Introduction

Shortly after Ibn al-Muwaqqit published al-Riḥla al-Marrākushiyya, aw, Mirʾāt al-masāwiʾ al-waqtiyya (Travels in Marrakech, or, a Mirror of Momentary Evils) in 1930, a firestorm of controversy erupted. Three of Marrakech's most important judges joined forces with the heads of the city's main Sufi orders and filed a complaint against al-Muwaqqit with the city's Pasha, who immediately took the matter to the king. The king unexpectedly responded by saying, “Whoever is attacked by the pen can only respond by the pen” (al-Muwaqqit 2000: 12). The dispute was then relegated to the world of print. Nevertheless, the text had undoubtedly struck a nerve. The merciless critique to which al-Muwaqqit had subjected so many in the book's pages, especially the sheikhs of the Sufi brotherhoods, was largely responsible. But in addition to this, the text's method of writing the urban space of Marrakech was something wholly new, and it held the potential to disrupt the fundamental sense of orientation intimately held by most of Marrakech's residents at the time, an orientation tied to their individual identities and collective histories. It is this aspect of al-Muwaqqit's writing that will be the concern of this chapter.

Muḥammad bin Muḥammad bin ʿAbd Allāh al-Muwaqqit (d. 1999) – more generally known as Ibn al-Muwaqqit – authored more than eighty titles. He lived during a time characterized by the rising tension between a number of binary oppositions: tradition vs. modernization, development vs. preservation, nationalist activism vs. support of colonialism, orthodox Islam or Salafism vs. the traditional Sufi orders (Jallāb 1994: 10). His work is infused with the existential turmoil of these conflicts, his own positions shifting radically through the course of his life. Born in 1894, he grew up in Marrakech's old city near the Ibn Yūsuf mosque (see Ben Youssef mosque, Figure 9.1). Arguably Marrakech's oldest and most important mosque, it was here that his father, Muḥammad bin ʿAbd Allāh al-Muwaqqit, served as resident timekeeper.