Resumen de Missionary Encounters: Moroccan Engagement with the Western Other
Missionaries from the U.S. and U.K. have operated in Morocco from the late 19th century to the present. While they have intermittently been expelled and their distribution of literature curtailed ‒ and while the number of people they succeeded in converting was trivial ‒ their impact on local Moroccan society cannot be wholly discounted. Working from original sources, visits to missionary headquarters and study of their archives and published accounts, as well as from numerous interviews with Moroccans who were in contact with them over the course of many decades, I will focus on the experience of missionary contact in the city of Sefrou (and to a more limited extent Fez) in an attempt to assess how these religious figures acted as agents of ʻmodernization,ʼ? why they were so highly respected yet so ineffectual in their foundational goal, In what ways the experience of encountering Christian missionaries may have both facilitated and frustrated the agents of Islamic fundamentalism in more recent times?
