Invention of the Maghreb: Beyond the Native Colonial Gaze | Majid Hannoum

In this episode of The afikra Podcast, host Mikey Mahanna engages in a profound conversation with Professor Majid Hannoum, a scholar of anthropology at the University of Kansas, about the colonial construction of identity in North Africa, particularly focusing on the invention of the term 'Maghreb' and its implications for Moroccan self-perception. Hannoum traces how 'Maghrib'—a term now synonymous with Morocco—was not part of pre-colonial Moroccan identity but was instead imposed by European colonial powers and later adopted by post-colonial elites. He critiques the Orientalist portrayal of Tangier as a dangerous, exotic, and sexually charged 'other,' shaped by Western writers like Mark Twain, Paul Bowles, and Alexandre Dumas, and contrasts it with the lived realities of Tangier as a complex, multi-layered city shaped by migration, class, race, and global flows. The discussion reveals how Tangier’s identity is fractured: it is both a symbol of modernity and a site of marginalization, where sub-Saharan migrants, LGBTQ+ communities, and drug economies coexist with elite expatriate enclaves and deeply entrenched racial hierarchies rooted in colonialism and colorism. Hannoum further interrogates the colonial translation of Ibn Khaldun’s work, arguing that the term 'race' was imported into his texts by 19th-century French orientalists like Duslan, distorting his original concepts of 'jil' (generation) and 'asabiyya' (social cohesion). This translation ideology, he contends, reconfigured a 14th-century Arab thinker into a colonial intellectual figure, reinforcing Eurocentric narratives of knowledge production. He urges students and scholars to critically engage with the institutions and languages that shape knowledge, advocating for decolonial reading practices, transdisciplinary methods, and the inclusion of North African voices writing in Arabic. The episode concludes with a call to unlearn colonial mentalities through rigorous, self-reflective scholarship that challenges institutional doxa and centers marginalized epistemologies.