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Rabat – Between April and May of this year, as Moroccan observers and officials appeared to marvel incredulously at Madrid’s apparent ignorance of basic diplomatic reciprocity as the “essential” Spain-Morocco partnership gradually disintegrated, Samir Bennis had a theory of why the Spanish government acted as it did.
While many commentators saw in Madrid’s dismissive attitude towards Rabat a surprising turn of events from a government that has long described Morocco as an indispensable partner, Bennis saw remnants of a centuries-old habit whereby Spanish authorities were conditioned to look upon the North African country as an inferior and junior partner Spain could treat as it sees fit.
At the heart of the then exacerbating diplomatic fallout between Rabat and Madrid, Samir wrote in an op-ed in May, was “the fact that the Spanish mentality has not really evolved on Morocco and Moroccans.” Instead, “it has remained frozen, trapped in the ghosts of the past and a visceral and inherent hostility to Morocco that generations of Spaniards have inherited and kept alive.”
“Le Grand Malentendu” (The Great Misunderstanding), Bennis’s upcoming 232-page book about Morocco-Spain relations, is an extension of this very argument. In it, Bennis sets out to shed critical light on the abiding contours of the political and ideological foundations of Spanish discourse and attitude towards Moroccans, and vice-versa.
Though limited in its scope, the book is bold and ambitious in its chronicling of eight centuries of the friendenemy dynamics between the two Mediterranean neighbors. From the fall of Granada in 1492, the forcible expulsion of Moors between 1609-1614, to the participation of Moroccan troops in Spain’s civil war in the 1930s, Bennis offers an unflinching, penetrating insight into the myths and narratives guididing Spain’s self-image and its relationship with the Arabo-Muslim world.
“The negative image that exists in Spain about Muslims in general and Moroccans in particular, has historical origins that stem from the rivalry that has long prevailed in relations between Morocco and Spain since the end of the Muslim presence in al-Andalus,” writes Bennis.
As such, he goes on to announce, the book’s main goal is to offer a critical exploration of the “propaganda of disqualification and objectification” pervading the writings and moral pronouncements of generations of Spanish intellectuals. For the most part, the views and attitude of these shapers of Spanish opinions toward Moroccans and Islam remain relevant in a Spanish poolitical landscape shrouded in “paternalistic condescension and ideological certainty.”
The central thesis here, of course, is that these past towering Spanish intellectuals’ view of Moors and Muslims as primitive and unsophisticated continues to inform much of contemporary Spanish discourse on Moroccans and the Muslim world.
At times, the book reads like an intellectual history of the “tumultuous and passion-ladden” centuries of mutual animosity and calculated fascination between Madrid and Rabat. In Bennis’ telling, the unresolved territorial questions of Ceuta, Melilla and Western Sahara are an integral part of this “endlessly conflictual” relationship. And that, at bottom, Spain continues to see in Morocco a vassal that can be trampled, made to behave, or an existential threat to monitor and contain.
What this comes down to is that the recent unwinding of the longstanding diplomatic ties between the two countries cannot be understood outside of this history of infantilization and condescension. The idea is, again, that Spain’s historical superiority complex remains a keystone of much of contemporary Spanish media discourse and policies vis-a-vis Morocco.
Beyond critique
The arresting picture that Benni’s trained eye – he is by academic training a specialist of Morocco-Spain relations – paints of this complex relationship is difficult to quarrel with. But, as the book drives a truck through the longstanding notion of Spain’s civilizational superiority over Morocco (and the Arabo-Muslim world in general), Bennis is careful enough to avoid the trap of resistance- or activism-driven scholarship.
And so, even as he takes issue with the “racializing and self-important catechism” of Spain’s political and intellectual class’ pontifications about Morocco’s supposed cultural backwardness, even as he portrays generations of Spanish chroniclers as eurocentric fabulists more interested in confirming their preconceptions than in a genuine study of Muslim societies, Bennis makes sure not to confuse historical analysis with passionate, activist fulmination.
This is particularly manifest in the book’s concluding remarks where, having deconstructed the blaze of acrimony and condescension that still characterizes Spanish attitude toward Morocco, Bennis extends an intellectual olive branch to the emerging cohort of Spanish intellectuals who are interested in an honest reckoning with the complex and dark episodes of their country’s past.
These “heralds of rapprochement,” as Bennis approvingly calls the growing crop of nuanced and objective Spanish intellectuals, are urging Moroccans and Spaniards to “transcend all the hatred and resentment of the past in order to lay the foundations for a relationship based on mutual respect, tolerance, and brotherhood.”
In this context, “The Great Misunderstanding” is not just an unflinching critique of the past and present of Spain-Morocco relations; it is also a plea for a better future, a call for “laying the groundwork for a new page in relations between Madrid and Rabat… to meet the socio-historical and politico-economic challenges at stake.”
Bennis’s, then, is a case for history with two distinct but umbilically linked messages. To the Spanish political class and the shapers of Spain’s public attitude and beliefs, the book’s message seems to be, to quote English journalist and popular historian Paul Jonhson, that “the study of history is a powerful antidote to contemporary arrogance.”
The idea is, in other words, that it is time for Spain to make peace with the fact that Morocco is no longer a peripheral actor in contemporary geopolitics and that it expects to be treated with the consideration and respect that its geostrategic importance and growing diplomatic assertiveness require.
To Morocco’s politico-media class and Moroccans in general, the book makes the case for the unparalleled significance of knowing one’s history. In the introduction to her brilliant one-volume American history, Jill Lepore writes of the “towering importance and gripping urgency of studying the past and reckoning with origins.”
“The past,” Lepore argues, “is an inheritance, a gift and burden. It can’t be shirked…. There is nothing for it but to get to know it.” With reports that Morocco and Spain are engaged in “intense negotiations” to mend their severed relationship, Bennis’s book could not have been published at a more appropriate time. As the first Moroccan to shed such much-needed and salutary light on the tumultuous, centuries-long Spain-Morocco relations, Bennis is urging Moroccans to get to know – or embrace – their tempestuous history with Spain in order to make sense of it and shake off its weight.
