Moroccan autobiography: The rhetorical construction of the self and the development of modern Arabic narrative in al-Maghrib al-Aqsa

The question this project addresses is why modern Moroccan narrative developed largely along the generic lines of autobiography. Or, is there a discernable relationship between indigenous precursors in the Arabic narrative tradition in the Moroccan context that led the modern narrative of the region to take the initial generic form of autobiography. While the tendency is to view the Moroccan novel as a Western import, the proposition here is to draw a line of continuity between premodern Moroccan autobiographical writing and the development of modern prose in Morocco. Through a series of close readings, the links between Ahmad Zarrūq\u27s fifteenth-century al- Kunnāsh fi \u27ilm āsh, Abū \u27Alī al-Hasan al-Yūsī\u27s seventeenth- century al-Fahrasah, Ahmad Ibn `Ajībah\u27s nineteenth-century Fahrasah and al-Wazzānī\u27s landmark text, al-Zāwiyah, often cited as Morocco\u27s first modern Arabic novel, will be elucidated with the aim of contributing to a more nuanced understanding of the historical development of modern Moroccan prose written in Arabic. These works will be considered as a literary series with tropological shifts related primarily to the evolving role of the institution of the zāwiyah in Morocco and these authors\u27 relationship to it. All the texts draw on the same governing model based upon the Prophetic paradigm and share the same core figurative and temporal structures. It is also suggested that the evolution of these texts can be connected to the particular ideological position of the zāwiyah or tarīqah to which their authors were attached. The shift in al-Wazzanī\u27s twentieth-century al-Zāwiyah, which brings spiritual autobiographical writing in line with the modern expectations of the novel genre, can be attributed, as in the Mashriq, to its relationship with the rise of print culture. The Arabic literary history of Morocco remains largely unwritten. This project has tried to suggest a way to view part of that history outside of the common paradigm that draws a sharp distinction between the premodern and modern periods.