Toward the 'Moral Conquest' of Morocco: Hispano–Arabic

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Geoffrey Jensen

Toward the ‘Moral Conquest’ of Morocco: Hispano–Arabic Education in Early Twentieth-Century North Africa

Those who work in the Delegación de Educación y Cultura undoubtedly feel inspired and strengthened by the magnificent spirit of the Institute of Translators of Toledo, where Christians, Muslims, and Jews once worked fervently to construct a culture marked by the originality common to all the achievements of Spain’s contact with Moroccans. [Such achievements] coincide with the mutual understanding and potential for fertile endeavours of two peoples situated in the same geographic, historic, ethnographic, and political realms, and they coincide as well with a common culture which today has great potential in a world that has lost its way and fervently searches for a beacon to lead it out of chaos.

Tomás García Figueras1

Why have we to fight against the Moors? Why must we ‘civilize’ them if they do not want to be civilized? Civilize them — we? We from Castile, from Andalusia, from the mountains of Gerona, who cannot read or write? Nonsense. Who is going to civilize us? Our village has no school, its houses are of clay, we sleep in our clothes on a pallet in the stable beside the mules, to keep warm. We eat an onion and a chunk of bread in the morning and go to work on the fields from sunrise to sunset.

Arturo Barea2

From the eighth-century Muslim invasion of Iberia to the boat- loads of Moroccans that have landed illegally on the Andalusian coast in recent years, the relationship between Spain and North Africa remains fraught with contradictions. While examples of tolerance, mutual respect, and appreciation for shared cultures and interests are not impossible to find, religious bigotry, racism, and sharp economic disparities have also characterized interaction between Christians, Muslims, and Jews in the lands of the western Mediterranean.3 Since at least the latter part of the

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nineteenth century, moreover, Spaniards’ negative perceptions of the Maghrib’s inhabitants have been supplemented by European ideas of social Darwinism, race, and the ideologies of high imperialism in general. Correspondingly, Spanish descriptions of the North African ‘Other’ have betrayed the influence of Orientalist schools of thought from north of the Pyrenees, where academic discourse helped justify imperial ventures.4 Yet in many ways nineteenth- and twentieth-century Spanish conceptions of Moroccans do not fit so neatly into the Western world’s Orientalist mould of the Other. Spanish interest in the Far and Middle East has been relatively minor compared with the commercial, military, and corresponding intellectual attention directed toward the Maghrib by the so-called africanistas in Spain.5 Because Spaniards have tended to view their primary focus of recent imperialist activity, North Africa, as more of a historical ‘frontier’ — or even as an extension of the metropole6 — than as home to a fully oppositional Other, they have not been able to place as much emphasis on cultural, historical, and racial distinctions between themselves and the colonized as have many other Europeans. In fact, the ambiguities of shared historical and ethnic backgrounds have coloured ideas of Spain’s imperial mission in Africa and the place of empire in Spanish nationalism. During the last several years Spanish cultural constructions of the ‘Moor’ have finally begun to receive some noteworthy scholarly attention.7 Much remains to be learned, however, about the ideological background of Spanish aims and policies in Morocco and how they manifested themselves on a local level. Understanding the recent history of Spanish actions in the protectorate entails study not only of the Spaniards’ publicly stated conceptions of their role as colonizers, but also of how they actually planned and carried out policy based on those conceptions. In this case, a study of the planning, rhetoric, and imple- mentation of one step in Spain’s imperial project in North Africa — the founding of primary schools for Muslim children in the Melilla area before the official establishment of the Spanish protectorate in 1912 — reveals much about Spaniards’ perceptions of themselves and their place in the modern world. As will become clear, the history of this early twentieth-century attempt at ‘peaceful penetration’ into the Maghrib sheds light on Spanish imperial ideologies in general and their influence on perceptions of national identity. 02_EHQ 31/2 articles 26/2/01 12:57 pm Page 207

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The experience of Spain’s first attempt to institute Muslim primary education in Melilla — ‘the most important Spanish city in Africa’ — would serve as a model for Spain’s subsequent cultural policies for Morocco as a whole, and colonial officials would later write proudly of the successful results of their early endeavours in what they considered the Spanish Maghrib’s best- developed system of education.8 But success is, of course, rela- tive. Admittedly, a Melilla primary school did begin the process of transforming a young, illiterate boy into arguably Spain’s most loyal Moroccan subject: Mohammed ben Mezian,9 who would go on to enjoy an illustrious career in the Spanish army. In fact, in 1926 the Inspector General of Hispano–Arabic Education in Spanish Morocco would proudly cite the case of Mezian as proof of the success of the Melilla school, noting that after his primary education Mezian had

. . . completed his studies with distinction at the Infantry Academy in Toledo and today, as a member of the outstanding officer corps of the Melilla garrison’s Regiment of Ceriñola, is in no way inferior to his gallant and brave comrades in his manners, education, conduct, knowledge, or enthusiasm for his noble profession.10

Yet the same primary school that Mezian attended also pro- vided primary education to another Moroccan who in the end so spectacularly symbolized the failure of Spain’s colonial policies in Morocco: Mhammed ben Abd-el-Krim, future commander- in-chief of the Rifian regular army and brother of the famous leader of the independence movement that would take thousands upon thousands of Spanish lives.11 Hence in one seemingly unim- portant primary school in North Africa we find a fascinating intersection of the interests and actions of a wide spectrum of players, including the offices of the prime minister, foreign office, and General Staff in Madrid, leading military administrators in Morocco, and the brother of one of modern Spain’s most formi- dable and most demonized external foes.

Although Melilla, a Spanish city since 1497, may seem a logical starting point for further colonization, until at least the mid- nineteenth century few Spaniards showed much interest in the area. Instead, Spanish imperialist attention tended to focus on the Americas, while the Spanish presence in Melilla — like that in 02_EHQ 31/2 articles 26/2/01 12:57 pm Page 208

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Spain’s other major Moroccan enclave, Ceuta — was taken for granted.12 In 1859, however, public acclaim after the Spanish defeat of a revolt by Moroccan tribesmen signalled the beginning of a rise in expansionist nationalism, and by the turn of the century the ‘New Imperialism’ so visible elsewhere in Europe had clearly taken hold in Spain. Defeat at the hands of the United States and Cuban rebels in 1898, which brought the once-mighty Spanish empire in the Americas and the Pacific to an end, only served to stimulate colonialist aspirations in the Maghrib further.13 Although the calls for expansion seem to have come more from a relatively elitist group of military officers, politicians, intellectuals, and journalists than from popular jingoism, they did form the basis of several very vocal and influential associations. After 1904, moreover, the imperialist sentiments of these groups — the Sociedad Geográfica de Madrid, the Asocia- ción Española para la Exploración del África, and the Sociedad Española de Africanistas y Colonistas (founded in 1876, 1877, and 1883, respectively) — would find further expression among the business community in the new Centros Hispano-Marroquíes of Madrid, Barcelona, and Tangier.14 Much of the colonialist discourse was couched in relatively pragmatic political, economic, and strategic terms, but some africanistas also emphasized Spain’s supposed moral obligation to carry out a ‘civilizing mission’. And as early as the 1860s even army officers recognized the need to add a cultural component to military activities in the Maghrib. Significantly, the Catholic Church and its orders — traditionally the strongest agents of Spanish cultural imperialism — were not to lead the endeavours. Instead, the colonial educators looked to public education as a tool of conquest. Hence a report on the need for a primary school system in the Melilla area did not conceive of schools solely for Spanish children, but for Moroccans as well. As the Royal Council on Public Instruction [Real Consejo de Instrucción Pública] indicated in 1863 when approving a new programme of primary education in Morocco, separate schools for the children of ‘Moors’ — presumably only boys — would aid in the Spanish ‘aim of extending and consolidating our legitimate and beneficial influence’ in Morocco. The plan called for Spanish children to begin learning the basics of Arabic and for their Moroccan counterparts to receive instruction in Castilian. After attending one of these Spanish–Arabic institutions, Moroccan children 02_EHQ 31/2 articles 26/2/01 12:57 pm Page 209

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would then have the opportunity to continue their studies in regular Spanish primary schools.15 It was not until after 1898, however, that Spanish authorities appear to have seriously considered devoting significant state resources to the education of Moroccans; indeed, it is doubtful that the Royal Order of 1863 was ever implemented fully. In late 1905 a Spanish teacher in Melilla, Francisco Sempere, wrote to the Military Governor of that district proposing the establishment of primary schools for Moroccans. Making no mention of any existing schools for Moroccans as had been proposed over four decades earlier, he noted that only a very small number of young Moroccans, mainly the children of local merchants, currently attended Melilla’s public schools.16 Although Sempere did not mention other parts of the Maghrib, his assessment could have applied to the few Spanish-run schools there as well, which were open to Muslims and Jews but primarily served Spanish children.17 A handful of Moroccan children living in areas of Spanish influence also had the opportunity to attend schools run by Franciscans. But government officials in Madrid had little interest in supporting the pedagogical endeavours of Father José Lerchundi, a fairly progressive Franciscan and one of the most important Catholics in Morocco during the last third of the nineteenth century, and his efforts reached relatively few Moroccan children. Jewish children, not mentioned in Sempere’s proposal, had attracted even less attention in Spain, although the Paris- based Alliance Israélite Universelle had operated schools in Morocco since the early 1860s.18 Like virtually all contemporary Europeans with an interest in imperial education, Sempere couched his proposal first in terms of its perceived benefits for Spain and not for the native peoples of the occupied territory. Given the current importance of the ‘Moroccan question’ for ‘our dear patria’, he wrote, it made sense to devote more resources to colonial education. ‘What could be a more powerful means of peaceful penetration,’ he asked, ‘than to instruct the people of the frontier [“estos fronterizos”] and enlighten them about the advantages of European life?’19 But unlike the pedagogical missions of the Franciscans and many other Spaniards in nineteenth-century Morocco, the teacher’s petition of 1905 largely rejected the blunt imposition of metropolitan religion, language, and law on the colonized population, with its scant recognition of the legitimacy of native 02_EHQ 31/2 articles 26/2/01 12:57 pm Page 210

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spiritual beliefs and practices. He may have begun his proposal with a customary allusion to the superiority of ‘European life’, but he also supported a curriculum in which the Koran rather than the Bible assumed the dominant role. He advised against establishing schools with obligatory Catholic instruction, since such a policy constituted the primary reason that Moroccan attendance of Spanish schools was so low. While one of the two instructors at his proposed school would be a Spaniard, who as director of the facility would know colloquial Arabic, he suggested filling the other teaching position with a Muslim in charge of Koranic education. This decision to give the Arabic language and Muslim religion dominant places in the Hispano–Arabic schools, which would remain Spanish policy throughout the century, differed dramatically from the approach generally favoured by the French, who insisted on conducting most instruction of Moroccan children in French and turned down requests to allot more time for Arabic.20 The French in North Africa had also tended to focus their acculturating efforts on precisely those groups, especially the Berbers of Kabylia, which they perceived to be less thoroughly ‘Islamicized’ and thus better subjects for conversion.21 In at least some cases, then, it was not the French model as much as Spain’s own past experiences with colonized Others that may have helped set the stage for the methods its officials favoured in Morocco. Although a full comparison with the colonial history of the Americas lies outside the scope of this article, it is worth noting that there Spain had ruled partly through the preservation of local culture, including native distinctions of ‘caste’ and hierarchy. Even through the eighteenth century in Mexico, for instance, Spanish colonial authorities had allowed for — and probably depended upon — the survival of traditional communal ties and native municipalities’ rights and responsibli- ties.22 Similarly, in Cuba during the 1800s the Spanish government had actually lent support to Afro–Cuban ‘Cabildos de Nación’, which it hoped would promote Christianity while allowing members to maintain part of the cultural heritage of their distinct African ethnicities.23 In other ways, though, Sempere’s colonialist ideas had little to do with their Spanish–American precedents. Not only did his rejection of the traditional colonial evangelical mission represent a clear and obvious departure from Spain’s stated religious goals 02_EHQ 31/2 articles 26/2/01 12:57 pm Page 211

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in the Americas, but in other ways his views differed from it and from basic French colonial philosophy as well. In order to encourage high attendance by Moroccan children, for instance, he proposed choosing a location for the school near the city’s refugee camp, a proposal which in itself illustrates another sharp difference between the Spanish and the French approaches to Moroccan colonization. Whereas the French explicitly strove to preserve the local status quo, at least some early Spanish administrators were less adamant about maintaining traditional native social hierarchies.24 Furthermore, while Spanish administrators in the pre-protectorate Melilla area often employed the term ‘Moor’ for Muslim Moroccan, the ethnic designation ‘Berber’ rarely surfaced in their writings, and they made no significant attempts to exploit differences between Berbers and non-Berbers. The French, on the other hand, would stress linguistic and cultural differences between ‘Arabs’ and ‘Berbers’ in an attempt to drive a wedge in Moroccan society, a tactic that Maghribi nationalists strongly opposed.25 Admittedly, after 1912 the focus of Spanish educational policy would turn primarily to the sons of local leaders, in part as an attempt to guarantee the good behaviour of their fathers, and Spanish policymakers would also begin to make more explicit distinctions between Berber and Arab ‘races’.26 Given the increase in tensions as Spain endeavoured to augment its power in Morocco, this later tendency to imitate the apparent success of the French methods was not surprising. It also must have become clear to many Spaniards that any attempt to empower lower-class Moroccans through education contradicted the basic definition of a protectorate anyway, which assumes the preservation of existing indigenous social structures while establishing hegemony over the colony as a whole.27 In addition, the rise of a new generation of army officers would affect views within the military, which always played an extensive and critical role in the colonial administration. In fact, ideological shifts in segments of the military, combined with the basic transformation of the area’s political status into a protectorate, would have an impact on many aspects of Spanish actions in the Maghrib. At least through the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in 1936, changes in the balance between competing schools of thought within Spain’s Army of Africa and within the Spanish army as a whole clearly affected colonialist strategies, including decisions to strike deals 02_EHQ 31/2 articles 26/2/01 12:57 pm Page 212

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with tribal leaders.28 But during the first decade of the twentieth century, when relatively progressive voices still had more say within the Army of Africa, Sempere and some of his successors in the Spanish administration would continue to reach well beyond the Moroccan elites in their attempts to bring ‘civilization’ to North Africa, even if they thereby contradicted the very premise of a protectorate. In his 1905 proposal Sempere also suggested that the Spanish government subsidize prizes for the students, awarding special ‘articles of clothing’ (‘prendas de vestir’) to punctual students and even offering day jobs to parents who demonstrated noteworthy interest in their sons’ education.29 For the most promising students, he wrote, the state should provide scholarships for further study in specialized schools and universities in Spain. He portrayed such measures as worthy expenditures that served Spain’s ‘política de atracción’, or ‘policy of attraction’, a popular catchphrase of the day describing the phase which was immedi- ately to precede Spain’s and France’s planned ‘peaceful penetration’ of Morocco.30 Although he did not explicitly admit it in his report, Sempere’s suggested prizes — which would become standard practice in the Hispano–Arabic schools — not only served the practical purpose of attracting students, but by grant- ing Spaniards the authority to recognize, reward, and thus define the accomplishments of ‘civilization’, the awards also functioned as highly visible, symbolic affirmations of Spanish power. Nevertheless, even though Sempere shared the widespread European presumption of the need for civilizing missions in Africa — betrayed by his praise for the ‘Europeanizing’ function of the proposed Spanish schools — he also affirmed, at least implicitly, the legitimacy of the religion of the conquered. He could claim that his promotion of Koranic education rested on purely practical grounds — the low enrollments in Moroccan schools with obligatory Catholic instruction — but in fact his proposal also betrayed an ambivalent attitude toward the culture of the indigenous peoples often not present in the contemporary rhetoric of European imperialists. The report did not, moreover, explicitly cast doubt on the intellectual potential of Moroccans in the manner of some Spaniards and other Europeans who wrote about the Maghrib. ‘We all know that the majority of young Moors have shrewdly developed intellectual facilities,’ Sempere wrote. Citing the case of the French in Algeria as a model, he 02_EHQ 31/2 articles 26/2/01 12:57 pm Page 213

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argued that Moroccans who received scholarships from the Spanish government would go on to ‘plant a seed of glorious praise for our dear Patria’ after they completed their studies.31 In addition, Spanish children in Melilla would benefit from the proximity of the proposed Arabic primary school. By attending classes there twice a week, Sempere argued, they would gain a basic knowledge of colloquial Arabic and of native Moroccan culture that could only help them someday as adults with government or commercial jobs in the region. Thus, while the myth of the historic struggle waged by Spanish Christians against ‘infidels’ might have served as ideological ammunition for Spain’s expansionist policies, at the same time at least some metropolitan administrators considered the Muslim ‘threat’ so insignificant that they did not hesitate to advocate sending Spanish children to classes taught by Muslim religious teachers. And the contradictory nature of the Spanish imperial outlook stands out even more vividly in light of the indisputable sense of reverence and sometimes even awe that many military officers in Morocco expressed for the power of Muslim religious sentiments, even if those officers at the same time revealed ethnocentric or explicitly racist sentiments.32 Years later, in fact, this kind of thinking would help explain how a National Catholic dictator such as Franco could paradoxically employ the Muslim term baraka when describing his own identity.33 A goal for colonial education might have been to foster a desire among the indigenous peoples to ‘Europeanize themselves and revere the advances of civilization’, as Sempere’s report asserted, but important aspects of native culture carried enough inherent value to be promoted rather than supplanted by their European alternatives.34 The proposal, moreover, did not merely reflect a lone voice, as the enthusiastic support it received from officials on the penin- sula and in North Africa attests. General José Marina y Vega, the military governor of the Melilla area, embraced the plan, as did the relevant officials from the War Ministry, the General Staff, and the Office of the Crown in Madrid.35 Although the question of funding generated some of the bureaucratic discussion typical of government affairs, by July of 1908 30 Moroccan children had successfully completed their first academic year at the ‘School of Primary Education for Indigenous Boys’ [‘Escuela de la Enseñanza para niños indígenas’], which was headed by Sempere himself. As the school inspector’s report submitted to 02_EHQ 31/2 articles 26/2/01 12:57 pm Page 214

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the Melilla area military government attests, Spaniards in Morocco considered the education of indigenous children to be an important first step in their strategy of bolstering those aspects of the native culture that they thought would best serve Spanish interests in the end. The inspector, José Riquelme y López Bago, was an Arabic-speaking infantry academy graduate who would spend nearly his entire career as an influential officer in Melilla. A strong advocate of the ‘cultural approach’ to conquest, he would rise to the rank of major general by the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in 1936.36 The relatively progressive oulook revealed in the support that Marina, Riquelme, and other officers lent to the project of Hispano–Arabic education reflected in part the lingering influence of the nineteenth-century liberal tradition on Spanish military culture. Although liberal views had by no means achieved complete hegemony in the ideologically diverse military world of Spain and Spanish Morocco, they did still have a fairly strong voice in the Army of Africa at the time Riquelme wrote his report. Eventually, the rise of the military ‘Generation of 1915’ in Morocco would bring with it a corresponding decline in the influence of such relatively enlightened colonial officers, as the more rightist military interventionists, such as Franco and other so-called army africanistas, gradually gained more influence.37 But even this transformation, which mirrored a more general, well-documented shift to the political right of much of the officer corps,38 did not mean that the sincere respect and admiration some officers had for aspects of Moroccan culture disappeared entirely. Instead, even officers who justified Spanish colonialism in essentially racist terms could also reveal a paradoxical reverence for Arabic culture as they perceived it. Although Riquelme’s report, filed after the formal act marking the end of the first academic year, describes a ceremony clearly intended to serve Spanish public relations, it also reveals un- mistakable respect for the intellectual abilities of the Moroccan children and deference toward the cultural world from which they came. According to Riquelme, the students had performed ‘brilliantly’ in their exams, exceeding all expectations in their masterful demonstration of ‘penetrating intelligence and well- polished practical skills’.39 Only 30 of the original 54 pupils had attended class regularly enough to take their exams,40 but those who had completed the course had all excelled in the primary 02_EHQ 31/2 articles 26/2/01 12:57 pm Page 215

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subjects taught at the school: Spanish, arithmetic and geometry, geography, Arabic, and the recitation of the Koran. In addition to the awarding of prizes to the outstanding students, including Mhammed ben Abd-el-Krim, the ceremony also featured a speech by the head of the board of examiners, Gonzalo Gutiérrez, which an interpreter translated into Arabic. Listeners included parents, local government officials, business leaders, representatives of the local Academy of Arabic, and members of the press.41 Congratulating the pupils, Gutiérrez also reminded them and their parents that they would always ‘enjoy the pro- tection and love of Spain’. In the eyes of the report’s author, the ceremony had brought a fitting close to a highly successful first academic year. The school’s ‘intelligent teaching staff’ [el inteligente profesorado de esta Escuela] had achieved much with the students, most of whom had arrived on the first day illiterate and without knowledge of ‘our language and customs’. In addition to praising the hard work of the teachers, the report also lauded the diligence and determi- nation of the pupils themselves, many of whom had to walk long distances — sometimes in heavy rain — in order to attend class every day. Most of the students lived at the outside edge of the Spanish zone, the inspector wrote, with some residing as far as eight kilometres from the school. Attempting to convince his superiors that the school and teaching staff merited more finan- cial support in order to expand its operations, Riquelme stressed the teachers’ success in raising the Moroccan boys’

. . . intellectual level through instruction, thereby instilling them with morality and respect for the truth, setting right their ideas of the just and the unjust, opening their hearts to the feelings of humanity, and — most importantly — using instruction in the true spirit of the Koran to combat the prejudices and superstitions that are so deeply rooted in the indigenous people and that constitute the greatest threat of all to civilization. [author’s italics]42

Such disdain for Moroccan ‘superstitions’ and ostensible deviations from ‘standard’ Arab–Muslim practice was common among Europeans. In the case of Riquelme, it allowed him to characterize Moroccan religious beliefs as primitive without questioning the legitimacy of what he held to be the more sophisticated, ‘correct’ tenets of Islam. Moroccans, he seemed to believe, had strayed from the proper Muslim path that had once contributed to Spain’s great civilization. Ironically, in this case 02_EHQ 31/2 articles 26/2/01 12:57 pm Page 216

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Moroccans were to be brought back to the right path of Islamic orthodoxy by Christians, and the Spanish civilizing mission eschewed Christianization in favour of restoring the native religion to its ‘true’ form.43 To aid the civilizing goals, Riquelme advocated development of more educational and vocational institutions for Moroccan children, citing statistics from what he perceived as a well- developed and highly effective school system in French Algeria to bolster his arguments. At the same time, he called for more training for Spanish teachers in Arabic and in local agricultural and other practical skills, which could then help prepare Moroccan boys for their subsequent vocations. The report even forecast the eventual instruction of Moroccan girls in such practical matters as the Spanish language, basic mathematics and office skills, sewing, tapestry, and textiles.44 Many scholars of the Koran do not believe instruction for girls to be prohibited, he wrote, although he also acknowledged that this interpretation had its detractors. Melilla’s Chamber of Commerce also supported the general call for an expansion of vocational training, donating forty primers of agricultural techniques for the educational endeavours.45 Taken together, the reforms advocated in the report served several goals, and the author may well have been doing personal friends a favour by promoting the practical aims of raising teacher salaries and building more educational facilities for native children.46 Nevertheless, his belief that Spain had to play a vital role in what he described as the ‘moral conquest’ of the Moroccans was clearly genuine, and the Governor-General of Melilla strongly supported the school and its expansion.47 Of course, in the end the Spaniards’ ostensibly tolerant and respect- ful attitude toward the native culture did not prevent Moroccans from seeing the self-serving nature of their occupiers’ actions. Perhaps the most dramatic proof of the failure of this chapter of Spanish cultural imperialism lies in the subsequent behaviour of the only Moroccan pupil praised by name in Riquelme’s report: the twelve-year-old Mhammed ben Abd-el-Krim.48 At the time Spaniards might have interpreted their pedagogical success with this boy, whom the anthropologist David Montgomery Hart believes to have been the first Rifian to receive a non-traditional education, as proof that they were on the right track. Two decades later, when Mhammed was co-operating with his better- 02_EHQ 31/2 articles 26/2/01 12:57 pm Page 217

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known brother Mohammed at the head of the independence movement that cost close to 20,000 Spanish lives, ‘Abd-el-Krim’ would be one of the most hated and feared names in Spain.49 At this point, however, the attempts to add a cultural component to the military occupation of the Melilla area seemed to yield positive results, and developments outside the sphere of education would in any case play a far larger role in determining the subsequent actions of the brothers Abd-el-Krim.50 In fact, Mhammed Abd-el-Krim worked briefly for the Spanish school system in Melilla in which he had performed so well as a pupil.51 The organization of Centros Comerciales Hispano-Marroquíes, moreover, would perceive enough value in the education of children to open its own school in Melilla in 1911, which com- peted directly with its predecessor. According to a Spanish doctor who spent much of his career in North Africa, the event was deemed of enough import for Spanish king, Alfonso XIII, to take part in its opening ceremony, and the school was intended to be followed by a future, extensive system of Moroccan education sponsored by the Centros.52 Nevertheless, the new military governor of Melilla, General José García Aldave, promptly closed this private school for violating the regulations of the military zone. The correspondence that its brief operation inspired, however, demonstrates the importance of the issue to many of the key Spanish colonialist interests in Morocco. Several days after the new school opened, García Aldave announced that he had suspended its classes because its administrators lacked the necessary authorization from the military government, to whom they had not even submitted the required plan of studies and information about its personnel and regulations. Furthermore, he charged, the leading pupils of the already- existing official school supported by the military administration had been bribed to attend the new institution. Without the knowledge of their parents, twelve already-literate students had actually been offered gifts and small amounts of money as rewards for switching schools. For García Aldave, the most dangerous aspect of this practice lay in its ‘immorality’ and corresponding undermining of ‘one of the principal elements of atracción política and the securing of our influence in the country’ — in other words, the official school for Moroccans.53 Ensuing correspondence over the conflict, which reached as high as the office of the Liberal Secretary of State Manuel García 02_EHQ 31/2 articles 26/2/01 12:57 pm Page 218

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Prieto, indicates that Melilla business leaders soon came to accept that their best course of action would be to limit their pedagogical efforts to areas of the Rif that still lacked primary schools, citing Cabo de Agua, Trec Forcas, and Tetuán as the most likely candidates. Significantly, the Spanish government officials in Madrid advised that any schools established by the Centros Comerciales Hispano-Marroquíes imitate the state- supported schools by making the study of Arabic and the Koran integral parts of their curricula, by including natives in the teaching staff, and by requiring the Spanish teachers to have a knowledge of Arabic.54 Subsequent discussion in the General Staff and War Ministry, moreover, argued forcefully that ‘non-official’ schools in North Africa should fall under the jurisdiction of the military and the Foreign Office rather than the Ministry of Education. Continuing to advocate a ‘laic’ (i.e. non-Catholic) programme of instruction based on the Koran — ‘the funda- mental base of all Muslim studies’ — Spanish officials made clear that the chief purpose of native education was to serve Spain’s foreign policy goals. After all, the aim of primary education here was not simply to teach the Spanish language, but to serve the broader goal of ‘peaceful penetration’ and ‘atracción’.55 In the meantime, the original school continued to operate successfully, and two other official primary schools opened in the region as well. The inaugural ceremonies of these two schools, replete with pomp and circumstance, reveal much about the self-perceptions of the Spanish administrators. Furthermore, the ways in which the public pronouncements differed from the private correspondence of the Spanish administrators illustrate how the real agenda of the Spaniards could differ from their public rhetoric. The Spanish authorities staged the presentations ‘with as much solemn imposition as possible in order to impress the indigenous element’ that was in attendance, conducting the proceedings in Arabic as well as Spanish.56 Although members of the local and national Spanish press as well as leaders of the Spanish community in the Melilla area were present, the ceremonies were aimed primarily at Moroccan listeners. In typically self-serving terms, at the opening ceremony of 23 September 1912 for the school in Nador, the speaker — acting in the name of the Captain General — immodestly proclaimed to his Moroccan listeners that the new facility symbolized 02_EHQ 31/2 articles 26/2/01 12:57 pm Page 219

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. . . a step of great importance in your life, representing the spiritual nourish- ment that Spain offers you and your children for elevating your intellectual level, as we grant you through education the understanding and knowledge necessary to be civilized and support your families.

Directly contradicting the state policy motives of imperial ‘penetration’ revealed in private correspondence and other documents, here he claimed that Spain’s only interest lay in guiding the Moroccans toward ‘the light of culture’. Listeners also heard references to ‘the generosity of Spain’ and the need for Spaniards and Moroccans — ‘pueblos hermanos’ — to work together in pursuit of ‘the work of harmony [concordia] and civilization that has been confided to us by Humanity’. The Captain General’s representative also went out of his way to assure listeners that instruction would be ‘purely laic’ in the schools, promising the presence and collaboration at the school of

. . . a Fqih [Fakih] who, as a learned man and keeper of the Islamic faith, will impart upon your sons education in the precepts of the Koran and in elements of Arab culture. Hence you can rest assured that this school will always show the most pro- found respect for your religion and your customs, and you should understand that the Spanish teacher will give you the greatest and most treasured gift that a man can yearn for: moral and intellectual education.

The Koran, he continued, makes clear that the believer should ‘enlighten’ himself [‘ilustrarse’], for facilitating cultural advances is in no way contrary to Islam.57 About one month later, even more self-serving and arrogant rhetoric characterized the opening of a Spanish supported primary school for Moroccans at Zoco-El-Had, located near Melilla in the territory of the Beni-Sicar tribe. This time the speaker, who announced that he was making his proclamation in the name of King Alfonso XIII, asserted that the new school was but one of ‘a million proofs that Spain came to this territory, once a prisoner of anarchy, on a mission of order and progress’. The intention of ‘generous Spain’, he wrote, was to ‘prepare you for a rosy future and bring light to the minds of your sons, which are now blinded by ignorance’. We have given you, he continued, ‘tranquillity, bringing calm to your agitated lives’, as well as the benefits of law, justice, and culture. Typically, however, his portrayal of the Spanish civilizing mission was ambivalent and contradictory: at the same time he 02_EHQ 31/2 articles 26/2/01 12:57 pm Page 220

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credited Spain for bringing legal order to the land, he also stressed to his Moroccan listeners the ways in which the Spaniards had magnanimously striven to preserve ‘your laws’ and ‘your judges’ in the protectorate. And even while the Spanish administrators had ‘furnished means of culture’ to the indigenous population, they had also by conscious decision endeavoured to maintain ‘your customs’ rather than replace them with Spanish substitutes. In this case, it seems, native culture was to play at least as important a role in Maghribi regeneration as that of its European protectors, even if the latter was to preside over and direct the process. Although the speaker mentioned the material benefits he believed Spain had brought to the area, citing Spanish-made railways and roads as examples, he believed his country’s cultural endeavours and respect for the Moroccans to merit the most emphasis. Praising the ‘gentleness’ and ‘tolerance’ of Spain’s imperial activities, he concluded by assuring his listeners that their ‘Islamic faith, sacred to your souls, will not suffer here even the slightest injury or the lightest damage’, since Spain was, after all, ‘a loyal guardian of her words’.58 Although some Spanish military writers would continue to regard Africa as a place of ‘infidels’ to be fought with the Christian faith, in practice the position of Arabic culture and religion in Spanish schools for Muslim children would increase as the century pro- gressed.59

In November of 1912 the French officially recognized the Spanish protectorate, reserving a much larger chunk of Moroccan territory for themselves, and a new chapter in Spain’s ‘cultural conquest’ of the Maghrib would begin. The Spaniards thereafter opened more schools, including several for Moroccan girls, and made some efforts to educate Moroccan Jewish children as well.60 But these early, sometimes tentative, hypocritical, and ultimately failed attempts to articulate and realize their plans for the Muslim children of Melilla had already betrayed the role of the imperialist mission in Spanish national identity, which set the stage ideologically for the purely political objectives of winning over local leaders and preparing young Moroccans for later service in the colonial administration. With time, of course, perceptions of North Africans were to change, as military, political, and economic interest in the Maghrib grew and the impact of the ‘Moroccan problem’ on metropolitan affairs deepened.61 Indeed, 02_EHQ 31/2 articles 26/2/01 12:57 pm Page 221

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subsequent writings by Spanish military and civilian figures in Morocco betray more explicitly negative, ‘alteritist’ and even racist outlooks than the earlier tracts. In addition, a general decline in liberal, rationalist thought in Spanish military culture during this period helped facilitate the growing lack of faith in liberal, European-style education as a path to civilization. Hence subsequent attempts to bolster native cultural practices and beliefs, especially after the Spanish Civil War, stemmed as much from a blatant desire to undermine France’s attempts to squash Maghribi nationalism as from any notion of natural cultural affinities.62 Furthermore, some of the post-war praise for Moroccan culture that appeared in Francoist discourse undoubtedly stemmed from the uncomfortable reality of the important roles Moroccan elites and mercenaries had played in bringing Franco to power. Yet the basic notion of Spain’s civilizing mission remained unchanged, and Sempere’s proposal and its consequences shed light on how this aspect of national identity — already studied in the works of leading Spanish literary and cultural figures — manifested itself on a practical level.63 Spain’s early twentieth- century Koranic schools demonstrated that even Spaniards who were willing to concede that Moroccans’ native intelligence was on a par with that of Spaniards nonetheless regarded Moroccan civilization as inferior to that of its Spanish (and thus European) counterpart.64 But the Spanish colonialist arrogance seems to have rested as much on perceptions of economic, military, tech- nological, and political superiority as on racial stereotypes, even if notions of race could underlie africanista thought as well, and a few military figures went as far as to embrace biological, ‘scientific’ racism with much enthusiasm.65 Of course, even relatively open-minded Spaniards in Melilla were certainly ethnocentric, and their prejudices helped bolster flagrantly self-serving actions there. But when compared to other turn-of-the-century Western perceptions of colonized peoples — for example, American portrayals of Cubans after 1898 — Spanish views appear much more elastic, subtle, varied, and less coloured by social-Darwinist and racialist ideologies.66 Cultural arrogance may permeate the documents of early Spanish–Muslim primary schools, but the ideas they espouse also demonstrate the fallacy of regarding a standard, purely negative conception of the ‘Moor’ as a universal component of Spanish national identity. Admit- 02_EHQ 31/2 articles 26/2/01 12:57 pm Page 222

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tedly, many Spaniards did attempt to portray Morocco’s culture and society in direct opposition to their own allegedly superior civilization, and the contrast between ‘civilized’ Spain and the ‘uncivilized’ Moroccan Other did find a place in some of the Franco regime’s National Catholic propaganda. But the undeni- able role of Arabic culture in Spanish history and the country’s obvious failure to match up to European social and economic standards — illustrated vividly by the two quotations that precede this article — made such an outlook largely untenable.

Notes

The author wishes to thank Christopher Schmidt-Nowara and the anonymous outside reader for their comments and suggestions. Research for this article was supported in part by a grant from the University of Southern Mississippi. 1. Tomás Garciá Figueras, ‘Lineas generales de la obra de educación y cultura que se desarrolla en nuestra zona de protectorado en Marruecos’, unpublished manuscript, [1944], p. 22, Biblioteca Nacional, Madrid, Colección Garciá Figueras. 2. The Forging of a Rebel, trans. Ilsa Barea (New York 1972), 295. The section of the book in which the quotation appears was first published as The Track in 1943. 3. The classic historic account stressing Mediterranean-wide cultural and geo- graphical unity is Fernand Braudel, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II, trans. Sian Reynolds, Vols 1–2 (Berkeley, CA 1996). Julia Clancy-Smith examines the Maghrib’s place in a nineteenth-century Mediterranean world that ‘was — as it always has been — utterly promiscuous, a privileged terrain for complex interaction involving many of the cultures around its rim’ in her article ‘The Maghrib and the Mediterranean World in the Nineteenth Century: Illicit Exchanges, Migrants, and Social Marginals’, in Michel Le Gall and Kenneth Perkins, eds, The Maghrib in Question: Essays in History and Historiography (Austin, TX 1997), 222–49. On recent Moroccan–Spanish relations and conflicts, see Henk Driessen, On the Spanish–Moroccan Frontier: A Study in Ritual, Power and Ethnicity (New York 1992), and Javier Valenzuela and Alberto Masegosa, La última frontera. Marruecos, el vecino inquietante (Madrid 1996). Surveys of contemporary Spanish Morocco are Víctor Morales Lezcano, España y el Norte de Africa. El protectorado en Marruecos (1912–1956) (Madrid 1986); Ramón Salas Larrazábal, El protectorado de España en Marruecos (Madrid 1992); and Tomás Garciá Figueras, La acción africana de España en torno al 98 (1860–1912), 2 vols (Madrid 1966). 4. Much current debate on ‘Orientalist’ thought and the projects it has served centres on Edward S. Said’s books Orientalism (New York 1979) and Culture and Imperialism (New York 1993). Norman Daniel, Islam, Europe and Empire (Edinburgh 1966), examines the evolution of European views of Islam. 5. On Spanish scholarship about North Africa and ‘the Arab world’, see 02_EHQ 31/2 articles 26/2/01 12:57 pm Page 223

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Bernabé López Garciá, Contribución a la historia del arabismo español (1840–1917) (Granada 1974), an abridged version of the author’s 1973 doctoral thesis at the University of Granada, and James T. Monroe, Islam and the Arabs in Spanish Scholarship (Sixteenth Century to the Present) (Leiden 1970). 6. For example, General Leopoldo O’Donnell, hero of Spain’s 1860 Moroccan campaign, proclaimed that his country’s ‘natural border lies in the Atlas Mountains, not the narrow channel that joins the Mediterranean to the Atlantic’. Cited in Capitán García Pérez, Posesiones españolas en Africa (Toledo 1909), 21. 7. Only two anthropological studies — Driessen, On the Spanish–Moroccan, and Josep Luís Mateo Dieste, El ‘moro’ entre los primitivos. El caso del protectorado español en Marruecos (Barcelona 1997), based on the author’s 1996 Autonomous University of Barcelona Master’s thesis — study Spanish perceptions and cultural constructions of the ‘Moor’ in significant depth. Although Mateo Dieste raises some of the same issues and themes that I treat in this article, his work examines only published sources and devotes relatively scant attention to the Hispano– Arabic schools. Driessen overlooks these schools altogether. 8. Ricardo Ruiz Orsatti, La enseñanza en Marruecos (Tetuán 1919), 95. 9. Because this article focuses on Spanish perceptions, policies, and actions, Arabic names will be transliterated and employed according to Spanish custom. 10. Ruiz Orsatti, Enseñanza, 99. Mezian would become the highest-ranking Moroccan officer in the Spanish army, rising to the rank of lieutenant general and serving as governor-general of the Canary Islands in 1954–6. He played a role in negotiations for Moroccan independence, and thereafter he assumed several important posts in the new state, including Minister of Defence in 1964 and Secretary of State in 1970. Richard Pennell, ‘The Responsibility for Anual: The Failure of Spanish Policy in the Moroccan Protectorate, 1912–21’, European Studies Review, Vol. 12 (1982), 71–2; I. William Zartman, Morocco: Problems of a New Power (New York 1964), 66, 85, 105; William Spencer, Historical Dictionary of Morocco (Metuchen, NJ 1980), 76. 11. Pennell, ‘Responsibility’, 71–2, also draws attention to the contrast between these two products of Spanish colonial education. Histories of the origins and course of the Rif uprising include Germain Ayache [Jarman Ayyash], Les Origines de la Guerre du Rif (Paris 1981); Shannon E. Fleming, Primo de Rivera and Abd- el-Krim: The Struggle for Spanish Morocco, 1923–1927 (New York 1991); C.R. Pennell, A Country with a Government and a Flag: The Rif War in Morocco, 1921–1925 (Wisbech 1986); and David S. Woolman, Rebels in the Rif: Abd-el- Krim and the Rif Rebellion (Stanford 1968). 12. On the history of Melilla as a ‘Hispano–African frontier’, see Driessen, On the Spanish–Moroccan, part 1. Spain took Ceuta from the Portuguese in 1688. 13. Studies that include discussion of these wars’ impact on the nationalism of Spanish intellectuals and other elites include José Álvarez Junco, ‘El nacionalismo español como mito movilizador. Cuatro guerras’, in Rafael Cruz and Manuel Pérez Ledesma, eds, Cultura y movilización en la España contemporánea (Madrid 1997), 35–67; Sebastian Balfour, The End of Spanish Empire, 1898–1923 (Oxford 1997); and Carolyn P. Boyd, Historia Patria: Politics, History, and National Identity in Spain, 1875–1975 (Princeton, NJ 1997). 14. Fleming, Primo, 19–22; Mateo Dieste, ‘Moro’, 78–80. The Centros Hispano-Marroquíes are sometimes referred to as the Centros Comerciales Hispano-Marroquíes. For more detailed discussion of the evolution and aims of 02_EHQ 31/2 articles 26/2/01 12:57 pm Page 224

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such organizations, see García Figueras, Acción, vol. I, 97–144, and vol. II, 187–232. For a more critical analysis of Spanish commercial interests in Morocco, see Víctor Morales Lezcano, El colonialismo hispano-francés en Marruecos (Madrid 1976). 15. ‘Plan de organización de las escuelas de las plazas militares de Africa’ and accompanying Royal Order, Madrid, 22 September 1863, Archivo General Militar, Segovia (hereafter AGM), sección 2, división 8, legajo 84. 16. ‘Escuela de la. enseñanza para moros: Ligeras indicaciones para la creación de la misma en esta plaza’. Handwritten proposal by Francisco Sempere, Melilla, 21 December 1905, AGM, sección 2, división 8, legajo 84. 17. García Figueras, ‘Lineas’; John P. Halstead, Rebirth of a Nation: The Origins and Rise of Moroccan Nationalism, 1912–1944 (Cambridge, MA 1967), 136. Schools established by the French for the children of their settlers barred Moroccan children outright. Halstead, Rebirth, 101. 18. After Franco’s victory in the Spanish Civil War, García Figueras, a conservative military officer and diligent student of Moroccan history and culture, would harshly criticize the Spanish liberal politicians of the previous century for failing to support Lerchundi’s ‘magnificent endeavours’, which García Figueras believed would have helped counteract the growing French influence in Morocco promoted by the schools of the Alliance Israélite Universelle. García Figueras also regretted that Spain had ‘abandoned’ the ‘Israelite’ community in Morocco, ‘so united in its effect on Spain and constituting a positive element of importance in the Moroccan economy, since Jews monopolize almost all of Moroccan commerce, in spite of the traditional general impression of total incompatiblity between Jews and Muslims’. García Figueras, ‘Lineas’, 4–5. For a history of the Alliance, see Michael M. Laskier, The Alliance Israélite Universelle and the Jewish Communities of Morocco: 1862–1962 (Albany, NY 1983). On Lerchundi and the Franciscans in Morocco, see Ramón Lourido Díaz (Ed) Marruecos y el Padre Lerchundi (Madrid 1996), especially the chapters by Bernabé López García, Ramón Lourido Díaz, and Miguel Villecillo Martín. 19. Sempere, ‘Escuela’. 20. Halstead, Rebirth, 102–7; Laskier, Alliance, 305–6. For a brief overview of Franco–Muslim education in the French protectorate, see also Alan Scham, Lyautey in Morocco: Protectorate Administration, 1912–1925 (Berkeley, CA 1970), 144–61. Other histories of the French administration of Morocco include William A. Hoisington, Jr., Lyautey and the French Conquest of Morocco (New York 1995), and Daniel Rivet, Lyautey et l’institution du protectorat française au Maroc, 1912–1925, 3 vols (Paris 1988). 21. See Patricia M.E. Lorcin, Imperial Identities: Stereotyping, Prejudice, and Race in Colonial Algeria (London and New York 1995). On the other hand, some leading French colonial figures — most notably Herbert Lyautey—would oppose attempts to eradicate Islamic culture, for which they professed great respect. 22. William B. Taylor, Drinking, Homicide, and Rebellion in Colonial Mexican Villages (Stanford 1979). 23. Aline Helg, Our Rightful Share: The Afro–Cuban Struggle for Equality, 1886–1912 (Chapel Hill 1995), 29. 24. Laskier, Alliance, 305–6 25. On the French in Morocco and the distinctions they promoted between ‘Berbers’ and ‘Arabs’, see ‘Alal al-Fasi, The Independence Movements in Arab 02_EHQ 31/2 articles 26/2/01 12:57 pm Page 225

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North Africa, trans. Hazem Zaki Nuseibeh (New York 1970; copyright 1954), 118–29; Halstead, Rebirth; Lorna Hahn, North Africa: Nationalism to Nationhood (Washington DC 1960); and Lorcin, Imperial Identities, 227–37. 26. Pennell, ‘Responsibility’, 71–2. For a brief analysis of the distinctions Spaniards made in the 1930s between ‘Arabs’ and ‘Berbers’, see Mateo Dieste, ‘Moro’, 107–18. 27. Mateo Dieste, ‘Moro’, 74–6. 28. Sebastian Balfour and Pablo La Porte, ‘Spanish Military Cultures and the Moroccan Wars, 1909–36’, European History Quarterly, Vol. 30, (July 2000), 307–32. 29. Sempere, ‘Escuela’. 30. Juan de España, La actuación de España en Marruecos. Apuntes de historia y estudios sobre la política y situación actual del problema hispano–marroquí (Madrid 1926), 27–8. 31. Sempere, ‘Escuela’. 32. For example, Tomás García Figueras, Notas sobre el Islam en Marruecos (Larache 1939); Ricardo Burguete, Teoría y práctica de la guerra. Evolución en el arte (Madrid 1913), 361–3; Ricardo Burguete, Rectificaciones históricas: De guadalete á Cavadonga y Primer Siglo de la Reconquista de Asturias. Ensayo de un nuevo método de investigación é instrumento de comprobaciones para el estudio de la historia (Madrid 1915), 316–17. 33. Mateo Dieste, ‘Moro’, 139. 34. Sempere, ‘Escuela’. 35. Various documents in AGM, sección 2, división 8, legajo 84. 36. After the Spanish Civil War, Riquelme helped reorganize the Agrupación Militar Republicana, a group that sought to overthrow Franco. Carolyn P. Boyd, La política pretoriana en el reinado de Alfonso XIII (Madrid 1990), 291; Albert A. Nofi, ‘General Officer Loyalties in the Spanish Civil War’, PhD dissertation, City University of New York, 1991, 568. Vincent Sheean, an American visitor to Morocco during the early 1920s, referred to Riquelme as ‘the one Spanish leader who really knows the Arab and can manage Arab populations’. After interviewing Mohammed ben Abd-el-Krim in the wake of the Spanish debacle at Anual, Sheean claimed that the Moroccan rebel leader ‘displayed genuine respect’ for Riquelme. An American Among the Riffi (New York 1926), 240. 37. Gabriel Cardona, El poder militar en la España contemporánea hasta la guerra civil (Madrid 1983), 29–43; Balfour and La Porte, ‘Spanish Military Cultures’. 38. Studies that examine this shift of officers to the political right include Manuel Ballbé, Orden público y militarismo en la España constitucional (1812– 1983) (Madrid 1983), Boyd, La política pretoriana, Cardona, Poder militar, Daniel R. Headrick, Ejército y política en España (1866–1898) (Madrid 1981), and Stanley G. Payne, Politics and the Military in Modern Spain (Stanford 1967). 39. Record of report [‘membrete’] by José Riquelme, Inspector, sent to José Marina, Gobierno Militar de Melilla y Plazas Menores de Africa. E.M. [Estado Mayor], Sección Asuntos Indigenas, [July 1908], AGM, sección 2, división 8, legajo 84. Unless otherwise noted, all of the following information concerning the inspector’s report is taken from this file. Although the last page of this report is missing, the date can be gleaned from references in this and other documents and in Ruiz Orsatti, Enseñanza, 102–7. 02_EHQ 31/2 articles 26/2/01 12:57 pm Page 226

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40. Although Spaniards would sometimes lament what they considered to be high attrition rates in their schools for Moroccans, their regrets might reveal more about their ignorance of Moroccan educational values than their pedagogical failures. Even in truly Moroccan (i.e. non-Spanish and non-French) schools, failing to complete a several-year course of studies was by no means unusual, nor was it considered to constitute failure. Dale F. Eickelman, Knowledge and Power in Morocco: The Education of a Twentieth-Century Notable (Princeton, NJ 1985), 59–65, 106. 41. The composition of the listeners is commented on in José Marina, Gobierno Militar de Melilla y Plazas Menores de Africa, Estado Mayor, Sección A.I., to Señor Ministro de Estado, Madrid, 30 September 1908. 42. Riquelme to Marina [July 1908]. 43. For a Francoist officer’s view of Moroccan Islam, see García Figueras, Notas. 44. Despite this recommendation, Spain would be slow to establish schools for Moroccan girls. In 1926 the Inspector General of Hispano–Arabic education would lament the lack of such a school in the Melilla area. He also acknowledged, however, that such a step would have to be taken carefully, since in his view the Rifian woman regrettably lacked ‘in society and law the considerations and status’ she deserved. Ruiz Orsatti, Enseñanza, 101. By the 1941/2 academic year the Spanish government had established eleven official primary schools for Muslim girls in the protectorate (excluding Ceuta and Melilla). In contrast, thirty-one primary schools for their male counterparts were in operation then. García Figueras, ‘Lineas’, 13. 45. Riquelme to Marina [July 1908]. 46. Career concerns and personal favouritism regularly played a role in the decisions and actions of Spanish military figures in Africa. Studies treating the political aspects of Spanish military activities in twentieth-century Morocco include Pennell, Country; David Montgomery Hart, Emilio Blanco Izaga. Coronel en el Rif (Melilla 1995), 25–62; Ayache, Origines; Fleming, Primo; Woolman, Rebels; Boyd, La política pretoriana; Cardona, Poder militar; and Payne, Politics. 47. José Marina, Gobierno Militar de Melilla y Plazas Menores de Africa, Estado Mayor, Sección A.I., to Señor Ministro de Estado, Madrid, 30 September 1908. 48. Riquelme to Marina [July 1908]. 49. Although the 1908 Spanish document refers to ‘el joven de unos 12 años de edad, Mohamed-Ben-Sid-Abd-El-Krim, natural de la Kabila de Beni-Urriagliel [sic]’, the pupil was in fact Mohammed’s brother, whose name is usually transliterated by Spaniards as ‘Mhammed’ and who was about ten years younger than his sibling. On the brothers Abd-el-Krim and the Rif revolt see Ayache, Origines, 153 ff.; Fleming, Primo; David Montgomery Hart, The Aith Waryaghar of the Moroccan Rif: An Ethnography and History (Tucson, AZ 1976), 369–403; Pennell, Country, 49–50; Pessah Shinar, ‘‘Abd al-Qadir and ‘Abd-al-Krim — Religious Influences on their Thought and Action’, Asian and African Studies, Vol. 1 (1965), 160–74; and Woolman, Rebels. 50. See Pennell, ‘Responsibility’. 51. A 1911 document pertaining to the Melilla school praises ‘el auxiliar indi- gena Mohammed Ben Sid Abd-El-Krim [sic]’. José García Aldave, Capitanía General de Melilla, Estado Mayor, Sección A.I. [Asuntos Indigenas], Melilla, to 02_EHQ 31/2 articles 26/2/01 12:57 pm Page 227

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Excmo. Señor Ministro de Estado, Madrid, 22 August 1911. During this period Abd-el-Krim also served as editor of the Arabic column in El Telegrama del Rif, the Spanish newspaper in Melilla, as a secretary in the Spanish Bureau of Native Affairs, as a Berber interpreter, and as chief Moroccan judge [qadi qudat] of Melilla. In early 1913 he received the Spanish award of ‘Knight of the Order of Isabel the Catholic Queen’. It is also possible that the assistant praised in the document was Mohammed’s younger brother Mhammed, who would later take a university course in Malaga and earn a degree in mining engineering in Madrid in 1917. Pennell, Country, 49–50; Hart, Aith, 371. 52. Victor Ruiz Albéniz (el Tebib Arrumi), España en el Rif (Madrid [1921]), 164–72. 53. José García Aldave, Capitanía General de Melilla, to Excmo. Señor Ministro de Estado, Madrid, 9 February 1911, AGM, Sección 2, División 8, legajo 84. 54. President Pablo Vallesca and Secretary General Jaime Tur, Cámara Oficial de Comercio, Industria y Navegación, Melilla, to Capitan General de Melilla, 22 March 1911; García Aldave, Melilla, to Sr. Ministro de Estado, Madrid, 29 March 1911; Report by Eugenio Ferrar, Ministerio de Estado, Madrid, 4 April 1911; García Prieto to Señor Ministro de la Guerra (Estado Mayor Central del Ejército), 4 April 1911. All of the preceding documents are in AGM, sección 2, división 8, legajo 84. 55. Capitanía General de Melilla, Estado Mayor, Sección A.I. to Señor Ministro de la Guerra, Estado Mayor Central del Ejército, 4 December 1911; and ‘Expediente é informe sobre la creación de Escuelas de primera enseñanza para indígenas de los territorios ocupados en el Rif (1912)’, Estado Mayor Central, 2a. Sección, 7 February 1912. 56. Capitanía General de Melilla. Estado Mayor, Subinspección de tropas y asuntos indígenas, ‘Dando cuenta de la inauguración de la Escuela indígena de Nador, y adjuntando copia de la alocución deida en castellano y árabe á los que presenciaron el acto’, to Excmo. Señor Ministro de la Guerra, Madrid, 27 September 1912. 57. Ibid. 58. José García Aldave, ‘A los indígenas presentes y ausentes’ (unpublished text of speech delivered at the opening of the school at Zoco-El-Had, 30 October 1912), accompanying his letter to Excmo. Señor Ministro de Estado, Madrid, 11 November 1912, Melilla. 59. For example, the section in García Pérez, Posesiones, devoted to Spain’s Moroccan policies begins with a quotation by Spanish Queen Isabel I calling for the ‘conquest of Africa’ and ‘war for the faith against the infidels’ (20). Paul Preston writes that years later the Franco regime propagated a ‘more or less racist vision which linked the Civil War to the crusading spirit of the wars between Christians and Moors and to the evangelical imperialism of the conquest of America’. Politics of Revenge: Fascism and the Military in Modern Spain (London 1990), 32. Nevertheless, after the outbreak of the Civil War the National Catholic regime of Franco actually implemented an educational policy of ‘complete Arabization’ [‘Arabizacíon a fondo’] of what had up to that point been defined as Hispano–Arabic schools. García Figueras, ‘Lineas’, 9. Francisco Andrés García Carrasco criticizes the stress on ‘Arabization’ instead of ‘españolización’ from a conservative nationalist perspective in his PhD thesis ‘La acción Cultural de 02_EHQ 31/2 articles 26/2/01 12:57 pm Page 228

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España en Marruecos’, Universidad Complutense, Madrid, 1976. 60. García Figueras, ‘Lineas’, 5–22; Vial del Morla (pseud. for García Figueras), España en Marruecos (La obra social) (Madrid 1947), 15–43; and Tomás García Figueras, Notas sobre instrucción y cultura en Marruecos (Ceuta 1940), all offer statistics and descriptions of educational programmes and facilities in Spanish Morocco after 1912 from the perspective of this knowledgeable Francoist military official. Because Spanish officials considered Melilla to be more a part of Spain proper than ‘African’ or ‘Moroccan’, they favoured making distinctions between Sephardic, ‘European’ Jews — regarded as the educated ‘aristocracy’ who dominated commerce in Melilla — and ‘Berber Jews’. The former were thought to belong in the standard Spanish schools. Ruiz Orsatti, Enseñanza, 263–5. In the protectorate in general, regarded in this case as separate from the ‘Spanish city’ of Melilla, Spanish schools for Jewish children also tended to favour the Spanish language over Hebrew and Arabic, since so many Moroccan Jews were of Spanish ancestry. Laskier, Alliance, 312. 61. See André Bachoud, Los españoles ante las campañas de Marruecos (Madrid 1988). The relatively progressive attitude toward Moroccans that characterized the early Hispano–Arabic project roughly coincided with a similar period of ‘open- ness’ seen in French literature on the Maghrib around the turn of the century, which Edmund Burke III, has labeled the ‘first crisis of orientalism’. See his ‘The First Crisis of Orientalism, 1890–1914’, in Jean-Claude Vatin et al., Connaissances du maghreb. Sciences sociales et colonisation (Paris 1984), 213–26. 62. On Spain’s role in anti-French nationalist activities, see Jamil M. Abun- Nasr, History of the Maghrib in the Islamic Period (Cambridge 1987), 391–3, and María Dolores Algora Weber, ‘La política árabe del régimen franquista. Planteamientos generales y fases’, Estudios Africanos, Vol. 5 (1990), 94. 63. Studies which examine the role of empire in Spanish intellectuals’ notions of national identity and nationalism include Carolyn P. Boyd, Historia; Balfour, End; Bachoud, Españoles; Martin Blinkhorn, ‘Spain: The “Spanish Problem” and the Imperial Myth’, Journal of Contemporary History, Vol. 15 (1980), 5–25; and Inman Fox, La invención de España (Madrid 1997). 64. Manuel Azaña, the most prominent liberal republican politician of the Spanish Second Republic and a fierce enemy of the military establishment, spoke in a Cortes debate in 1932 of the need to ‘civilize’ Morocco, achieving for Spaniards ‘commercial, industrial, and territorial expansion’ while demonstrating ‘to the Moor, to the natives, how Spain still has the ability to bring civilization’. Cited in José Luis Neila Hernández, ‘Las responsabilidades internacionales de la II. República en Marruecos. El problema del abandonismo’. Estudios Africanos, Vol. 5 (1990), 77. Nineteenth-century Spanish republicans in Cuba had revealed a similar desire to supplant native culture with Spanish civilization, urging slaves to leave their African ancestry behind. On republican views in nineteenth-century Cuba, see Christopher Schmidt-Nowara, Empire and Antislavery: Spain, Cuba, and Puerto Rico, 1833–1874 (Pittsburg 1999). 65. On Spanish ideas of race and how some Spaniards applied them to Morocco, see Joshua Seth Goode, ‘The Racial Alloy: The Science, Politics and Culture of Race in Spain, 1875–1923’, PhD dissertation, University of California, 1999. 66. David F. Healy, The United States and Cuba, 1898–1902 (Madison 1963), 209–10. 02_EHQ 31/2 articles 26/2/01 12:57 pm Page 229

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Geoffrey Jensen

is assistant professor of history at the University of Southern Mississippi, where he also co-directs the Center for the Study of War and Society. He is the author of Irrational Triumph: Cultural Despair, Military Nationalism, and the Ideological Origins of Franco’s Spain (2001) and co-editor, with Andrew Wiest, of War in the Age of Technology: Myriad Faces of Modern Armed Conflict (2001).