Majid Hannoum

This book considers secularism and its narrative expressions. It shows how secularism is articulated, and transmitted ubiquitously within state institutions and outside of them. Abdelmajid Hannoum does this by dissecting, in a series of essays, a variety of narrative forms, interrogating modes of their constitution and production, the dynamics of their translatability, the politics of their use, the struggle over their status of truth, and the conditions that make secular narration so central to our existence. The book ranges from a medieval narrative of the secular to a modern narrative, to anthropological secularism and religious experiences, to narratives of translation produced by what the author calls translation ideology, to historical narratives regulated by archival power and state secrecy, to narratives of violence, to narratives of recollection, as well as narratives of silence. Particular attention is paid to postcolonial French contemporary cultures and politics. Transdisciplinary approaches are deployed to not only reframe old questions in new ways but to posit new questions out of old ones. In doing so this innovative work opens up fresh discursive possibilities that cross traditional disciplines. It will be of interest to scholars of anthropology, history, and beyond.

Under French colonial rule, the region of the Maghreb emerged as distinct from two other geographical entities that, too, are colonial inventions: the Middle East and Africa. In this book, Abdelmajid Hannoum demonstrates how the invention of the Maghreb started long before the conquest of Algiers and lasted until the time of independence, and beyond, to our present. Through an interdisciplinary study of French colonial modernity, Hannoum examines how colonialism made extensive use of translations of Greek, Roman, and Arabic texts and harnessed high technologies of power to reconfigure the region and invent it. In the process, he analyzes a variety of forms of colonial knowledge including historiography, anthropology, cartography, literary work, archaeology, linguistics, and racial theories. He shows how local engagement with colonial politics and its modes of knowledge were instrumental in the modern making of the region, including in its postcolonial era, as a single unit divorced from Africa and from the Middle East.

Since the early 1990s, new migratory patterns have been emerging in the southern Mediterranean. Here, a large number of West Africans and young Moroccans, including minors, make daily attempts to cross to Europe. The Moroccan city of Tangier, because of its proximity to Spain, is one of the main gateways for this migratory movement. It has also become a magnet for middle- and working-class Europeans seeking a more comfortable life.
Based on extensive fieldwork, Living Tangier examines the dynamics of transnational migration in a major city of the Global South and studies African "illegal" migration to Europe and European "legal" migration to Morocco, looking at the itineraries of Europeans, West Africans, and Moroccan children and youth, their strategies for crossing, their motivations, their dreams, their hopes, and their everyday experiences. In the process, Abdelmajid Hannoum examines how Moroccan society has been affected by the flows of migrants from both West Africa and Europe, focusing on race relations and analyzing issues related to citizenship and social inequality. Living Tangier considers what makes the city one of the most attractive for migrants preparing to cross to Europe and illustrates not only how migrants live in the city but also how they live the city—how they experience it, encounter its people, and engage its culture, walk its streets, and participate in its events.

Reflecting on his own experiences and drawing on the work of Hannah Arendt, Edward Said, Tayeb Saleh, Amin Maalouf, and Dany Laferrière, Hannoum provokes new questions in order to reconfigure migration as a postcolonial phenomenon and interrogate how Moroccan society responds to new cultural processes.

"In the Western imaginary Tangier appears as exotic and romantic. The reality is far more complex. In this heartfelt and beautifully written account, Abdelmajid Hannoum brings us face to face with protests against the indignities of daily life and the crisscrossed paths of African and Arab migrants seeking a new life in Europe and Europeans seeking a new life in North Africa. From the local response to the Arab Spring to the realities of children's street life, Hannoum's deeply researched and personally involved account adds immeasurably to our understanding of the pain and promise of migration."—Lawrence Rosen, Princeton University

"By combining perspectives from three different sets of migrants—young rural Moroccans seeking to cross into Europe, West Africans in transit from their home countries to Europe, and Europeans who have migrated to Morocco—Living Tangier examines migration on multiple registers at once, allowing the author to draw attention to the universal elements intertwined with all migratory movement as well as to provide an insightful look into the multiple ways in which migration shapes the dynamics of one specific city."—Dinah Hannaford, Texas A&M University

"Beautifully written and moving, Living Tangier is a truly solid ethnography."—Rachel Newcomb, Rollins College

Islam in Africa is deeply connected with Sufism, and the history of Islam is in a significant way a history of Sufism. Yet even within this continent, the practice and role of Sufism varies across the regions.

This interdisciplinary volume brings together different histories and experiences of Sufism in various parts of Africa, offering case studies on several countries that include Morocco, Algeria, Senegal, Egypt, Sudan, Mali, and Nigeria. It uses a variety of methodologies ranging from the hermeneutical, through historiographic to ethnographic, in a comprehensive examination of the politics and performance of Sufism in Africa. While the politics of Sufism pertains largely to historical and textual analysis to highlight paradigms of sanctity in different geographical areas in Africa, the aspect of performance adopts a decidedly ethnographic approach, combining history, history of art and discourse analysis. Together, analysis of these two aspects reveals the many faces of Sufism that have remained hitherto hidden.

Furthering understanding of the African Islamic religious scene, as well as contributing to the study of Sufism worldwide, this volume is of key interest to students and scholars of Middle Eastern, African and Islamic studies.

In this chapter, I formulate the concept of translation ideology to argue that translation is inherently ideological in the sense that translation is a passage from one cognitive universe to another, each with its own categories, types of relations, and cultural dynamics. The translator navigates a vast semantic universe to complete a translation. This navigation requires decisions about the text, equivalents, omissions, additions, and so forth – all of which are conscious and sometimes subconscious decisions. In this, the preface, almost always part of a translation, plays an important role in reinforcing or challenging a given translation ideology. The chapter demonstrates how translation ideology commands any semantic transformation by juxtaposing two prefaces to Frantz Fanon’s Les Damnés de la Terre: one by Homi Bhabha for the English translation of 2004 and one for the Arabic translation of 2012. The chapter shows how each preface reinforces a different translation ideology. The chapter also offers an approach useful for decolonising translation.

The text of the Muqaddima is organized in chapters uneven in length, each considering one of many and varied themes ranging from the division of the earth to the impact of the climate on people and cultures, from the craft of history to tribal dynamics and their relation to dynastical power, from taxation to the sciences, state functions, language, grammar, poetry, midwifery, and so forth. As such, the Muqaddima can be looked at from different angles and lends itself to different interpretations. The following discussion examines the cognitive framework underlying the disparate themes found in the Muqaddima. This framework has three cornerstones, which are explored in turn in this section: history, ʿumrân (culture/civilization), and the state. Ibn Khaldûn’s interest in history led him to the question of ʿumrân, and the question of ʿumrân took him to the issue of the state and its centrality in human societies. A note on citation: my discussion of the major ideas of Ibn Khaldûn relies on the Arabic text published in 1994, with quotations in English from Franz Rosenthal’s translation (1958), cited as Ibn Khaldûn/Rosenthal. For disputed concepts, I provide my own translation in square brackets. Where there is no reference to Ibn Khaldûn/Rosenthal, the translation is entirely mine.

In this essay I argue the French postcolonial corpus on colonialism, as quantitatively significant as it is, is not only a recollection of the colonial past, but also contains within itself an important dimension of forgetting. For, taking my lead from Henry Rousso and Paul Ricœur, I maintain forgetting is neither a dysfunction of memory nor an absence of recollection; rather, it is a way to reorganize memory. I further maintain such reorganizing of memory is neither accidental nor innocent, but a way to define the political present, to give meaning to specific events, to control their contingencies. Such a definition for the case at hand involves an articulating of a form of postcolonial citizenship whose individuals, because they cannot share our forgetting, cannot share our political present.

In this article, I discuss the tragic attack on the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo in Paris on 7 January 2015. First, I comment on Didier Fassin's article ‘In the name of the Republic’, published in anthropology today in April 2015. I express my disagreement with him on the issue of laïcité, and offer a critical examination of the concept, taking into account what I call ‘the Christian heritage of the secular state’. I then examine the various French reactions to the tragedy and focus on the history of the French state and its (post)colonial relations with French Islam to offer an explanation of the events.

Abstract: What does it mean to be a native anthropologist? Is there such a thing as native anthropology? If so, how does it differ from non native anthropology? As anthropology is traditionally a discipline that studies the ‘Other”  and it sets as a goal for itself, “to grasp the native’s point of view?”, the question of nativism is important. Yet, it has not been given the attention it deserves. This essay tackles the issue of nativism and ask questions about its meanings and its implications for anthropological knowledge. The essay argues that anthropology as a discipline, that is as a field regulated by specific epistemology and certain rules for its writings give its adherers a specific identity that makes them part and parcel of the same temple. Yet, the essay also shows that anthropology requires a double belonging. A discussion of the well known debate between Gananath Obyesekere and Marshal Sahlins shows that the question of nativism is not about being from there, as it is about being from here and from there, not necessarily ethnically, but culturally, and especially epistemologically.