Middle East Critique

ISSN: (Print) (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/ccri20

The Other Khatibi: Envisaging Arab Intellectuals

after the End of Grand Narratives

Idriss Jebari

To cite this article: Idriss Jebari (2021): The Other Khatibi: Envisaging Arab Intellectuals after the
End of Grand Narratives, Middle East Critique, DOI: 10.1080/19436149.2021.1911464

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/19436149.2021.1911464

Published online: 08 May 2021.

Submit your article to this journal

View related articles

View Crossmark data

Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at

https://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=ccri20
Middle East Critique, 2021
https://doi.org/10.1080/19436149.2021.1911464

The Other Khatibi: Envisaging Arab

Intellectuals after the End of
Grand Narratives
IDRISS JEBARI
Trinity College, Dublin, Ireland

ABSTRACT: The recent revival of interest in Moroccan thinker Abdelkebir Khatibi (1938–2009)
around the English release of his seminal 1983 essay, Maghreb Pluriel represents an opportunity
to place this thinker in the inner circle of post-1967 Arab thought. This article argues that most
coverage and commemoration of him has been devoted to a glorified side of his trajectory that fits
neatly within the framework of ‘postcolonial francophone intellectuals.’ However, this article
argues that we must revise the meaning of his seminal book and his call for a ‘plural Maghreb’ to
see it also as the demise of his project for a decolonized sociology in Morocco, which was
necessary to set his sights toward semiology and his significant literary oeuvre. His example
informs us on Arab intellectual strategies after the end of grand ideological narratives, and how to
write Arab intellectual and cultural histories without succumbing to the trap of nostalgia.
KEY WORDS: Arab thought; Critique; Cultural history; Francophone; Intellectuals; Nostalgia

In the recent years, the Moroccan thinker Abdelkebir Khatibi (1938–2009) has been
experiencing a revival beyond his traditional niche in francophone studies. A decade
after his passing, this figure who evades labels is on course to join the inner circle of
post-1967 Arab thought with the recent English release of his 1983 collection of
essays Maghreb Pluriel (1983).1 It has been mostly English-speaking scholars of the
Arab world driving this revival because they find in his prolific oeuvre a soothing and
invigorating message in favor of pluralism. As the Arab Left continues to flounder, the
search for Arab voices for pluralism is a stark reminder of the continued absence of
grand narratives for progressive Arab thought, especially after the post-1967 disen-
chantment with modernity and the return of cultural heritage.2 Others relish the

Correspondence address: Idriss Jebari, Department of Near and Middle Eastern Studies, Trinity College,
Dublin, Ireland. E-mail: [email protected]
1
Abdelkebir Khatibi (2019 [1983]) Plural Maghreb: Writings on Postcolonialism (2019). Translated by
P. Burcu Yalim (London: Bloomsbury Press). In this article, I use ‘Maghreb’ in the title of works
published in French and I use ‘Maghrib’ in my analysis as is more conventional in English academic
works.
2
Christoph Schumann (2008) The ‘failure’ of Radical Nationalism and the ‘Silence’ of Liberal Thought
in the Arab World, Comparative Studies of Africa Asia and the Middle East 28:3 (2008), pp. 404–415;
Ahmad Agbaria (2019) What Does it Mean to be an Arab Leftist Today, International Journal of
Middle Eastern Studies, 51(2), pp. 309–311; and Nelly Lahoud (2004) Tradition (tur
ath) in
Contemporary Arabic Political Discourse, Middle East Critique, 13(3), pp. 313–333.
ß 2021 Editors of Middle East Critique
2 I. Jebari

possibility of de-centering Arab intellectual history toward its peripheries and giving
Morocco its dues as ‘a center for Arab critical thinking.’3
The Maghreb, just like California’s Gold Rush in the mid-nineteenth century repre-
sents a new land of opportunities for the East. It offers a less ideological and less sect-
arian engagement with Arab modernity, as Wael Hallaq argues in Abdurrahman
Taha’s case, with its thinkers who are more willing to dabble in eclectic approaches
and blur disciplinary lines.4 This interest in Khatibi is consistent with the latest devel-
opments in Arab intellectual history: Fascination for the prophetic, charismatic intellec-
tuals ‘in crisis,’5 circulating theory and the emergence of hybrid traditions across the
two shores of the Mediterranean,6 and as a shorthand to understand an authoritarian
Arab present that appears to be devoid of certainty or grand narratives.7
This article, however, is concerned with the ‘other Khatibi,’ not the celebrated
Khatibi who penned the call for ‘the Maghreb as a Horizon of Thought’ in Maghreb
Pluriel four decades ago and remains a powerful voice for pluralism. The first Khatibi
dialogued with Jacques Derrida and Mahmoud Darwish in prestigious Parisian salons.
He shaped a radical culture with other members of the Moroccan radical cultural group
Souffles in the 1960s, the golden age of cultural journals.8 His novels deconstructed
rigid linguistic conventions and spoke about hybrid notions such as aimance, pensee-
autre, and double-critique with prestigious publishers in Paris, the former colonial
metropolis.9 This Khatibi demonstrated the power of literature as an outlet for his mel-
ancholia and its therapeutic value in search of reconciliation between the French and
the Arabic components of his identity. While the country veered toward Islamism and
authoritarian repression, he stood firmly for cultural pluralism and for assuming
Morocco’s multilingual self.
The ‘other Khatibi’ is only found in the footnotes or as passing context. This one
was a sociologist at the Muhammad V University, a stone’s throw from the Royal
Palace and other spheres of power. He wrote about the little and trivial social phenom-
ena rather than great philosophical principles. He published with Okad or Toubkal
Editions in Rabat rather than Gallimard and Deno€el in Paris. He fought the small and
local battles as a co-founder of the union of Moroccan researchers, and he oversaw the
country’s social sciences as the head of Morocco’s research institute (IURS). His work
there did not score big, glamorous victories, but lesser remarked influence. In fact, this
other Khatibi is better understood through a narrative of failure rather than heroism, in

3
Hosam Aboul-Ela (2018) The Specificities of Arab Thought. Morocco since the Liberal Age, in: J.
Hanssen & M. Weiss (eds) Arabic Thought Against the Authoritarian Age (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press), p. 143; Brahim El-Guabli (2021) Review the Unmaking of the Arab Intellectual:
Prophecy, Exile and the Nation, Journal of North African Studies, 26(1), pp. 163–169.
4
Wael Hallaq (2019) Reforming Modernity. Ethics and the New Human in the Philosophy of
Abdurrahman Taha (NewYork: Columbia University Press).
5
Zeina Halabi (2017) The Unmaking of the Arab Intellectual: Prophecy, Exile and the Nation
(Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press).
6
Yoav Di-Capua (2018) No Exit: Arab Existentialism, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Decolonization (Chicago:
Chicago University Press).
7
Jens Hanssen & Max Weiss (eds) (2018) Arabic Thought Against the Authoritarian Age (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press).
8
Gonzalo Fernandez-Parilla (2014) The Challenge of Moroccan Cultural Journals of the 1960s, Journal of
Arabic Literature 45(1), pp. 104–128; and Andy Stafford (2009) Tricontinentalism in Recent Moroccan
Intellectual History: The Case of Souffles, Journal of Transatlantic Studies 7(3), pp. 218–232.
9
Gary Wilder (2015) Freedom Time: Negritude, Decolonization, and the Future of the World (Durham:
Duke University Press).
 The Other Khatibi 3

light of the continued challenges for social sciences in Morocco and the Arab world.10
Later in life, as an established member of the Rabat-based Moroccan intelligentsia in
the 1990s, he became more reformist than revolutionary and even could be seen rub-
bing shoulders in Rabat’s high circles. That Khatibi does not fit with the romantic nar-
rative of the principled postcolonial francophone intellectual. Instead, it illustrates the
compromises that Arab writers and intellectuals frequently have had to make.11 For
this reason, it is consistently ignored, but knowing this other side can help us to frame
properly the value of his intellectual project.
This article does not advocate shifting our attention to one Khatibi at the expense of
the other. Instead, I argue that both attributes are necessary to gage the value and
meaning of a seminal book such as Maghreb Pluriel. This article will focus on one
inflexion point of his intellectual journey: His decision to devote himself fully to lit-
erature in the late 1970s, which represents an implicit admission of failure to decolon-
ize Moroccan sociology, a task he had set on after returning from Paris in 1964.12
Later in life, Khatibi conceded the failure of this task. Rather than claiming Khatibi’s
intellectual project was a failure, however, this article argues that this failure and his
coming to terms with it, represents an essential and necessary stage on the road to pro-
ducing the ground-breaking insights in Maghreb Pluriel that led the astute observer
Hisham Sharabi to assert Khatibi produced ‘perhaps the most incisive and most ori-
ginal critique of neopatriarchal thought … in the last two decades.’13 He distanced
himself from positivist sociology, turned to semiology and deconstruction, and began
to explore the ‘signs’ of Moroccan culture. This ‘turn’ culminated in Maghreb Pluriel.
To state that this process began with a failure is different than to assert that Khatibi
was a failed intellectual.
This article hopes to inform the ongoing renewal of Arab intellectual history, and
especially the way that formative experiences shape the formulation of critical intellec-
tual projects. As Israel Gershoni argues, the ‘narrative of crisis’ pervades the history
of Arab thought due to the work of orientalist scholarship (H.A.R. Gibb, Gustav Von
Grunebaum, etc.) and misrepresents the aims of the Arab intellectual when they shift
their strategies or objects of study. In this case the modernist Egyptian thinkers who
turned to the Islamiyyat literature in the 1930s were painted as having ‘failed’ and lost
hope in western rationality whereas Gershoni and Singer recast their decision as a
‘calculated and well-planned reorientation’ intended to ‘lay an intellectual foundation
for a common culture,’ meaning a continuity of their previous aims with different
methods.14 In a similar vein, Khatibi met a personal crisis that allowed him to rethink
Moroccan culture and society and its emancipation. I do so by bringing Khatibi fully
into the context of the 1960s and 1970s, and the way he is being remembered and
commemorated today. The poetics and aesthetics of Khatibi’s texts have been

10
Mohamed Bamyeh (2015) Social Sciences in the Arab world: Forms and Presence. First Report by the
Social Science Monitor (Beirut: ACSS).
11
Charles Murphy & David Forsdick (2009) The Rise of the Francophone Postcolonial Intellectual: The
Emergence of a Tradition, Modern and Contemporary France 17(2): pp. 163–175.
12
Abdelkebir Khatibi (2008) Le scribe et son ombre [The Scribe and his Shadow] (Paris: La difference)
pp. 31–32.
13
Hisham Sharabi (1987) Cultural Critics of Contemporary Arab Society, Arab Studies Quarterly 9(1),
p. 9.
14
Israel Gershoni (2006) The Theory of Crisis and the Crisis in a Theory: Intellectual History in
Twentieth-Century Middle Eastern Studies, in: I. Gershoni & A. Singer (eds) Middle East
Historiographies: Narrating the Twentieth Century (Seattle: Washington University Press), p. 169.
4 I. Jebari

generously explored over the years, and we stand at the cusp of a well-deserved
revival by a committed francophone and postcolonial field.15 This article seeks to
underline the importance of embracing his journey, with all its hesitations, failures and
imperfections. The local context for the production of his ideas, in this case, pushes
back against the implicit denial that the Maghreb cultural realities and its intellectual
scene could be behind such original theoretical contributions. Khatibi and others rou-
tinely are treated as geniuses sprouting in a barren desert.
Finally, this article aims to write a history of Arab intellectuals that departs from a
haunting longing for their whereabouts and treats them instead as ordinary historical
subjects.16 Academic commentary often portrays Arab intellectuals as prophetic saviors
to come.17 Until their return, we are prompted to reminisce nostalgically over their era
of greatness as a separate period from the Arab present. This approach fails to interro-
gate the very conduct and positions of these figures to explain the state of culture and
power in the Arab present. In this article, I address this limitation by embracing the
uncertainties and failures of Khatibi’s journey: A Moroccan who was invested in his
country’s nation building after French colonialism from within the national university
and as a member of the critical intelligentsia. The era of the grand Arab intellectuals
did not simply pass or vanish, I argue, but it was the era of grand ideological narra-
tives that made way for a new configuration of culture, knowledge and politics.
Khatibi evolved along the way and did not remain a relic of the past to fawn over
with nostalgia. Tarik Sabry demonstrates how Khatibi’s contribution to ontological
debates about Arab modernity can become a methodological tool. He invites us to be
self-reflexive on the process of dislocating the Arab sense of self from idealized
notions of authenticity. Khatibi’s call for a dialogic double-critique can be deployed as
methodology to de-westernize Arab media and offer a theoretical spine to the discip-
line of Arab cultural studies.18 By redrawing a continuous narrative of Khatibi’s trajec-
tory we can overcome amnesia about and nostalgia for Morocco’s recent past, better
contextualize his theoretical insights, and chart a path after the loss of grand narratives
for the benefit of the whole of Arab thought.

Remembering Khatibi
In literary studies, Khatibi needs very little introduction. There has been solid aca-
demic interest in his work for several decades, starting with his autobiography, La
Memoire Tatouee (1971) and his subsequent novels. Khatibi informs postcolonial lit-
erature through his original, creative engagement with French. He has been studied as

15
Jane Hiddleston & Khalid Lyamlahy (2020) Abdelkebir Khatibi: Postcolonialism, Transnationalism,
and Culture in the Maghreb and Beyond (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press).
16
Richard F. Worth (2011) The Arab Intellectuals Who Didn’t Roar, New York Times, 29 October.
Available at https://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/30/sunday-review/the-arab-intellectuals-who-didnt-roar.
html, accessed March 3, 2020; Hazem Kandil (2010) On the margins of Defeat: A Sociology of Arab
Intellectuals under Authoritarianism, in: Bahghat Korany (ed) The Changing Middle East, A New Look
at Regional Dynamics, pp. 85–118 (Cairo: AUC Press); and Suzanne Elizabeth Kassab (2013) The
Arab Quest for Freedom and Dignity, Middle East Topics and Arguments, 1, pp. 26–34.
17
Nader Andrawos & Alaa Badr (2020) The Arab Intellectual. Past and Present, MadaMasr, 26 January.
Available at https://madamasr.com/en/2020/01/26/opinion/u/the-arab-intellectual-past-and-present/,
accessed March 3, 2020.
18
Tarek Sabry (2010) Cultural Encounters in the Arab World: On Media, the Modern and the Everyday
(London: Bloomsbury), p. 158.
 The Other Khatibi 5

an example of the Empire that ‘writes back’ and unsettles classical literary forms to
speak as a fully liberated colonial subject.19 In the meantime, he has lingered on the
margins of Arab thought, ignored because he wrote in French, emulated Derridean
deconstructionism rather than the fiery ideological style that wins over supporters in
Beirut (here, the contrast with Mohammed al-Jabri or Abdallah Laroui is striking).20
Rare exceptions came from Hisham Sharabi, who identified Khatibi’s works early on,
in contrast to Edward Said, who dismissed him as ‘peripheral’ because ‘he doesn’t
have the force or the presence or the place or the location inside French culture that
Sartre or Foucault do or had.’21 More recently Elizabeth Suzanne Kassab quoted him
generously by shedding light on his powerful post-Fanonian message:

But who among us—groups or individuals alike—has undertaken the real

decolonizing work in its global reach of deconstructing the image that we have
created of our domination, both exogenous and endogenous? We are still at the
dawn of global thinking. But we have grown up in the suffering that calls upon
us to use the might of the word and revolt. If I were to tell you, whoever you are,
that this work has already started and that you cannot hear me only as survivor,
maybe you will then listen to the slow and progressive march of all the
humiliated and all the survivors.22

This Khatibi is the cultural critic of the 1960s and 1970s who managed to bridge
the gap between North Africa and France on his own terms. He was a ‘postcolonial
thinker’ who formulated an original and progressive Arab theory for cultural pluralism.
For example, in November 2019, a group of researchers met at Dartmouth College to
share ongoing work on Khatibi, marking the first such event devoted to him in the
United States.23 The workshop’s re-evaluation of Khatibi’s work compared his influ-
ence to that of Edward Said in terms of both men being committed intellectuals. In the
case of Khatibi, it was his relentless calls for a unified Maghreb, the geographical and
cultural ‘island’ of North Africa.’24 As early as 1977, during high tensions between
Morocco and Algeria over the question of the Sahara, Khatibi had brought together ten
intellectuals from each country in a special volume of Les Temps Modernes to reiterate

19
Lucy McNeece (1993) Decolonizing the Sign: Language and Identity in Abdelkebir Khatibi’s La
Memoire tatouee, Yale French Studies 83(2), pp. 12–29; Mustapha Hamil (2002) Abdelkebir Khatibi
and the postcolonial prerogative, Alif Journal of Comparative Poets, 22, pp. 72–86; Andrea F. Khalil
(2003) A Writing in Points: Autobiography and the Poetics of the Tattoo, Journal of North African
Studies, 8(2) pp. 19–33; and Debra Kelly (2005) Autobiography and Independence: Selfhood and
Creativity in North African Postcolonial Writing in French (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press).
20
Mary E. Wolf (1994) Rethinking the Radical West: Khatibi and Deconstruction, L’Esprit Createur [The
Creative Spirit], 34(2), pp. 58–68.
21
Hisham Sharabi (1987) Cultural Critics of Arab Society, Arab Studies Quarterly, 9(1) pp. 1–19;
Stephen Sheehi (1998) Interview with Edward Said, al-Jadid, 4, pp. 20–1; and Françoise Lionnet
(2011) Counterpoint and Double Critique and Edward Said and Abdelkebir Khatibi: A Transcolonial
Comparison, in Ali Behdad and Dominic Thomas (eds) A Companion to Comparative Literature, pp.
387–407 (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing).
22
Suzanne Elizabeth Kassab (2010) Contemporary Arab Thought: Cultural Critique in Comparative
Perspective, pp. 238–252 (New York: Columbia University Press).
23
Conference ‘Abdelkebir Khatibi: Literature and Theory’, Dartmouth College, 07 November 2019.
Convened by Yasser Elhariry and Matt Reeck.
24
Hele Beji (1982) Desenchantement national - Essai sur la decolonisation [National disenchantment:
Essay on decolonialization] (Paris: Maspero).
6 I. Jebari

all the similarities in the region and to think ‘beyond the nation-state.’25 In 1993, he
published a book supporting the recent creation of a EU-type organization for the
countries of North Africa, the Union du Maghreb, and called specifically for setting up
a cultural and intellectual basis for this project.
Khatibi also proved to be an original Arab theorist. His main conceptual argument
is summed by his call for a ‘double-critique’ of the two hegemonic epistemes (or
modes of thought) that stifle and oppress the Maghreb: the western-orientalist pole and
the Arab-Islamic pole (as
ala).26 This epistemological argument combines aesthetics
and politics: Reclaiming the means of self-representation would be the surest path for
true liberation. The Maghreb, as a metaphor, represents an epistemological chance to
embrace one’s realities for what they are rather than to pursue ill-suited models that
perpetuate cultural malaise and rob the region of its potential.27
Khalid Lyamlahy explained the value of Maghreb Pluriel following its English-
release.28 First, the book represents a particular cultural moment in Morocco: A desire
to ‘reinvent a North African modernism by resisting simultaneously the burden of local
traditions and the influence of Western practices. It offers the means to ‘debunk this
tradition [and] to demystify it.’ Second, Khatibi brings in the concept of an ‘other
thought,’ an alternative mode of thinking ‘that is open to plurality, alterity, and differ-
ence,’ thus making the Maghreb ‘a site of productive discontinuity and dissymmetry’
after the oppressive mental conditions of Empire.29 This book reads as the entry point
into a wide corpus constituted of several novels, autobiographical novels and books of
poetry that have been translated into English since his passing in 2009 and in which
he puts this ‘other thought’ into practice.30 They allow him to break out of the franco-
phone postcolonial label and allow Arab intellectual historians consider his work.31
We may be standing on the cusp of a ‘Khatibian age’ in the discipline, one that Tarik
Sabry initiated when he sought to ontologize the category of modern in Arab thought
by carrying out a Khatibian double-critique, a category that needs to be situated in
time and place, and as the result of an encounter and that manifests itself from high
intellectual spheres of debates on Arab reason to the cultural phenomena of every-
day life.32

25
Idriss Jebari (2018) Rethinking the Maghreb and the post-colonial intellectual in Khatibi’s Les temps
modernes issue in 1977, Journal of North African Studies 23(1-2), pp. 53–70.
26
Alfonso De Toro & Charles Bonn (eds.) (2009) The Maghreb Writes Back. Figures de l’hybridite dans
la culture et la literature maghrebine [The Maghreb writes back: Figures of hybridity in Maghrebi
culture and literature] (Zurich: Hildescheim & New York: Georg Olms Verlag), p. 69.
27
Olivia Harrison (2018) The Maghreb as Method, Boundary2, 02 December. Available at https://www.
boundary2.org/2018/12/olivia-c-harrison-thinking-the-maghreb-with-said-and-khatibi/; accessed December
10, 2019.
28
Khalid Lyamlahy (2019) The Professional Stranger: On Abdelkebir Khatibi’s Plural Maghreb, LA
Review of Books, 03 December. Available at https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/the-professional-
stranger-on-abdelkebir-khatibis-plural-maghreb/, accessed March 03, 2020.
29
Ibid.
30
Abdelkebir Khatibi (2016) Tattooed Memory, Thompson, O. (trans) (Paris: L’Harmattan); and
Abdelkebir Khatibi (2017) Class Warrior Taoist Style, M. Reeck (trans) (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan
University Press).
31
Omnia el-Shakry (2019) Review Essay: Rethinking Arab Intellectual History. Epistemology,
Historicism. Secularism, Modern Intellectual History. Available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/
journals/modern-intellectual-history/article/rethinking-arab-intellectual-history-epistemology-historicism-
secularism/92532AE872FACA0A36151164740BD447, accessed March 03, 2020.
32
Sabry, Cultural Encounters, pp. 1–22.
 The Other Khatibi 7

Plural Audiences
Moroccans have been key drivers in Khatibi’s revival rather than following and con-
forming to outside interest. The many events, from small commemorative meetings to
national symposia, appear to be uncoordinated and provide a multitude of entry points
into his intellectual legacy. The French literature departments of Ibn-Tofaïl University
in Kenitra and Muhammad V University in Rabat have emerged as leading locations
for these events, thanks to the strength of these departments and the prominence of his
former colleagues and students, who have organized workshops and talks to commem-
orate his literary contributions.33 These events also have continued in France, espe-
cially at L’Institut du Monde Arabe. On the occasion of the tenth anniversary of
Khatibi’s death (March 2019), the Academy of the Kingdom of Morocco celebrated
him in a program featuring the Syrian poet and intellectual Adonis. Moroccan journal-
ist Ghassan el Kechouri wrote an article in Zamane that put Khatibi in the pantheon of
such Moroccan thinkers as Abdallah Laroui.34
While Khatibi is hitting peak interest levels with the Moroccan intelligentsia of the
center, his memory is also being revived at more regional levels of the country. His
nephew Mourad has been active on social media in the past decade to publicize his
works in two groups: ‘L’Etranger Professionel’ and ‘Hommage a Abdelkebir
Khatibi.’35 He frequently unearths gems from his papers that he shares with followers,
such as a group photo taken in 1985 with Mahmoud Darwish and Elias Sanbar in
Paris, which sheds light on the missing connection with Beirut’s literary scene. In
another priceless photo, Khatibi is sitting next to his smiling mother: He in a smart
vest; she in a loosely fitted veil. This picture captures several dimensions of the
revived Khatibi: The multilingual and hip cosmopolitan sharing a moment of tender-
ness with his loving mother in his humble origins, shedding away notions of an elitist
thinker in the ivory tower. In fact, this Khatibi is made part of the local patrimony:
Mourad frequently publishes in a local newspaper and on websites in al-Jadida, where
Khatibi grew up, drawing connections between this geographical landscape and his
ideas. Al-Jadida, the old Mazagan by the Atlantic Ocean, has figured regularly as a
source of Khatibi’s literary inspiration. It is assumed to have inspired his desire to live
by the ocean in Rabat.
Other admirers of his work also have held meetings and conferences. For example,
Marrakesh’s Gallery Dar Cherifa hosted in late January 2020 a book launch for
Abdelghani Fennane’s book, ‘Celui qui vient de l’avenir: Abdelkebir Khatibi’ [The
one who came from the future: Abdelkebir Khatibi], and a photo exposition, ‘Sur les
Traces d’Abdelkebir Khatibi’ [On the paths of Abdelkebir Khatibi]. Marrakesh’s spe-
cific topography and cultural history differ from Khatibi’s literary inspiration, but there
is a growing appetite in celebrating a secular and progressive heritage driving this
interest. These book launch events since have gone on the road as a literary caravan.
Such events help broaden the appeal of this intellectual away from francophone liter-
ary specialists and his hometown. Similarly, the Amazigh public intellectual Ahmed

33
Examples include, among others, Abderrahman Tenkoul, Assia Belhabib, Hassan Wahbi and
Mustapha Bencheikh.
34
Ghassan Kechouri (2019) ʿabd al-kabīr al-khatībī: s:
a ʾgh al-naqd al-muzdawij [Abdelkebir Khatibi and
Double Critique], Zamane (March), pp. 61–63.
35
For links to those groups see: https://www.facebook.com/groups/elkhatibimourad22333.mm/; and
https://www.facebook.com/groups/82914242344/, both accessed March 3, 2020.
8 I. Jebari

Aassid devoted a whole episode on Khatibi in his program ‘Makers of History.’ He

stressed Khatibi’s humble social origins in a working-class neighborhood as the gen-
esis of his interest in the signs of Moroccan culture and his sociological work after
Morocco’s independence in favor of ‘pluralism in practice.’36 It appears proper that
the legacy of Khatibi’s message of pluralism itself is being claimed by a multitude of
Moroccan actors.
Khatibi belonged to Rabat academia and the francophone intelligentsia. Since his
passing in 2009, his audience has drafted the J’didis who take pride in their son of
humble origins, to Arabic readers and Amazigh audiences, and others from different
regions in search of national heroes. It follows a fashionable trend to celebrate these
figures after their passing.37 At the global level, Arab intellectual historians are starting
to share the stage with postcolonial literature specialists, especially after the publica-
tion of his translated works. Most of them perpetuate a glorified image of the intellec-
tual-as-prophet, detached from the dynamic context that produced him. Critical
assessments of Khatibi’s journey often are shelved, because they could be seen as per-
sonal attacks. However, if we were to reconstitute this Khatibi from what is said and
heard at these celebratory events, we would end with a one-dimensional, larger-than-
life individual who bears little resemblance to the real person. Hence, we now turn to
the ‘other Khatibi,’ a reading of his journey from his return to Morocco in the 1960s
until the publication of his essay on the Maghrib as a horizon of thought. I argue that
his call for an ‘other-thought’ was not a consecration of a cosmopolitan mindset, but a
statement of failure after years of attempting to decolonize sociology, and a conscious
decision to reorient his approach.

The Other Khatibi

Khatibi travelled extensively in life, to such distant places as France, Scandinavia and
Japan. He embraced his identity as a ‘professional stranger,’ defined as an exercise in
‘cosmopolitan alterity capable of travelling through differences’ – in other words, writ-
ing about cultural differences between the lines but without being bound by them.38
However, Khatibi’s main center of gravity was Morocco. He affirmed in his memoirs,
‘I live and work in Morocco … I owe it my birth, my name, and my first culture.’39
Reminiscing on the fiery Parisian theoretical debates of the 1970s, he enjoyed how
Morocco gave ‘a marginality that protected me, a convenient shelter.’40 In those mem-
oirs, published shortly before his passing, he shed light on the big unknown in his
journey: His career as a sociologist at the Muhammad V University. Khatibi’s contri-
bution to the discipline during those two decades invites comparisons with other noted
Arab sociologists and public intellectuals such as the Egyptian Saadedine Ibrahim, the

36
Sun
aʿ al-t
arīkh [Builders of History] (2018) ʿabd al-kabīr al-khatībī, RTM 8, Episode 7, Aired on 30
May 2018. Available online: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ePvueoO8_OE, accessed March
3, 2020.
37
In Morocco (Fatema Mernissi, Villa des Arts Rabat, 2018), in Tunisia (Lilia Ben Salem, National
Library Tunis, 2015), or in Lebanon (Sadiq Jalal al-Azm, at the American University in Beirut 2017).
38
Quoted in Reda Bensmaïa (2003) Experimental Nations, or the invention of the Maghreb (Princeton,
NJ: Princeton University Press) p. 134; and Jane Hiddleston (2017) Writing after Postcolonialism:
Francophone and North African Literature in Transition (London: Bloomsbury), p. 178.
39
Khatibi (2008) Le scribe et son ombre (Paris: La Difference), p. 9.
40
Ibid. p. 55.
 The Other Khatibi 9

Algerian Ali el-Kenz, the Moroccan Fatema Mernissi, or the Tunisians Lilia Ben
Salem and Abdelkader Zghal. Yet, his name is largely absent from that conversation.41
His call for a new ‘horizon of thought’ and ‘other thought’ informs his contribution to
postcolonial studies, but it needs to be connected to his ambitious plan to decolonize
Moroccan sociology in the 1960s. Hence, this ‘Other Khatibi’ starts by reconsidering
the historical context where his main theoretical insight failed to live up to expecta-
tions and what this failure meant to the rest of his intellectual journey. During this epi-
sode in Morocco’s intellectual history, Khatibi stood on the frontlines of the call for
cultural decolonization in the halls of the humanities faculty in Rabat, rather than in
the transnational francophone space of ideas.
Khatibi led the effort to decolonize sociology from the mid-1960s at Rabat
University, after his 1964 return from Paris with a sociology diploma from the
Sorbonne. He had learned positivist sociology, taught by Raymond Aron and Georges
Gurvitch, inspired by Max Weber and Karl Marx, and their search for categorizations,
to which Khatibi complemented with his explorations across the city, and later discov-
ering the sociologist of urban life Henri Lefebvre.42 Upon his return, his aim was to
‘establish a new postcolonial school of thought … without orientalism of any kind’
and to develop ‘true knowledge on Moroccan society.’43 At the time, this meant break-
ing with the colonial-era methods of studying Moroccan society through ethnographic
methods and by producing an alternative to this colonial knowledge.44 On the surface,
this was a glorious era for Moroccan sociology: He directed the UNESCO-supported
Institute for Sociology, whose students benefited from the likes of Mohamed
Guessous, Paul Pascon and Grigori Lazarev.45 During those early years, Khatibi car-
ried out extensive fieldwork in Rabat. He explored the impact of rapid modernization
and evolving social norms, which only in 2002 was compiled in a single volume,
Chemins de Traverse.46 From 1967 to 1971, he wrote about cultural symbols and
alienation, on fertility and birth control, the administrative and economic elite in
Morocco, and social classes more broadly, and urban segregation in Rabat.47 After
spending years attending sociology congresses in the Maghreb and the Arab region, he

41
Georges Sabagh, Iman Ghazalla (1986) Arab Sociology Today: A View from Within, Annual Review of
Sociology 12, p. 377.
42
Khatibi, Le scribe et son ombre, pp. 18–21.
43
Ibid, p. 31.
44
Jean Claude Vatin (1984) Connaissances du Maghreb: Sciences sociales et colonisation [Knowledge of
the Maghreb: Social sciences and colonialization] (Paris: Editions CNRS); and Jean Duvignaud (1968)
La sociologie Maghrebine [Maghreb sociology], Cahiers Internationaux de Sociologie, 44,
pp. 141–144.
45
Alain Roussillon (2002) Sociologie et identite en Egypte et au Maroc: le travail du deuil de la
colonisation [Sociology and identity in Egypt and Morocco: the work of mourning colonialization],
Revue d’histoire des Sciences Humaines 7, p. 209; Maurice Erard (1960) L’institut de sociologie de
Rabat, Rapport final de mission, UNESCO/Mission Maroc [The Sociology Institute of Rabat, Final
Report of the Morocco UNESCO mission].
46
Abdelkebir Khatibi (2002) Chemins de Traverse: essais de sociologie (Universite Mohammed V-
Souissi, IURS). This volume’s quality and format pales in comparison to his literary works: low design
and formatting, one can only find them among the informal book sellers in Morocco rather than his
novels, which are usually sold in posher bookstores.
47
Examples include: ‘Deux Propositions sur le changement social et l’acculturation’ Colloque de
Sociologie Maghrebine, Annales Marocaines de Sociologie (Rabat, 1968); ‘Etude  sociologique du
planning familial au Maroc,’ Journal de medecine au Maroc,’ Janvier, 1967; ‘Note Descriptive sur les
elites administratives et economiques marocaines,’ in Annuaire de l’Afrique du Nord, 1968; and
Pouvoir et administration: etudes sur les elites maghrebines (Paris: CNRS, 1970).
10 I. Jebari

issued an ambitious call for the reform of Arab sociology in 1971, which he discussed
in a noted interview with the novelist Tahar Ben Jelloun in Le Monde Diplomatique.48
The state of Moroccan sociology was dire, as Khatibi found a few years after pro-
claiming his ambitious goal. In Bilan de la sociologie au Maroc [State of sociology in
Morocco], Khatibi surveyed sociological scholarship on Morocco and found that the
first 11 years of independence had not shifted the discipline from its colonial orienta-
tion. Moroccan sociologists were forced to rely on ethnographic methods inherited
from the colonial era and steered clear of sociological tools applied to study industrial-
ized societies. This methodological and epistemological conundrum maintained a self-
representation of Morocco as a ‘backward,’ ‘exotic’ and ‘mysterious’ land.49 In Bilan,
Khatibi invited Moroccan sociologists to start addressing topics relating to moderniza-
tion and social change. He listed the topics that would benefit from solid sociological
research, including rural change, miners, and the situation of women in urban life.50
As the editor-in-chief of Morocco’s economic and social journal, Bulletin Economique
et Social du Maroc (BESM), Khatibi seemed to be in an ideal position to shape this
agenda going forward. In reality, Moroccan sociologists faced a reluctant object of
study. Moroccan society was full of ‘Inhibition. Repression. Heavy silence.’51 These
first sociologists faced resistance when trying to carry out fieldwork or probe their
subjects. Faced with this obstacle, he explains, he began to pay more attention to the
‘underlying signs of change and entropy,’ turning to new branches of sociology and to
semiology, which required less engagement with subjects.52
Political authoritarianism was the other major impediment to his ambitious aims to
decolonize Moroccan sociology. In 1970, in the context of student protests on campus,
the Laraki Government closed the Sociology Institute. Retrograde and patriarchal
thinking among the authorities drew a link between student discontent, Marxist ideol-
ogy and the sociology courses taught at the Institute. They called sociologists oiseaux
de mauvaise augure [prophets of doom and gloom] who created a negative mindset
and promoted division and unrest, according to long-time observer Zakya Daoud.53
Closing the Institute was merely the first step in a broader plan to undermine the uni-
versity as a space of opposition and critical thought. As student protests led by the stu-
dent union [al-ittih:
ad al-watanī li-talaba al-maghrib] continued, the authorities
replaced the teaching of philosophy with religious studies, a move decried by the pro-
gressive intelligentsia.54 Consequently, in 1970–71, sociology was integrated into other
departments, and Khatibi had to teach in Fez. Over the next decade, the discipline’s

48
Tahar Ben Jelloun (1974) Decolonisation de la sociologie au Maghreb [Decolonization of sociology in
the Maghreb], Le Monde Diplomatique (August), p. 18; also published as ‘Sociologie du monde arabe
– Positions’ in BESM, n 126, republished in ‘Decolonisation de la sociologie’ in Chemins de traverse:

essais de sociologie (Rabat: Editions Okad), p. 42; and Abdelkebir Khatibi (1985) Double Criticism:
The Decolonization of Arab Sociology, in Halim Barakat (ed.), Contemporary North Africa: Issues of
Development and Integration, pp. 9–19 (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press).
49
Abdelkebir Khatibi (1967) Bilan de la sociologie au Maroc [State of sociology in Morocco], (Rabat:
Publications de l’Association pour la recherche en sciences humaines [Publications for research in
human sciences]), p. 9.
50
Ibid, pp. 39–52.
51
Khatibi, Le scribe et son ombre, p. 34.
52
Ibid. p. 36.
53
Zakya Daoud is quoted in Abdelkebir Khatibi (2008) Le scribe et son ombre (Paris: La difference), p.
34; Zakya Daoud (2007) Maroc, les annees de plomb (Paris: Manucius), p. 143.
54
Bilal Mousjid (2018) Comment Hassan II a tue la philosophie [How Hassan II killed philosophy],
Telquel, 820, 13–19 July.
 The Other Khatibi 11

energies progressively were diluted following the mass integration of conservative,

Islamist-leaning students at the public university, and Khatibi cast aside his socio-
logical research after 1971.55
Khatibi began to move slowly away from the decolonization of sociology, as
defined in the 1960s as the production of new knowledge on Moroccan society using
positivist sociological theories and models. This was a progressive move rather than a
sudden rupture, and his interviews show how he began to shift his mode of thinking
toward more abstract questions. Khatibi engaged regularly with the cultural journals
and newspapers in Morocco in the 1970s and began to speak about a new notion: the
‘double-critique.’ For example, after his return from a sociology congress in Caracas
in February 1973, he adopted an abrasive tone in an interview with Zakya Daoud for
Lamalif, and he claimed that his intellectual peers were unable to produce a body of
knowledge that properly addressed and understood Moroccan society in all its forms.
His colleagues could not look beyond the western (understood as French) sociological
frameworks, or they were restricted by cultural tradition, or what Sadiq Jalal al-Azm
later would call ‘religious thinking.’56 This sounded like a frustrated assessment that
contrasts with the prevalent portrayal of Khatibi as a calm and composed intellectual.

The majority of Moroccan intellectuals are unconsciously tied to a theocratic and

theological mode of thinking, even while they claim to break from it. We should
then ask: how can we formulate a critical analysis while moving away from
metaphysics?57

His frustrations with sociology later would provide fodder to think more broadly on
the ethnocentric and ill-suited theoretical models used to study non-western societies.
At that point, however, Khatibi was going through a crisis, similar to what Gershoni
wrote about the Egyptian modernists of the 1930s, and he drew on new directions of
thought. The fiery rebuke to Moroccan intellectuals cited above contained elements of
Derridean deconstructionism, reflecting his search for new modes of thought to help
usher in cultural decolonization. In fact, Khatibi and Derrida first met in Paris in 1974
and would shape a mutual friendship and reciprocal influence that even extended to
how they positioned themselves in their respective fields.58 In Les Temps Modernes
(LTM), Khatibi wrote a scorching review of Jacques Berque’s latest orientalist book
Languages Arabes du present (1974), citing Derrida as an example of French critical
self-examination that neo-Orientalists such as Berque should emulate when writing
about the Arabs. He reiterated this point the following year by editing a landmark vol-
ume, ‘Du Maghreb’ in LTM. Khatibi and his two colleagues, the Algerian Noureddine
Abdi and the Tunisian Abdelwahab Meddeb brought together thirty North African
intellectuals to put into practice Khatibi’s call for a pensee-autre, the ‘other thought.’59
This was the culmination of Khatibi’s theoretical intervention. In this manifesto-like

55
As can be noted in Chemins de Traverse.
56
Sadiq Jalal al-Azm (2015 [1969]) Critique of Religious Thought (Gerlach Press), translated
from Arabic.
57
Zakya Daoud (1973) Abdelkebir Khatibi: il faut s’essayer a une double critique permanente
[Abdelkebir Katibi: One must engage in a permanent double critique], Lamalif, 57 (February), p. 32.
58
Tina D. Christensen (2017) Towards an Ethics of Bilingualism: An Intertextual Dialogue Between
Khatibi & Derrida, Interventions: Journal of Postcolonial Studies, 19(4), pp. 447–466.
59
Idriss Jebari, Rethinking the Maghreb, p. 53.
12 I. Jebari

text, he issued his call for the ‘Maghreb as a horizon of thought.’ It was intended as a
rupture with colonized and theocratic modes of thought and toward a decolonized
mind. Five years later, it became the first chapter of Maghreb Pluriel.
With one swift movement, Khatibi and his colleagues took down a pillar of neo-
orientalist scholarship and received unparalleled recognition in Paris, especially consid-
ering that North Africans were still colonial subjects only two decades earlier. His
message was subversive to the careful and informed reader and represents a landmark
in postcolonial critique. In practice, however, this call failed to revolutionize Moroccan
sociology, not only because this prestigious revue was difficult to access. The call for
a ‘double critique’ had a significant conceptual value, but it did not speak to the prac-
tical issues that Moroccan and Maghribi sociologists faced. Very few had the luxury
(or theoretical ability) to detach themselves from the methodological frameworks they
had acquired as students in France or even in Morocco. Furthermore, under pressure
from the demands of national development and widely accessible education, the new
Maghribi sociologist was first and foremost a mass instructor for the state’s bureau-
cratic needs rather than a cutting-edge researcher at the vanguard of cultural
decolonization.
From this point, Khatibi’s intellectual choices diverged from the country’s cultural and
ideological orientations. He treated his call as a defeat of the Fanonian grand ideals he
had espoused soon after independence, as he acknowledged in the opening essay of
Maghreb Pluriel. By 1983, he concedes his and his colleagues’ idealism was unable to
produce anything more than ‘simplified Marxist thought … and theological Arab nation-
alist ideology.’60 At this turning point, it was time to let go of his previous ambitions and
realize that ‘decolonization is an opportunity for the mind’ [se decoloniser, c’est cette
chance de la pensee], meaning he was ready for a different type of intervention.61
When we study a journal like Lamalif, with its finger on the country’s pulse, it
appears that the radical call for cultural decolonization in the 1960s had lost its power
by the late 1970s.62 The Souffles and Anfas episodes had ended abruptly.63 The Arab
world generally turned to the political right in the era of petro-dollars and structural
adjustment cuts, while the progressive intelligentsia debated the merits of the
‘Moroccanization’ of the economy. They were uncertain about the 1979 Islamic
Revolution in Iran, as Hassan II gave brief refuge to the ousted shah [king]. That same
year, Morocco was embroiled in a guerilla war in the Sahara, and the government
implemented austerity programs and confronted popular protests.64 The authorities
responded to contestation with repressive measures, especially against UNEM on cam-
puses. In this context Khatibi decided to devote himself fully to literature and set aside
his grand goals to decolonize sociology. When Moroccan society was in its greatest
need for leading thinkers to make sense of these political changes, he appeared to
retreat (until the Moroccan alternance of 1998).65 In the following years, he published

60
Khatibi, Maghreb Pluriel, p. 16.
61
Ibid.
62
Brahim El-Guabli (eds) (forthcoming) Lamalif: A Critical Anthology of Societal Debates in Morocco
During the ‘Years of Lead’ (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press).
63
Kenza Sefrioui (2012) La revue Souffles: Espoirs de Revolution Culturelle au Maroc [The Souffles
journal: Hopes for a cultural revolution in Morocco] (Casablanca: Edition du Sirocco).
64
Susan Miller (2013) A History of Modern Morocco (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).
65
Abdelkebir Khatibi (1998) L’Alternance et les partis politiques: essai [Alternation and the political
parties: An Essay] (Casablanca: Eddif). In 1998, the Moroccan left came back to power under the
 The Other Khatibi 13

the novels that constitute his celebrated corpus, and in which he put into practice his
theory of aimance. This term has been explained as ‘language of love and the art of
proximity’ that goes beyond ‘fixed affinities’ and rigorous conventions of human rela-
tionships, and it was put in practice in Le Livre du Sang (1979), Amour Bilingue
(1983), Un ete 
a Stockholm (1992) and Triptyque de Rabat (1993).66 This turn to lit-
erature can be read as a failure to decolonize the discipline of sociology and the search
for others to carry out the work of cultural decolonization. He had devoted more than
a decade to it while arguing earnestly that it was a necessary step for Moroccan eman-
cipation and national development. Along the way, he recalibrated his convictions out
of necessity (the constraints of Moroccan society and the regime) and by addressing
the epistemological dimension of decolonization.
Seen from this historical angle and by accounting for his intervention in the socio-
logical discipline, the publication of Maghreb Pluriel in 1983 was also an honest state-
ment of failure and an effort to convince his peers of the need for an epistemological
break. In hindsight, it was possibly the post-mortem of a radical, decolonized
Moroccan sociology, which allowed for other forms to emerge among the second gen-
eration of sociologists, now working at the universities in Casablanca, Fez and Rabat.
Yet, postcolonial literary studies fail to acknowledge the context that ascribes to this
text its full meaning. At that time, a series of articles in Lamalif shed light on the pro-
found malaise among the Moroccan intelligentsia, a panicked realization of their grow-
ing isolation. Lamalif’s illustrated January 1982 cover depicted a smartly dressed man
reading a newspaper while sitting on the moon. With the earth far on the horizon, the
title read ‘Intellectuals: Uncertainty and Disconnect.’ A contributor, Ammar Idrissi
(possibly a penname), wrote a scathing editorial laying out the rampant social crisis, a
youth bulge and, more worryingly, an intelligentsia unable to make sense of this
new world:

Why should we talk about intellectuals? In a certain way, it is a roundabout way

to talk about society. Their impotence means something about this society. First,
there is a problem with their tools that are inadequate for reality: Except for a
few works, I cannot see a workable concept that would allow us to make sense
(let alone predict) who we are or for what we strive, or a thesis about our
situation.67

After the ‘years of lead’ came the gradual opening of the 1980s, yet the
intelligentsia remained embroiled in theoretical squabbles, as Idrissi adds, quite
emphatically:

government of Abderrahman Youssoufi. The essay reflects on this moment, the supposed end of
authoritarianism, and the new opportunities for political activism for the younger generation, in which
he demonstrated shrewd insights that had been missing for two decades.
66
Anna Rocca & Kenneth S. Reeds (eds) (2013), Women Taking Risks in Contemporary
Autobiographical Narratives (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing), p. 28; and Thomas Beebee
(1994) The Fiction of Translation: Abdelkebir Khatibi’s ‘Love in Two Languages,’ SubStance, 73 (23),
pp. 63–78.
67
Ammar Idrissi (1981/82) Les intellectuels: ambivalence et coupure [The intellectuals: Indecision and
Ruptures], Lamalif, 131 (December/January), p. 5.
14 I. Jebari

Moroccans have been good little students. They have learned their lesson well
[ … ] mended [foreign] concepts, the latest fashionable obscurantism, tasteless
waffling, have found here a warm nest, and interested placeholders: from Marx’s
dogmatism, the prose of Barthes, the economic thinking of De Bernis, and
Althusser’s structuralism etc. They emphatically have plowed this country’s elite.
However, the yield has been underwhelming. Here again, a conceptual drought
has messed it all up.68

Instead of talking for and about the masses, the intelligentsia has to come to terms
with the fact that it is closer to the elite than ever.69 For Idrissi, change only could
come from ‘deviants’ and not from conformists:

Who one day will write a sociology of the queue at the third circumscription?
Who will talk with warmth and character about the journey between Rabat and
Casablanca in a working-class bus? Who will describe the dominant philosophy
in the cafes of Sebbata? Who will write about the economy of prostitution, and
how it fluctuates each month when civil servants receive their salary? [ … ] All of
this appears too raw or flat, or mundane or close, and it is more reassuring … to
talk about the Ideas, great systems, concepts with capital letters.70

According to this assessment, the decolonization of sociology could not lead any-
where until intellectuals had settled on their place in society.
The failure of Khatibi’s call to decolonize Moroccan sociology meant that the discipline
developed in a different direction in the following decades. Khatibi’s call represents an
essential stage in the history of Moroccan social sciences during which the first post-inde-
pendence generation mourned colonization by dismantling its concepts.71 Notwithstanding
the indirect sociological insights of his work on Moroccan cultural signs, or as editor in
chief of the Bulletin Economique et Social du Maroc, the discipline remained attached to
fieldwork based methodologies and reconciled with anthropology in the late 1980s. The dis-
cipline owes a greater debt of gratitude to the likes of Mohammed Guessous or Paul
Pascon, who chaperoned the next generation of Arabic and French-speaking sociologists
who currently populate Moroccan universities.72 Guessous and Pascon offered a different
posture, practical sociologists above all. Their legacies in the discipline continue to thrive,
especially Pascon’s rural sociology, or the study of social change, family and gender rela-
tions led by Fatema Mernissi. In the 1990s, a new generation of sociologists inherited this
complicated legacy and sought to shed light on new social values.73 The successors were
Rahma Bourqia, Hassan Rachiq, Mohamed Tozy, Mokhtar el-Harras and Mohamed el-
Ayadi, who frequently overlapped with anthropology.74 As the discipline moved on,
Khatibi’s call for a ‘double-critique’ and ‘other-thought’ was relegated to a general mindset

68
Ibid.
69
Ibid, p. 6.
70
Ibid, pp. 6–7.
71
Roussillon, Sociology and identity in Egypt and Morocco, p. 209.
72
Which Khatibi himself acknowledged; see Khatibi, Le scribe et son ombre, pp. 36-37.
73
Hassan Rachik & Rahma Bourqia (2011) La sociologie au Maroc: Grandes etapes et jalons thematiques
[The sociology of Morocco: important stages and thematic milestones], in SociologieS. Available at
https://journals.openedition.org/sociologies/3719, accessed March 03, 2020.
74
Ibid.
 The Other Khatibi 15

rather than a practical concern, an artefact from a different, more ideological time in
Moroccan history.75

After the End of Grand Narratives

The history of Morocco’s recent cultural past is written conventionally around its Golden
Age (1960s-1970s).76 This was an era of certitudes and grand narratives. What happened
next was a period of uncertainty and crumbling ideological beliefs for academics, journalists,
poets and writers. After Khatibi released Maghreb Pluriel, he too had to cope with life after
the grand narratives. Because the literature about disillusioned Arab intellectuals remains
scant, I turn to Khatibi’s journey to gauge different intellectual strategies that developed,
especially the role that trauma has played in Moroccan literary history.77 With Maghreb
Pluriel, Khatibi entered a new dawn and began to address new themes.78 In its preface, he
accepted the need to shift toward the ‘silent questions’ in Maghribi society, understood as
the ones that should have been excavated long before.79 For example, the intelligentsia to
which he belonged no longer could afford to ignore Islamic cultural heritage, which had
proved resilient in Moroccan society. Khatibi began to write about the Quran – a nod to
ath – along with sexuality, as his continuing commitment to subversive scholarship.80 In
tur

the following decade, he wrote about the ‘signs’ of Moroccan culture: From Amazigh
[Berber] tattoos to tapestry to modern art. This was both a departure from his empirical
sociological work and its continuation. In his memoirs, he linked this final enquiry into
Moroccan cultural semiology as a continued search for plurality and a reconciled identity:

These symbols of mixed belonging, during the period of my generation was a disrupted
and disrupting time that caused identity disorders, for the individual and the collective.81

Literature and interest in Moroccan culture seems to have become his personal ref-
uge, and a panacea for a section of the progressive intelligentsia after the radical
Golden Age.
Increasingly, the latter felt pushed by the oppressive Islamist voices to look to the state for
reform and liberalization, especially on human rights issues.82 The authorities allowed the intel-
ligentsia to write critically in a restricted cultural sphere as long as they steered clear of partisan
politics. Radical francophone niches were allowed to survive, while more socially committed

75
This call seems to have a greater following and has thrived in other disciplines, such as French
literature, or at the Cultural Studies department at the University of Fez.
76
Adil Hajji (2000) Malaise dans la culture Marocaine [Malaise within Moroccan culture], Le Monde
Diplomatique (September), pp. 24–25.
77
Marie Duboc (2011) Egyptian Leftist Intellectuals’ Activism from the Margins: Overcoming the
Mobilization/Demobilization Dichotomy, in: J. Beinin & F. Vairel (eds) Social Movements,
Mobilization and Contestation in the Middle East and North Africa, pp. 61–82 (Stanford CA: Stanford
University Press).
78
Abdelkebir Khatibi (1983) Maghreb Pluriel (Paris: Deno€el), p. 16.
79
Ibid. p. 41.
80
Ibid, Chapter Four, ‘Sexuality according to the Quran,’ pp. 147–176; Similarities can be drawn with the
Tunisian sociologist Abdelwahab Bouhdiba (1975) Sexualite en Islam (Paris: Presses Universitaires
de France).
81
Ibid. p. 17.
82
Marguerite Rollinde (2002) Le Mouvement Marocain des droits de l’homme [The Moroccan movement
for human rights] (Paris: Karthala).
16 I. Jebari

spaces, such as the Lamalif journal, were pushed to close. The Moroccan intelligentsia searched
for figures to anoint, as a reminder of an era of grand narratives, of ideological certitude, and
upright public conduct and to restore a sense of ideological consistency. In this context, the
celebration of Khatibi’s oeuvre has crystallized an image of him as an intellectual outside his
time and context, to underline the timeless nature of his critical thinking, at the expense of
understanding critical thought as a reflection of a certain moment in Morocco’s history.

Conclusion
Khatibi’s trajectory after the end of his grand narrative evokes a common theme for
Arab intellectual historians, namely the cultural malaise that followed the June 1967
defeat against Israel, and the search for other anchors. Suzanne Elizabeth Kassab recre-
ates the atmosphere of shock after the crumbling of grand ideological narratives
regarding where Arabs stood on the journey toward greatness and modernity. After
this gut-punch was processed via the cri de coeur of Saadallah Wanous’s theatre or
Sadiq Jalal al-Azm’s powerful essay on the defeat, a renewed creative episode
refreshed the discourse on Arab reason. A new generation of thinkers, such as Nawal
al-Saadawi and Abdallah Laroui, examined critically the factors that held back Arab
societies (patriarchy or ahistoricism), and the effort required to lead their revival.83
Khatibi belonged to this generation, as Hisham Sharabi noted in 1988. He was a pro-
lific writer who diagnosed the epistemological obstacles to a plural Arab modernity.
Khatibi is a singular figure in the Moroccan and Arab intellectual field. His shift away
from radical sociology offers an opportunity to say something broader on the fate of intel-
lectuals after the end of their grand ideological narratives. From the 1990s on, he embraced
a softer approach to literature and the search for his reconciled self. The recent revival of
interest in his work following the English release of Maghreb Pluriel is exciting for the
field and will attract new readers and long-time followers. With Khatibi and other intellec-
tuals, audiences search for answers to overcome a fraught Arab present. This reading of
Khatibi offers a strong sense of communion and hope in pluralism. However, it risks under-
mining Moroccan cultural history and the history of its thinkers if he is disconnected from
the context of his journey, including his failures and his doubts. Khatibi’s pluralism did not
apply just to the cultural multiplicity of the Maghreb, it was also a call to accept the non-
existence of a single framework of meaning. In his final testament, he reiterates his case
and insists instead on the malleability of how he is presented:

I often wondered if my profile as an intellectual is clear in people’s minds, whether

they read me or if they know me personally. I often am labeled a sociologist, a
researcher, a professor, a poet, a novelist, and essay writer, a semiologist, art critic,
philosopher, even political scientist. I am taxed by this non-identification of roles. But
then, I told myself that this muddling of roles and tasks is itself an obstacle that would
favor knowing the self and the other. I observed myself and concluded that, like any
other intellectual, I am a living being of fiction, with a reality that can be stretched.84

83
Suzanne Elizabeth Kassab (2010) Critique After the 1967 Defeat: Contemporary Arab Thought (New
York: Columbia University Press), pp. 48–115.
84
Abdelkebir Khatibi (2008) Le Scribe et son ombre (Paris: La Difference), p. 14.
 The Other Khatibi 17

‘The surest path, according to Wael Hallaq, is to write Arab intellectual histories
which ‘first comprehend the historical conditions of possibility that make [his] project
intelligible,’ adding that intellectuals are ‘specifically historical phenomenon,’ both
‘products’ and ‘manifestations.’85 The Maghrib contains crucial episodes that can
inform our efforts to redraw Arab intellectual history. In this case, it starts by reconcil-
ing one Khatibi with the other one.

References
Aassid, A. (2018) Sun
aʿ al-t
arīkh [Builders of History] RTM 8, Episode 7, Aired on 30 May. Available at:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ePvueoO8_OE. Accessed March 3, 2020.
Aboul-Ela, H. (2018) The Specificities of Arab Thought: Morocco since the Liberal Age. in: Hanssen, J. &
Weiss, M. (eds) Arabic Thought Against the Authoritarian Age, pp. 143–162 (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press).
Agbaria, A. (2019) What Does It Mean to Be an Arab Leftist Today, International Journal of Middle East
Studies, 51(2), pp. 309–311.
Aidi, H. (2019) So Why Did I Defend Paul Bowles? The New York Review of Books, December 20.
Available at: https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2019/12/20/so-why-did-i-defend-paul-bowles/, accessed
March 3, 2020.
Al-Azm, S. J. (2015 [1969]) Critique of Religious Thought (Berlin: Gerlach Press). Translated from Arabic.
Andrawos, N., & Badr, A. (2020) The Arab Intellectual: Past and Present, MadaMasr, January 26. Available
at: https://madamasr.com/en/2020/01/26/opinion/u/the-arab-intellectual-past-and-present/, accessed March
3, 2020.
Beebee, T. (1994) The Fiction of Translation: Abdelkebir Khatibi’s Love in Two Languages, Substance,
23(1), pp. 63–78.
Beji, H. (1982) Desenchantement national - Essai sur la decolonisation [National Disenchanment: Essay on
decolonialization] (Paris: Maspero).
Ben Jelloun, T. (1974) Decolonisation de la Sociologie au Maghreb [Decolonialization of Sociology in the
Maghreb], Le Monde Diplomatique, 345, pp. 18.
Bensmaïa, R. (2003) Experimental Nations, or the invention of the Maghreb (Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press).
Bouhdiba, A. (1975) Sexualite en Islam [Sexuality in Islam] (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France).
Campbell, I. (2013) Labyrinths, Intellectuals and the Revolution: The Arabic Language Novel in Morocco,
1957-1972 (Leiden, NE & Boston, MA: Brill).
Chraïbi, D. (1954) Le passe simple [The simple past] (Paris: Den€
oel).
Christensen, T. D. (2017) Towards an Ethics of Bilingualism: An Intertextual Dialogue between Khatibi and
Derrida, Interventions, 19(4), pp. 447–466.
Daoud, Z. (1973) Abdelkebir Khatibi: il Faut S’essayer a Une Double Critique Permanente [Abdelkebir
Khabibi: One Must Engage in a Permanent Double Critique], Lamalif, 57, pp. 32.
Daoud, Z. (1974) Laroui, Belal et Guessous Face au Retard Historique et a la Tradition, L’Istiqlal Apres Si
Allal [Laroui, Belal and Guessous Confront Historical Delay and Tradition: The Istiqlal after Sir Allal],
Lamalif, 64, pp. 6–12.
Daoud, Z. (2007) Maroc, les annees de plomb [Morocco: The years of lead] (Paris: Manucius).
De Toro, A. & Bonn, C. (eds.) (2009) The Maghreb Writes Back. Figures de l’hybridite dans la culture et
la literature maghrebine [Figures of hybridity in Maghrebi culture and literature] (Zurich: Hildescheim
& New York: Georg Olms Verlag).
Di-Capua, Y. (2018) No Exit: Arab Existentialism, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Decolonization (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press).
Duboc, M. (2011) Egyptian Leftist Intellectuals’ Activism from the Margins: Overcoming the Mobilization/
Demobilization Dichotomy, in: Beinin, J. & Vairel, F. (eds.) Social Movements, Mobilization and
Contestation in the Middle East and North Africa, pp. 61–82 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press).

85
Wael Hallaq (2019) Reforming Modernity (New York: Columbia University Press), pp. 2–3.
18 I. Jebari

Duvignaud, J. (1968) La Sociologie Maghrebine [Maghribi Sociology], Cahiers Internationaux de

Sociologie, 44, pp. 141–144.
El-Guabli, B. (ed.) (forthcoming) Lamalif: A Critical Anthology of Societal Debates in Morocco During the
‘Years of Lead’ (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press).
El-Guabli, B. (2021) Review: The Unmaking of the Arab Intellectual: Prophecy, Exile and the Nation,
Journal of North African Studies, 26(1), pp. 163–169.
El-Shakry, O. (2019) Review Essay: Rethinking Arab Intellectual History: Epistemology, Historicism,
Secularism. Modern Intellectual History, First view. Available at: https://www.cambridge.org/core/
journals/modern-intellectual-history/article/rethinking-arab-intellectual-history-epistemology-historicism-
secularism/92532AE872FACA0A36151164740BD447, accessed March 03, 2020.
Erard, M. (1960) L’institut de sociologie de Rabat, Rapport final de mission [Final Mission Report of the
Rabat Institute of Sociology] (Neuch^atel: UNESCO/Mission Maroc).
Fernandez-Parilla, G. (2014) The Challenge of Moroccan Cultural Journals of the 1960s, Journal of Arabic
Literature, 45(1), pp. 104–128.
Flory, M. (1968) Le Concept de Revolution au Maroc [The Concept of Revolution in Morocco], Revue Des
Mondes Musulmans et de la Mediterranee [Review of the Muslim World and the Mediterranean], 5, pp.
145–152.
Fries, D. (2018) Price and Prejudice in Tangier, LaPham Quarterly, October 22. Available at: https://www.
laphamsquarterly.org/roundtable/pride-and-prejudice-tangier, accessed March 3, 2020.
Gershoni, I. (2006) The Theory of Crisis and the Crisis in a Theory: Intellectual History in Twentieth-
Century Middle Eastern Studies, in Gershoni, I. & Singer, A. (eds.) Middle East Historiographies:
Narrating the Twentieth Century, pp. 131–182 (Seattle: Washington University Press).
Graiouid, S. (2008) We Have Not Buried the Simple Past: The Public Sphere and Post-Colonial Morocco,
Journal of African Cultural Studies, 20(2), pp. 145–158.
Hajji, A. (2000) Malaise Dans la Culture Marocaine [Malaise within Moroccan Culture], Le Monde
Diplomatique, 558, pp. 24–25.
Halabi, Z. (2017) The Unmaking of the Arab Intellectual: Prophecy, Exile and the Nation (Edinburgh:
Edinburgh University Press).
Hallaq, W. (2019) Reforming Modernity. Ethics and the New Human in the Philosophy of Abdurrahman
Taha (New York: Columbia University Press).
Hamil, M. (2002) Abdelkebir Khatibi and the Postcolonial Prerogative, Alif: Journal of Comparative
Poetics, 22(22), pp. 72–86.
Hanssen, J., & Weiss, M. (eds) (2018) Arabic Thought Against the Authoritarian Age (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press).
Harrison, O. (2018) The Maghreb as Method, Boundary2, December 02. Available at: https://www.
boundary2.org/2018/12/olivia-c-harrison-thinking-the-maghreb-with-said-and-khatibi/, accessed
December 10, 2019.
Hiddleston, J. (2017) Writing after Postcolonialism: Francophone and North African Literature in
Transition (London: Bloomsbury).
Hiddleston, J., & Lyamlahy, K. (2020) Abdelkebir Khatibi: Postcolonialism, Transnationalism, and Culture
in the Maghreb and Beyond (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press).
Himmich, B. (1997) Au pays de nos crises: essai sur le mal marocain [In the country of our crises: An
essay on the Moroccan ills] (Casablanca: Afrique Orient).
Idrissi, A. (1981/82) Les Intellectuels: ambivalence et Coupure [Intellectuals: Indecision and Ruptures],
Lamalif, 131, pp. 5–8.
Jebari, I. (2018) Rethinking the Maghreb and the Post-Colonial Intellectual in Khatibi’s Les Temps
Modernes Issue in 1977, The Journal of North African Studies, 23(1-2), pp. 53–70.
Kandil, H. (2010) On the Margins of Defeat: A Sociology of Arab Intellectuals under Authoritarianism, in:
Korany, B. (ed.) The Changing Middle East: A New Look at Regional Dynamics, pp. 85–118 (Cairo:
AUC Press).
Kassab, S. E. (2010) Contemporary Arab Thought: Cultural Critique in Comparative Perspective (New
York: Columbia University Press).
Kassab, S. E. (2013) The Arab Quest for Freedom and Dignity, Middle East Topics and Arguments, 1, pp.
26–34.
Kechouri, G. (2019) ʿAbd al-Kabīr al-Khatībī: s:
a ʾgh al-Naqd al-Muzdawij [Abdelkebir Khatibi and Double
Critique], Zamane, 65, pp. 61–63.
 The Other Khatibi 19

Kelly, D. (2005) Autobiography and Independence: Selfhood and Creativity in North African Postcolonial
Writing in French (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press).
Khalil, A. F. (2003) A Writing in Points: Autobiography and the Poetics of the Tattoo, The Journal of
North African Studies, 8(2), pp. 19–33.
Khatibi, A. (1967) Bilan de la sociologie au Maroc [State of Sociology in Morocco] (Rabat: Publications de
l'Association pour la recherche en sciences humaines).
Khatibi, A. (1983) Maghreb Pluriel (Paris: Deno€el).
Khatibi, A. (1993) Penser le Maghreb [Thinking the Maghreb] (Rabat: Societe Marocaine des Editeurs
reunis).
Khatibi, A. (1998) L’Alternance et les partis politiques: essai [Alternation and Political Parties: An Essay]
(Casablanca: Eddif).
Khatibi, A. (2002) Chemins de Traverse: Essais de sociologie [Crossroads: Essays in sociology] (Rabat:
Universite Mohammed V-Souissi, IURS).
Khatibi, A. (2006) Le Maghreb Aujourd’hui [The Maghreb Today], Le Monde Diplomatique, Maniere de
voir, 86.
Khatibi, A. (2008) Le scribe et son ombre [The Scribe and his Shadow] (Paris: La difference).
Khatibi, A. (2016) Tattooed Memory, Thompson, P. (trans) (Paris: L’Harmattan).
Khatibi, A. (2017) Class Warrior Taoist Style, Reeck, M. (trans) (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University
Press).
Khatibi, A. (2019 [1983]) Plural Maghreb: Writings on Postcolonialism, Burcu Yalim, P. (trans) (London:
Bloomsbury Press).
Labdaoui, A. (1993) Les nouveaux intellectuels Arabes [The New Arab Intellectuals] (Paris: L’Harmattan).
Lahoud, N. (2004) Tradition (Tur
ath) in Contemporary Arabic Political Discourse, Middle East Critique,
13(3), pp. 313–333.
Le Tourneau, R. (1965) Chronique Politique [Political Chronology], L’Annuaire de L’Afrique du Nord, 4,
pp. 1165–1190.
Leveau, R. (1985) Le Fellah Marocain, defenseur du tr^ one [The Moroccan peasant: Defender of the throne]
(Paris: Les presses de Sciences Po).
Lionnet, F. (2011) Counterpoint and Double Critique and Edward Said and Abdelkebir Khatibi: A
Transcolonial Comparison. In: Behdad, A. & Thomas, D. (eds) A Companion to Comparative
Literature, pp. 387–407 (Chichester, West Sussex & Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing).
Lyamlahy, K. (2019) The Professional Stranger: On Abdelkebir Khatibi’s Plural Maghreb, LA Review of
Books, December 03. Available at: https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/the-professional-stranger-on-
abdelkebir-khatibis-plural-maghreb/, accessed March 3, 2020.
McNeece, L. (1993) Decolonizing the Sign: Language and Identity in Abdelkebir Khatibi’s ‘La Memoire
Tatouee,’ Yale French Studies, 83(83), pp. 12–29.
Miller, S. (2013) A History of Modern Morocco (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).
Mousjid, B. (2018) Comment Hassan II a Tue la Philosophie [How Hassan II Killed Philosophy], In:
Telquel, 820, July 13–19.
Murphy, C., & Forsdick, D. (2009) The Rise of the Francophone Postcolonial Intellectual: The Emergence
of a Tradition, Modern and Contemporary France, 17(2), pp. 163–175.
Ouakrim, H. (2017) Memoir of a Berber: Brian Jones of the Rolling Stones in Jahjouka and the Beat
Generation in Morocco (Meadville: Fulton Books).
Rachik, H., & Bourqia, R. (2011) La sociologie au Maroc: Grandes etapes et jalons thematiques,
SociologieS [Sociology in Morocco: Important stages and thematic milestones]. Available at: https://
journals.openedition.org/sociologies/3719, accessed March 3, 2020.
Raghavan, S. (2018) Rediscovered in the Alleys of Tangier, Morocco’s Last Link to the Beat Generation
Feels Broken, Washington Post, May 12. Available at: https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/middle_
east/rediscovered-in-the-alleys-of-tangier-moroccos-last-link-to-the-beat-generation-feels-broken/2018/05/
11/12aaa056-3dac-11e8-955b-7d2e19b79966_story.html, accessed March 3, 2020.
Rocca, A. & Reeds, K. S. (eds) (2013) Women Taking Risks in Contemporary Autobiographical Narratives
(Cambridge Scholars Publishing).
Rollinde, M. (2002) Le Mouvement Marocain des droits de l’homme [The Moroccan human rights
movement] (Paris: Karthala).
Roussillon, A. (2002) Sociologie et Identite en Egypte et au Maroc: Le Travail du Deuil de la Colonisation
[Sociology and Identity in Egypt and Morocco: The Work of Mourning Colonization], Revue D'Histoire
Des Sciences Humaines, 7(2), pp. 193–221.
20 I. Jebari

Sabry, T. (2010) Cultural Encounters in the Arab World: On Media, the Modern and the Everyday
(London: Bloomsbury).
Saha, M. (2017) La litterature du Maroc invitee du Livre Paris: ‘Dilapider une opportunite historique’
[Moroccan literature guest of Paris Book (fair): Squandering an historic opportunity], ActuaLitte, May
11. Available at: https://www.actualitte.com/article/tribunes/la-litterature-du-maroc-invitee-de-livre-paris-
dilapider-une-opportunite-historique/82671, accessed March 3, 2020.
Said, E. (1994) Representations of the Intellectual: The 1993 Reith Lectures (London: Vintage).
Schumann, C. (2008) The ‘Failure’ of Radical Nationalism and the ‘Silence’ of Liberal Thought in the Arab
World, Comparative Studies of Africa, Asia and the Middle East, 28(3), pp. 404–415.
Sefrioui, K. (2012) La revue Souffles: Espoirs de Revolution Culturelle au Maroc [The Souffles cultural
journal: Hopes for the cultural revolution in Morocco] (Casablanca: Edition du Sirocco).
Sharabi, H. (1987) Cultural Critics of Arab Society, Arab Studies Quarterly, 9(1), pp. 1–19.
Sheehi, S. (1998) Interview with Edward Said, al-Jadid, 4, pp. 20–21.
Stafford, A. (2009) Tricontinentalism in Recent Moroccan Intellectual History: The Case of Souffles,
Journal of Transatlantic Studies, 7(3), pp. 218–232.
Vatin, J. C. (1984) Connaissances du Maghreb: Sciences sociales et colonisation [Knowledge of the
Maghreb: Social sciences and decolonialization] (Paris: Editions CNRS).
Wilder, G. (2015) Freedom Time: Negritude, Decolonization, and the Future of the World (Durham, NC:
Duke University Press).
Wolf, M. E. (1994) Rethinking the Radical West: Khatibi and Deconstruction, L’Esprit Createur, 34(2), pp.
58–68.
Worth, R. F. (2011) The Arab Intellectuals Who Didn’t Roar, New York Times, October 29. Available at:
https://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/30/sunday-review/the-arab-intellectuals-who-didnt-roar.html, accessed
March 3, 2020.