Representing Victorian Britain: Moroccan Ambassadorial Occidentalism in the Nineteenth Century

Abstract

This article examines Ibn Idris Jaaydi’s travelogue, Ithaf al-Akhyar bi-Ghara?ib al-Akhbar (1876), as a pivotal instance of Moroccan Occidentalism focused on Victorian Britain. Combining ceremonial politics, gendered perception, and technological inquiry, the London chapters reveal how sovereignty was staged while being translated into a Moroccan idiom of honour that magnified Sultan Moulay Hassan. Jaaydi’s ethnographic eye extends from transport, prisons, and the Mint to the Crystal Palace and Woolwich arsenal, where he measures, times, and explains, adopting a documentary tone that registers British civilizational and military superiority without surrender. His portrayals of English women—at elite salons, theatres, circuses, and Madame Tussaud’s—oscillate between admiration and moral containment, casting women as key indices of modern urban life and of Islamic norms of modesty. The article situates Ithaf within earlier rihla traditions (al-Fasi, al-?Amrawi) and broader debates on Arab perceptions of European secularism (Abu-Lughod), arguing that Jaaydi acknowledges Britain’s civilizational and military power yet contains it within Islamic-Moroccan categories. His text exemplifies a late-nineteenth-century “confidence effect”: an Occidentalism that frames European modernity less as a threat than as a theatre of foreign marvels that could be observed, catalogued, selectively appropriated, and translated for the edification and entertainment of a Moroccan readership eager to encounter Europe on its own terms.