¹ Hassan II Prize Awards Ceremony, BNRM, Rabat, Morocco, December 12, 2018.

² The subject of financial compensation for participating in the Hassan II Prize is complex. Although a majority of prize administrators assume that the prize money is the only reason people participate in the competition (not that they necessarily have a problem with this), participants are actually motivated by multiple intellectual and cultural heritage concerns in addition to the financial incentive which many believe to be inadequate and not in keeping with the cultural value of the materials and with the prices for which Moroccan manuscripts sell in (licit and illicit) international markets.

³ Anderson, Benedict, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (New York: Verso Books, 2006), 36Google Scholar.

⁴ Therese, Marie and House, Ellis, “Al-Andalus As a Metaphor of Collective Identity for 1940s Moroccan Intellectuals,” Journal of Mediterranean Studies 21, no. 1 (2012): 101–26Google Scholar.

⁵ Anderson, Imagined Communities, 44.

⁶ Ibid., 39.

⁷ Fawzi Abdulrazak, “The Kingdom of the Book: The History of Printing as an Agency of Change in Morocco between 1865 and 1912” (PhD diss., Boston University, 1990), 35.

⁸ As-Saffar, Muhammad, Disorienting Encounters: Travels of a Moroccan Scholar in France in 1845–1846, trans. Miller, Susan Gilson (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press,1992), 204CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁹ Head, Gretchen, “Print Culture and Sufi Modernity: al-Tuhami al-Wazzani's Embodied Reading of Morocco's Nahda.” Philological Encounters 6, no. 1–2 (2021): 179–213CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹⁰ Therese and House, “Al-Andalus.”

¹¹ France officially colonized Morocco from 1912 to 1956; Spain colonized other areas of Morocco during this same period.

¹² This term is frequently used by the Moroccan Ministry of Culture in its publications about the Hassan II Prize for Manuscripts.

¹³ Bongianino, Umberto, The Manuscript Tradition of the Islamic West: Maghribi Round Scripts and the Andalusi Identity (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2022), 2CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹⁴ Gilliland, Anne J., “Archival and Recordkeeping Traditions in the Multiverse and Their Importance for Researching Situations and Situating Research,” in Research in the Archival Multiverse, ed. Gilliland, Anne J., McKemmish, Sue, and Lau, Andrew J. (Clayton, Australia: Monash University Press, 2016), 45CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹⁵ See also Caswell, Michelle L., “‘The Archive’ is not an Archives: On Acknowledging the Intellectual Contributions of Archival Studies,” Reconstructions 16, no. 1 (2021)Google Scholar.

¹⁶ Abdulrazak, “Kingdom of the Book.” The author states that the first book printed in Morocco was al-Shamaʾil al-Muhammadiyya by al-Tirmidhi in 1865.

¹⁷ Krätli, Granziano, “The Book and the Sand: Restoring and Preserving the Ancient Desert Libraries of Mauritania,” World Libraries 14, no. 1 (2004): 21–44Google Scholar.

¹⁸ Roper, Geoffrey, “The History of the Book in the Muslim World,” in Oxford Companion to the Book, ed. Suarez, Michael and Woudhuysen, H. R. (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2010), 323Google Scholar.

¹⁹ Binebine, Ahmad Shawqi, Dirasat fi ʻIlm al-Makhutat wa-l-Bahth al-Bibliyughrafi (Marrakesh: al-Matbaʿa wa-l-Waraqa al-Wataniyya, 2004), 45Google Scholar.

²⁰ Ibid., 46.

²¹ Benjelloun-Laroui, Latifa, Les bibliothèques au Maroc (Paris: G.-P. Maisonneuve et Larose, 1990), 301Google Scholar.

²² Ibid., 301-20.

²³ Binebine, Dirasat fi ʻIlm al-Makhutat, 202.

²⁴ The Istiqlal (Independence) Party of Morocco, Morocco under the Protectorate: Forty Years of French Administration (New York: Moroccan Office of Information and Documentation, 1953), 9–10.

²⁵ Chatterjee, Partha, The Nation and Its Fragments: Colonial and Post-Colonial Histories (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993), 6Google Scholar.

²⁶ Boum, Aomar, Memories of Absence: How Muslims Remember Jews in Morocco (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2013)Google Scholar; Ahmed, Sumayya, “Archives du Maroc? The Official and Alternative National Archives of Morocco,” Archives and Manuscripts 46, no. 3 (2018): 255–68CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

²⁷ Edmund Burke III, “The Creation of the Moroccan Colonial Archive, 1880–1930,” History and Anthropology 18, no. 1 (2007): 1–9.

²⁸ Muhammad El Mansour, “Moroccan Historiography since Independence,” in The Maghrib in Question: Essays in History and Historiography, ed. Michel Le Gall and Kenneth Perkins (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1997), 113–14.

²⁹ Ibid., 117.

³⁰ Gilliland, Anne J. and Caswell, Michelle, “Records and Their Imaginaries: Imagining the Impossible, Making Possible the Imagined,” Archival Science 16, no. 1 (2016): 53–75CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

³¹ Allal al-Fassi, The Independence Movements in Arab North Africa (New York: American Council of Learned Societies, [1954] 1970), 87.

³² Rowlands, Michael, “The Power of Origins: Questions of Cultural Rights,” in The Material Culture Reader, ed. Buchli, Victor (Oxford, UK: Berg, 2002), 126Google Scholar.

³³ Rajagopalan Radhakrishnan, “Postcoloniality and the Boundaries of Identity,” in Identities: Race, Class, Gender, and Nationality, ed. Linda M. Alcoff and Eduardo Mendieta (London: Blackwell, 2003), 312–29.

³⁴ Jerome Weiner, “The Green March in Historical Perspective,” Middle East Journal 33, no. 1 (1979): 22.

³⁵ Gilliland and Caswell, “Records and Their Imaginaries,” 55.

³⁶ Anderson, Imagined Communities, 178.

³⁷ Cook, Terry, “What Is Past Is Prologue: A History of Archival Ideas since 1898, and the Future Paradigm Shift,” Archivaria 43 (1997): 18Google Scholar.

³⁸ Laroui, Abdallah and Manheim, Ralph, “The Renascent Maghrib,” International Journal of Politics 7, no. 3 (1977): 19Google Scholar.

³⁹ Muhammad al-Fassi, “Les Bibliothèques au Maroc et Quelques-uns de leurs Manuscrits les Plus Rares,” Hespéris-Tamuda 2 (1961): 137.

⁴⁰ Saʿid al-Mourabati, “Muqadimah,” Fihris al-Maktutat al-`Arabiyya: al Mahfudha fi al-Khizana al-ʿAma bi-l-Ribat, vol. 7, Harf Qaf (Rabat: Khizana al-Awqaf, 2001), 8–14.

⁴¹ Sheila S. Blair, J. G., and C. Hamès, “Zāwiya”, in Encyclopedia of Islam, 2nd ed., ed. P. Bearman et al. (Leiden: Brill, 2014).

⁴² Makdisi, George, The Rise of Colleges: Institutions of Learning in Islam and the West (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1981), 11Google Scholar.

⁴³ Abdulrazak, “Kingdom of the Book,” 54.

⁴⁴ The saying was reiterated by the director of the Royal Library, Binbine, at a roundtable discussion on manuscripts at the Jacques Berques Centre in Rabat, Morocco, on 23 May 2022, reflecting a continuing reality.

⁴⁵ In his 1961 article on rare manuscripts in Morocco, al-Fassi noted thirty-three manuscripts found across public or semipublic libraries, the first being Hidhq al-Quraysh, which he called “the oldest Arabic manuscript in the world,” dating from 810. He said that it had recently been “discovered” in the Nasiri Zawiya library in Tamgroute. See also al-Fassi, “Les bibliothèques au Maroc,” 135–44.

⁴⁶ Moroccan Royal Dhahīr [Decree], August 1979, number 1234.79.

⁴⁷ Tashelhit is a dialect of Tamazight spoken in southeastern Morocco.

⁴⁸ Afa, Aomar, “Tarikh al-Makhtut al-Amazighi al-Maktub bi-l harf al-ʿArabi fi Mintaqat Sus,” in al-Makhtut al Amazighi (Rabat: IRCAM, 2004), 63–74Google Scholar; Abdallah Amennou, “Lexicon of Ibn Tunart: Illuminations on an Arabic-Amazigh Manuscript from the Middle Ages,” Etudes et Document Berberes 45/46 (2021): 9–37.

⁴⁹ Benjelloun-Laroui, Les bibliothèques au Maroc, 295.

⁵⁰ Hespress, “Bensaid Yataraʾas Hafl Tawziʿ Jaʾizat al-Hassan al-Thani li-l-Makhtutat,” YouTube video, 7 March 2023, https://youtu.be/vUeHkvDzEcI.

⁵¹ Cook., Terry “The Archive(s) is a Foreign Country: Historians, Archivists, and the Changing Archival Landscape,” American Archivist 74, no. 2 (2011): 631CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Emphasis is mine.

⁵² Kathryn A. Schwartz, “Book History, Print, and the Middle East,” History Compass 15, no.12 (2017): 1.

⁵³ At that time the official title was Ministry of State in Charge of Cultural Affairs and Traditional Teaching (Ministère d'Etat Charge des Affaires Culturelles et de L'Enseignement Originel).

⁵⁴ Abdallah Laroui, “Cultural Problems and Social Structure: The Campaign for Arabization in Morocco,” in Humaniora Islamica, ed. Herbert W. Mason, Ronald L. Nettler, and Jacques Waardenburg (Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton, 1973), 37; Katarzyna Pieprzak, Imagined Museums: Art and Modernity in Postcolonial Morocco (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2010), 30.

⁵⁵ Segalla, Spencer D., Moroccan Soul: French Education, Colonial Ethnology, and Muslim Resistance, 1912–1956 (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2009)Google Scholar.

⁵⁶ The motivations and concerns of manuscript owners are nuanced, at times converging with the priorities of the government, and at others diverging.

⁵⁷ Mohamed El Fasi, “Les Archives et Les Sources Inédites de l'Histoire du Maroc,” in Les Arabes par leurs Archives (XVI – XX siècles). Colloques Internationaux du Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique 555, ed. Jacques Berque and Dominique Chevallier (Paris: Editions du Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, 1976), 47–53.

⁵⁸ Abdelwahab Benmansour, “al-Wathaʾiq al-Maghribiyya fi ʿAhd Jalalat al-Malik al-Hassan al-Thani,” Da`wat al-Haq, 174 (1976), http://habous.gov.ma/daouat-alhaq/item/4628 (accessed 31 July 2022).

⁵⁹ Touzani, Amina, La culture et la politique culturelle au Maroc (Casablanca: Editions la Croisée des Chemins, 2003), 15Google Scholar.

⁶⁰ Buckley, Liam, “Objects of Love and Decay: Colonial Photographs in a Postcolonial Archive,” Cultural Anthropology, 20 no. 2 (2005): 249–70CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁶¹ Mezran, Karim, Negotiation and Construction of National Identities (Leiden: Martinus Nijhoff, 2007), 33Google Scholar. Mezran defines the Moroccan elite at the time of independence as being composed of the “rural establishment (caids, sufi shayks, notables); urban upper and middle class; . . . [and] the makhzen, which is the Sultan, his bureaucracy and the top echelons of his police and army officers and functionaries”; Ahmed, “Archives du Maroc?”

⁶² “Inshaʿ Jaʾizat al-Hassan al-Thani li-l-Makhtutat,” al-ʿAlam, 19 February 1969, 1.

⁶³ Majorie Akin, “Passionate Possession: The Formation of Private Collections,” in Learning from Things: Method and Theory of Material Cultural Studies, ed. W. David Kingery (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institute Press, 1996), 105.

⁶⁴ This seems to have actually begun in November 1968, according to a statement by al-Fassi in another publication.

⁶⁵ Insha' Ja'izat al-Hassan al-Thani li-l-Makhtutat, al-`Alam, 19 February 1969, 1.

⁶⁶ This book is described as “discovered in Morocco fairly recently” in the 1990 publication, Abbasid Belle-Lettres, edited by Julia Ashtiany, T. M. Johnstone, J. D. Latham, and R. B. Serjeant (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 82. See also Geert Jan van Gelder, “Kitab al-Bursan: al-Jahiz on Right and Left Handedness,” in al-Jahiz: A Muslim Humanist for our Time, ed. Arnim Heinemann, John L. Meloy, Tarif Khalidi, and Manfred Kropp (Beirut: Orient-Institut, 2009), 239–52; and Katrina Richardson, Difference and Disability in the Medieval Islamic World (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012).

⁶⁷ “Inshaʾ Jaʾiza al-Hassan al-Thani li-l-Makhtutat,” 1.

⁶⁸ Muhammad El Mansour, in discussing the development of historiography in Morocco after colonization, talks about nationalist parties needing certain histories to meet their political aims, one of which was, for the Istiqlal Party, “to prove that independent Morocco as it stood in 1956 represented only one-fifth of the real historical Morocco.” See “Moroccan Historiography since Independence,” 113.

⁶⁹ A Moroccan academic confided in me about the role of Benmansour as the mastermind behind the prize. After learning about his life and reading his works, his influence on the prize seems plausible.

⁷⁰ ʿAbd al-ʿAziz Tilani, “Biyughrafiyya al-Ustadh ʿAbd al-Wahab bin Mansur,” in Tarikh al-Hadara wa-l-Sulta bi-l-Maghrib: Min Khilal Kitabat al-Muʾarikh ʿAbd al-Wahab bin Mansur, ed. ʿAbd al-Latif Shuta and ʿAbd al-Qadir JanJay (Casablanca: Ben Msik Faculty of Science and Letters, 2000), 61–68. It is not clear if there is a specific law that was put into practice, but the authority of the royal palace was surely enough to elicit complicity.

⁷¹ Ibid.

⁷² Benmansour, “al-Wathaʾiq al-Maghribiyya fi ʿAhd Jalalat al-Malik al-Hassan al-Thani.”

⁷³ Ibid.

⁷⁴ Boukhars, Anouar and Roussellier, Jacques, Perspectives on Western Sahara: Myths, Nationalisms, and Geopolitics (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2014)Google Scholar.

⁷⁵ Maghraoui, Abdeslam, “The Ambiguities of Sovereignty: Morocco, the Hague and the Western Sahara Dispute,” Mediterranean Politics 8, no. 1 (2003): 120CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁷⁶ In 1969, Sidi Ifni was returned to Morocco and no doubt gave the government hope that other areas of the Sahara would also be returned. As early as 1956, Morocco established an office of Moroccan Services of Saharan and Border Affairs, with the goal of completing independence with the “return” of what the country considered to be its territories. See Zunes, Stephen and Mundy, Jacob, Western Sahara: War, Nationalism, and Conflict Irresolution (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2010)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁷⁷ Rodney G. S. Carter, “Of Things Said and Unsaid: Power, Archival Silences, and Power in Silence,” Archivaria 61 (2006): 215–33.

⁷⁸ Ibid., 223, 227.

⁷⁹ Michelle Caswell, “On Archival Pluralism: What Religious Pluralism (and Its Critics) Can Teach Us about Archives,” Archival Science 13, no. 4 (2013): 276, 284.

⁸⁰ Thomas K. Park, “A Report on the State of the Moroccan Archives,” History in Africa 10 (1983): 395–409.

⁸¹ Verne Harris, “Jacques Derrida Meets Nelson Mandela: Archival Ethics at the Endgame,” Archival Science 11, no. 1 (2011): 121.

⁸² Author interview, July 2015, Rabat, Morocco.

⁸³ Jocelyn Hendrickson, “A Guide to Arabic Manuscript Libraries in Morocco, with Notes on Tunisia, Algeria, Egypt, and Spain,” MELA Notes 81 (2008): 15–88.

⁸⁴ Jeannette A. Bastian, “Taking Custody, Giving Access: A Postcustodial Role for a New Century,” Archivaria 53 (2002): 81.

⁸⁵ Ibid., 93.

⁸⁶ Benjelloun-Laroui, Les Bibliothèques au Maroc.

⁸⁷ Rowlands, Power of Origins.

⁸⁸ Graiouid, Said and Belghazi, Taieb, “Cultural Production and Cultural Patronage in Morocco: The State, the Islamists, and the Field of Culture,” Journal of African Cultural Studies 25, no. 3 (2013): 265CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Driss Maghraoui, “The Ambiguity of Citizenship and the Quest for Rights in Morocco,” in Routledge Handbook of Citizenship in the Middle East and North Africa, ed. Roel Meijer, James N. Sater, and Zahra R. Babar (London: Routledge, 2020), 260.

⁸⁹ Maghraoui, “The Ambiguity of Citizenship and the Quest for Rights in Morocco.”

⁹⁰ Graiouid and Belghazi, “Cultural Production,” 265.

⁹¹ The prize is usually held annually or semiannually. There have been forty-two rounds held in fifty years.

⁹² The 2014 ministerial decree discussed in an earlier chapter changed the number of branch office submission centers from seven (Oujda, Tetouan, Fez, Rabat, Agadir, Marrakech, and Layyoune) to sixteen. The number and location of submission centers often changes with each round.

⁹³ al-Mannuni, Muhammad, “Maʿtiyat Jaʾizat al-Hassan al-Thani li-l-Makhtutat wa-l-Watha'iq ʿabr Sabaʿa Sanawat,” Daʿwat al-Haqq 17, no. 4 (1975)Google Scholar .

⁹⁴ Al-Mannuni also singled out what he considered to be “rarities (nawādir) and treasures (dhakhāʾir)” related to religious education that had been found through the Hassan II Prize. He noted the presence of ijāzāt (diplomas) issued upon the completion of scholarly milestones, such as the complete memorization of the Qur'an and its proper rules of recitation or the mastery of another subject in the Islamic sciences. Al-Mannuni said that often the diplomas were written on parchment (ʿala al-riqq) in a beautiful script, with the oldest one submitted for the Hassan II Prize at that time dated 813 (1410). He also noted a medical diploma issued to a Moroccan doctor, al-Hajj Muhammad bin al-Hajj Ahmad al-Kahhak al-Fassi, in 1248, and a notebook (kunnash), the oldest in Morocco according to al-Mannuni, that belonged to Muhammad bin Qasim al-Zjalii, a well-known author from Fez during the third Saʿdian era. It contained within it some ballads (qasāʾid) that were up until that point unknown. Among the works on medicine and science submitted for Hassan II Prize, he noted a text on the medicinal uses of food by an unknown author from Islamic Spain from the Almohad era and a manual on how to make astrolabes by the Andalusian scholar Abu Qasim ibn al-Safar al-Qurtubi (d. 1035).

⁹⁵ Muhammad Mezzine, “Political Power and Social-Religious Networks in Sixteenth-Century Fes,” in Islamic Urbanism in Human History: Political Power and Social Networks, ed. Tsugitaka Sato (New York: Kegan Paul International, 1997), 113.

⁹⁶ Ibid.

⁹⁷ Of course, not all submissions are digitized, because they are not all qualifying documents. For example, a page torn from a recently printed children's book with calculations on the back that was submitted in 2015 was not sent to be digitized. As one member of the national judging committee told me, “people don't understand [what constitutes] archival documents,” and so sometimes the new policy to digitize all submissions may be sidestepped. It should be noted that in the field of archives, digitization is not generally considered a good form of preservation due to the fragility of digital objects. See Conway, Paul, “Preservation in the Age of Google: Digitization, Digital Preservation, and Dilemmas,” Library Quarterly 80, no. 1 (2010): 61–79CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁹⁸ A 2010 French language advertisement for the prize that ran in the Moroccan newspaper Le Matin (14 May 2010) explained that participation in the prize “contributes to the enrichment of sources for scholarly research and the collection of scattered manuscripts and documents.”

⁹⁹ Michel Le Gall and Kenneth Perkins, eds., The Maghrib in Question: Essays in History and Historiography (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1997), 250.

¹⁰⁰ In early December 2018, I was told that the entirety of the National Library's manuscript collection had been digitized and that the library was awaiting the appointment of its new director before making any further steps toward providing access. On 20 December 2018, Mohammad al-Farane was named the new head of the National Library.

¹⁰¹ This was the situation as of July 2022. Thank you to Armaan Sidiqqi for this information.

¹⁰² The 1969 handbook, which may be the most valuable of the Hassan II Prize handbooks, is not at the National Library in Rabat. However, a copy can be found, surprisingly, at the Juma Majid Center in the United Arab Emirates.

¹⁰³ Arrif, Abdelmajid, Fables d'Archives. Effacement, Oubli, Infidélité, trans. Dumothier, Theo (Casablanca : Editions La Croisée des Chemins, 2015), 30Google Scholar.

¹⁰⁴ Ibid., 35 (trans. K. Pieprezak).

¹⁰⁵ Gallagher, Nancy, “Interview: The Life and Times of Abdallah Laroui, a Moroccan Intellectual,” Journal of North African Studies 3, no. 1 (1998): 141, 149CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹⁰⁶ The BNRM and the new National Archives are part of an ecology of Moroccan government–supported memory institutions that includes the previously mentioned Office of Royal Archival Documents (Mudiriya al-Wathaʾiq al-Malakiyya) established in 1975 and the Centre National de Documentation du Maroc established in 1966, all of which are in Rabat. In addition to these, the King Abdul-Aziz al Saoud Foundation for Islamic Studies and Human Sciences in Casablanca also collects manuscripts and archival records from private collections. Finally, several elite or scholarly families have established foundations through which they open their collections to the public.

¹⁰⁷ Bazzaz, Sahar, Forgotten Saints: History, Power, and Politics in the Making of Modern Morocco (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010), 6–7Google Scholar.

¹⁰⁸ Harris, “Jacques Derrida,” 121.

¹⁰⁹ Kimberly Christen and Jane Anderson, writing in the context of Indigenous archives in the US, remind us that “colonial structures of erasure, displacement, and dispossession can be seen . . . within general calls for open access that refuse to grapple with histories of collection and ongoing historical traumas ushered in by the creation and circulation of digital surrogates of these original physical and analog materials”; “Toward Slow Archives,” Archival Science 19 (2019): 98.

¹¹⁰ Hassan Rachik, Symboliser la Nation: Essai sur l'Usage des Identités Collectives au Maroc (Casablanca: Editions Le Fennec, 2003).

¹¹¹ Al-Tanbihat al-Mustanbita ʿala Kutub al-Mudawwana wa-l-Mukhtalita is a Maliki fiqh (jurisprudence] text, an abridgment and commentary of the Mudawwanah of Sahnun.

¹¹² Hespress, “Bensaid yatara`as hafl Tawzi ‘Ja’izat al- Hassan al-Thani li-l makhtutat”

¹¹³ See Saadouni, Mohamed and Stroomer, Harry, “Tashelhiyt Berber Manuscripts in Arabic Characters: An Update,” Études et Documents Berbères 42, no. 2 (2019): 194Google Scholar, in which the authors say that in Morocco the very existence of such manuscripts, “has often been denied or considered unimportant and its study has been neglected in academic circles” by both Arabs and Imazighen (sing. Amazigh).

¹¹⁴ Hespress, “Bensaid Yataraʾas Hafl Tawziʿ Jaʾizat al-Hassan al-Thani li-l-Makhtutat.”

¹¹⁵ Instead of embracing such narratives, two things can be done to support access to and stability of collections, that is, to address the preservation and conservation needs of private collectors and improve the overall access to education in archival studies (a subfield of library and information science) in the region so that professionals trained to international standards but attuned to local sensitivities work in both public and private memory institutions.