ijtihād magazine, issue. 47/48.
10. Brian Turner, 2000. ‘al-Istishrāq wa-mushkilat al-mujtamaʻ al-madanī fī al-Islām’. Al-Ijtihād magazine, issue. 47/48.
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