The study, conducted by Tritha Abdelaziz of the Faculty of Languages, Arts and Human Sciences in Settat, Morocco, approaches al-Ḥajwī’s text through a postcolonial micro-historicist lens, examining the fine-grained details of one traveler’s observations to challenge sweeping generalizations about Arab encounters with Europe. The research pushes back against a long-standing trope in Western scholarship, exemplified by the Scottish Arabist William Robertson Smith, who wrote in 1912 that the Arabian traveler finds the labor of moving from place to place a mere nuisance, has no enjoyment in effort, and grumbles at hunger and fatigue with all his might. Abdelaziz argues that, notwithstanding such adamantly maintained tropes of subordination and exclusion from the Euro-Christian traveling repertoire, Arab travelers were already pioneering agents and representatives of their home countries, capable of ventilating their thought and transcending the dogmatic binaries that divided the world into Dār al-Ḥarb, the abode of war, and Dār al-Islām, the abode of Islam.

Al-Ḥajwī himself was no marginal figure. A prominent Moroccan scholar of Islamic jurisprudence, he later authored al-Fikr al-Sāmī fī Tārīkh al-Fiqh al-Islāmī, a celebrated history of Islamic law. His European journey, undertaken in the immediate aftermath of the First World War and published in 1919, belongs to a rich tradition of Moroccan rihla literature — travel accounts written by scholars, ambassadors, and envoys who crossed the Mediterranean for diplomacy, pilgrimage, study, or commerce. What distinguishes al-Ḥajwī’s account, according to the new analysis, is the minuteness with which he lingers on the infinitesimal details of each country he visits, from the military omnipotence of France to the extreme orderliness of its public urban life and the workings of its democratized political scene.

That attention to detail matters because it reveals a mind actively negotiating rather than simply rejecting or admiring. Abdelaziz’s central argument is that al-Ḥajwī’s travelogue foregrounds an alternative discourse that neither reinstalls the Orientalist binary opposition — the framework made famous by Edward Said, in which the West defines itself against a supposedly backward East — nor consolidates the confrontational project of Occidentalism articulated by the Egyptian philosopher Hassan Hanafi, which mirrors Orientalism by treating the West as a monolithic civilizational enemy. Instead, al-Ḥajwī’s text occupies a middle ground: he avows European science and organization while filtering them through his own Islamic scholarly formation, producing a portrait of modernity that is selective, critical, and dialogical.

The concept of the voyage in, coined by Edward Said in his 1994 book Culture and Imperialism, provides one theoretical anchor for the analysis. The voyage in describes a form of resistance to metropolitan culture, a strategy of writing back to the Western body of knowledge that deflects the Orientalist tale and undermines its coherence. It is an endeavor to alter Western consciousness and transform coercive power relations, repositioning the marginalized as a subject of enunciation and a central narrator rather than a passive object of description. Al-Ḥajwī’s journey to Europe, written from the position of the traveled-to rather than the traveler-in-power, exemplifies this reversal: the Moroccan scholar observes, categorizes, and judges Europe using his own evaluative vocabulary, much as European Orientalists had long done with the Islamic world.

Yet al-Ḥajwī’s judgments are strikingly ambivalent, and it is precisely this ambivalence that the study finds most compelling. On questions of gender and public life, for instance, his positions appear paradoxical on the surface. In many passages, the presence of women and men together in theatrical settings is treated as sharply contradicting the maxims of Islam and the tenets of Sharia, since promiscuity is prohibited in Islamic ethics and Western playhouses, as spaces of leisure and entertainment, may in his view encourage immoral attitudes. Yet the same travelogue contains vehement advocacy for gender equality in access to education. The apparent contradiction dissolves, Abdelaziz suggests, when one recognizes the distinction al-Ḥajwī draws between kinds of spaces: schools, in his conception, are fountains of knowledge, education, and ʿilm — science — while ludic spaces offer mere ephemeral and transient entertainment. His advocacy for women’s education was also backed by his own educational background and the profound influence of his mother.

Education, in fact, emerges as the gravitational center of al-Ḥajwī’s reflections on modernity. What he admired most in Europe was not its military parades or its political institutions per se, but the open horizon for learning and the unimpeded acquisition of practical sciences. His praise of educational freedom carries an implicit criticism of Islamic education of his era, in which learners were shackled by a religion-based curriculum, and of the self-reservation and introversion that weakened the content of learning and hampered the circulation of books. Drawing on deeply rooted Islamic proverbs — some of which scholars judge to be false hadiths — such as Seek knowledge as far as China and Seek knowledge from the cradle to the grave, al-Ḥajwī argued that a solid scientific foundation rests on early educational exposure to the tenets of science and knowledge in general. Freedom, in his framework, is a sine qua non for shaping the identity and acumen of young learners: granted the necessary conditions of knowledge production, including freedom and educational dedication, a person will gain the practical knowledge needed to serve his or her nation. Notably, he neither lingers on institutional foundations as generators of freedom nor dwells on democratized elections as anchors of its principles — his concern is epistemic rather than constitutional.

This selectivity reflects the political constraints under which the travelogue was written. As Abdelaziz notes, al-Ḥajwī’s account was composed within the courtesy of Royal tradition, destined for the Moroccan court, where travel writing was deemed suggestive and tacit rather than vertically imposing. While he foregrounds the merits of French military power and political stability, he does not overtly incite the Sultan to embark on urgent reforms. His view toward both French military readiness and the fragility of the Moroccan military and political systems is mitigated, setting the ground for a dialogical negotiation rather than a confrontational demand. The genre itself — the rihla addressed to a sovereign — shaped what could be said and how, channeling critique through observation and insinuation rather than direct prescription.

Al-Ḥajwī’s account also belongs to a longer and more diverse genealogy than is often acknowledged. The historian Nabil Matar, in his 2003 study In the Lands of the Christians: Arabic Travel Writing in the Seventeenth Century, demonstrated that travel during the early modern period was not a Euro-Christian exclusivity, examining Arab travelers such as Abū al-Qāsim al-Ḥajarī, Aḥmad ibn Muḥammad al-Khālidī al-Ṣafadī, and Ilyās Ḥannā al-Mawṣilī. Against Bernard Lewis’s claim that the absence of curiosity deterred Arab journeys to Europe, Matar shows the real deterrent was mutual fear born of intermittent confrontation: the Levant and the Mediterranean Basin were fierce grounds of piratical incursions, and the harbingers of the Reconquista dominated the Iberian Peninsula as Christians sought vengeance for Muslim rule over their former territories. Despite the brewing signs of war and encroachment, Arab travelers developed alliances with the Christian Other, producing cultural reciprocity and religious tolerance. Within the Moroccan tradition specifically, Abdenbi Dakir traces the encounter of Moroccan intellectuals with Western theatrical performance back to the journey of Muhammed Tamim in 1682, whose manuscript is lost but whose trajectory survives in reports of the French press, and possibly in one of Antoine Trovane’s tableaux. Dakir finds that Moroccan ambassadors’ attitudes toward the strange and different were heterogeneous — ranging from the admiration of al-ʿAmrāwī, al-Ṣaffār, and al-Ghassāl to the castigation offered by al-Ḥajwī and al-Miknāsī — making Western theatres contested spaces where stances were contingent on individual convictions and theological injunctions.

The recovery of such texts is itself an ongoing scholarly project. Dar al-Suwaydi in the United Arab Emirates has published a series of forgotten Arabic travel accounts as part of an effort to re-narrate Arab travel writing and resurrect travelers’ archival memories, and al-Riḥla al-Ūrubbiyya survives as one of the rare manuscripts preserved in its integrality. These endeavors go beyond compiling rihalat in books; they provide instrumental information about the travelers themselves, the historical context, and the itineraries of their journeys — ʿAbdallāh al-Fāḍilī’s introduction to the 2004 Beirut edition, for example, offers insights into al-Ḥajwī’s background and the historical dimensions that framed his travel. A French translation of the journey, Voyage d’Europe: le périple d’un réformiste, rendered by Alain Roussillon and Aziza Saâf, has also made the text accessible to a wider readership. What emerges from Abdelaziz’s micro-historicist reading is a portrait of modernity as something negotiated rather than imposed: al-Ḥajwī’s Europe is a place of order, science, and freedom worth avowing, but not a destination requiring the abandonment of faith, tradition, or identity. In an era when debates about Islam and the West remain charged, this century-old travelogue suggests that the most productive encounters have always happened in the space between dogmatic rejection and uncritical admiration — a space where a Moroccan jurist could marvel at French orderliness, champion education for women, condemn the theatre, and still write it all in the idiom of his own tradition.

Subject of Research: Postcolonial analysis of modernity, Orientalism, and scientific avowal in a 1919 Moroccan travel account of Europe

Article Title: Modernity between dogmatic rejection and scientific avowal in Muḥammad Ben al-Ḥasan al-Ḥajwī’s al-Riḥlah al-Ūrūbbiyyah (The European Journey) (1919)

Article References: Abdelaziz, T. (2026). Modernity between dogmatic rejection and scientific avowal in Muḥammad Ben al-Ḥasan al-Ḥajwī’s al-Riḥlah al-Ūrūbbiyyah (The European Journey) (1919). SN Social Sciences, 6(9), Article 363. https://doi.org/10.1007/s43545-026-01639-7

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s43545-026-01639-7

Keywords: modernity, Orientalism, Occidentalism, Arabic travel writing, al-Ḥajwī, Morocco, postcolonialism, microhistory, Islamic jurisprudence, gender equality, education, rihla literature