World History Association

WHA Names 2008 World Travel Scholar Recipient

WHA members who attend the 2005 conference at Al-Akhawayn University in Ifrane, Morocco probably remember Dr. Driss Maghraoui, who served so ably as the chair of the Local Arrangements Committee. Due in large part to Driss's work, conferees had a marvelous time, as well as a stimulating intellectual experience.

Thanks to a generous donation from an anonymous patron, who stipulated that a travel grant be offered to a North African scholar, the WHA has been able to name Driss Maghraoui as the recipient of a World Scholar travel grant to attend the 2008 WHA conference in London.

Driss Maghraoui received his History Ph.D. in 2000 from the University of California at Santa Cruz, where he presented the dissertation "Moroccan Colonial Troops: History, Memory, and the Culture of French Colonialism." Currently he is an assistant professor at Al-Akhawayn University, where he offers a wide variety of history courses, including "Contemporary World History," "Islamic Civilization," "North African Immigration in Europe," and "The History of the World Economy, 1500-2000." In 2004-2005 he was a visiting assistant professor at Yale University.

Among his many publications are the forthcoming "Secularism in Morocco: A Stagnant Word in Motion" and "Cultural Diversity and the Arab-Islamic Heritage in Morocco."

While at the conference in London, Dr. Maghraoui will present the paper "Tangier in World History" as a contribution to that part of the program devoted to Global Cities. According to Maghraoui, his paper "will attempt to uncover the varied layers of the commercial activities that put the port city [of Tangier] into an international [system of] interconnected trade routes." Moreover, contrary to the classic thesis presented by the Belgian historian Henri Pirenne, which maintained that the early Muslim conquests badly disrupted the existing commercial network in the Mediterranean, thereby ending the unity of the Mediterranean World, his paper will suggest that the Muslim conquest of North Africa and Spain "set in motion the dynamics of an important trade network." Beyond that, his paper will argue against Bernard Lewis's notion that a "medieval iron curtain between Islam and Christendom seems to have kept cultural exchanges at a minimum, and greatly restricted even commercial and diplomatic intercourse." To the contrary, Maghraoui will present the argument that the Muslim conquerors of the seventh and early eighth centuries helped revitalize the commercial activities of the Mediterranean Basin, and Tangier played an important role in that early medieval renewal of trade. Finally, because of its strategic location and commercial importance, Tangier later became entangled in a web of early modern European political and dynastic alliances and rivalries.

For anyone interested in the Pirenne Thesis and medieval long-distance trade, the Mediterranean in world history, early modern European international diplomacy, and Muslim-Christian relations through the centuries this paper is an absolute "must hear."

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