Narrating Diasporic Religion and Postsecular Identity in Tahar Ben Jelloun’s A Palace in the Old Village

Abstract

Inspired by Western secular literary tradition, many diasporic writers in the Maghreb in general and in Morocco in particular did not include religious or spiritual themes in their literary works, as compared to the valorized ones of race, class and gender. Much of Maghrebian fiction, primarily written by immigrant writers of Islamic background who adopt secular perspectives that are often critical of Islam, has depicted religion, especially Islam, in negative terms. Tahar Ben Jelloun is one of those writers who are criticized for being self-orientalizing authors who ‘prostitute’ their works to their Western audience. But, Tahar Ben Jelloun is misunderstood by the majority of his readers. In this article, using postsecularism and secular spirituality as analytical tools, I will explore the postsecular identity and diasporic religion in Tahar Ben Jelloun’s A Palace in the Old Village. Reading the novel from a postsecular perspective and more specifically from a secular spiritual perspective, I will show that Tahar Ben Jelloun is neither self-orientalizing Islam nor celebrating French secularism. Instead, he is upholding postsecular values and diasporic consciousness by negotiating instances of extremism and communalism that mark the failures of both organized religion and Eurocentric secularism. Indeed, Ben Jelloun presents Islam as faith, as a spiritual practice; a diasporic religiosity which is not associated with any political doctrine or organization.

1. Introduction

Today, the term diaspora has become a widely studied concept in political science, anthropology, sociology, psychology, religious studies, history, and even literature so often that it has become a growing industry in academia (Safran 2004, p. 9; Johnson 2012, p. 95). Over the last decade, the term diaspora has taken on intricate new implications in social and cultural studies as well as political debate. With the advent of concepts like global deterritorialization, transnational migration, and cultural hybridity, the term diaspora has taken on new significance. It is increasingly being used as a metaphoric definition for expatriates, expellees, refugees, immigrants, displaced communities, and ethnic minorities. The term diaspora has also been used to describe the experience of movement/displacement and to analyze the social, cultural, and political formations that result from this movement/displacement. According to R. Cheran, diaspora is “that segment of people living outside the homeland”. Cheran also adds that diaspora can be seen as “a sense of belonging to more than one history, to more than one time and place, to more than one past and future” (Cheran 2004, p. 3). What is more, diaspora can be expanded to include several communities that express new identities and cultural practices as the result of displacement. Interestingly, globalization and immigration have been instrumental in creating several transnational diasporic communities. As these communities spread across borders and continents, it is interesting to note that religion often serves as a unifying force among diasporic populations. This connection between diaspora and religion can be traced back to the foundational concept of diaspora, which finds its roots in the Jewish historical narrative beginning with the Babylonian exile. Other early diasporic religious communities include the Christian and Muslim diasporas. The Christian diaspora arose as a result of the dissemination of Christianity within the Roman Empire and beyond, while the expansion of Islam in the 7th century also gave rise to the establishment of diasporic Muslim communities. However, the importance of religion in shaping the diasporic journey is frequently disregarded in diaspora studies. Religion has been the focus of relatively little attention within this growing field. In particular, before the 9/11 attacks both diasporic literary critics and writers were reluctant to address the questions of religion and spirituality in the diasporic literature due to the secularity of the mainstream postcolonial and postmodern literatures (El Amrani 2021, p. 5).

The relationship between literature and religion dates back to the emergence of literature, since man’s first literary explorations were of a religious nature. For example, Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy, and Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales are literary works that suggest a deep and enduring connection between literature and religion throughout human civilization. Literature gradually distanced itself from religion and began to be written for various secular reasons. In fact, when a steadfast faith in religion started to dwindle and science gained authority in the post-Enlightenment era, literature seemed to have little interest in, or was sometimes even hostile to, religion.1 So, literature has always been introduced as a decidedly secular enterprise.2 In this sense, religion has been overlooked in literary studies because literature has so long relied on the unquestioned acceptance of the secularization narrative. Christina Phillips thus argues “literary texts may contain religious themes, characters and imagery but, if they wish to be taken seriously by critics, these must be secularized” (Phillips 2012, p. 66). Inspired by both Western literary tradition and Edward Said’s concepts of secular criticism and the secular intellectual, many diasporic writers in the Arab world in general and in Morocco in particular did not include religious or spiritual themes in their literary works, as compared to the valorized ones of race, class, gender, nation, migration, and hybridity. Leila Aboulela, a famous Sudanese–Scottish novelist, says that the early generation of novelists in the Arab World did not write about Islam:

The generation that came before me were very secular. They just didn’t see the resurgence of Islam coming at all: they were completely unaware of it, and they distanced themselves from the peasants in the village who were ‘backward’ and ‘veiled’. This middle-class, urban generation of the 1960s and 1970s were the ‘city people’. They thought that they had kicked off the veil, and that they were the ones who were going to show the West that they could embrace modernity. So they were also the generation that was postcolonial, nationalistic, against the West but also very close to the West.

(qtd. in Rashid 2012, p. 617)

Based on Aboulela’s statement, it is important to note that the previous generation of Maghrebian diasporic writers tended to neglect addressing Islam, viewing it as a relic of the past and distancing themselves from traditional practices. Those who did touch on Islam often misrepresented it, reflecting a secular and modernist perspective prevalent in the 1960s and 1970s. However, following the global resurgence of religion in the public sphere post-9/11, Maghrebian writers have begun to engage with Islam in their works, signaling a shift towards a postsecular turn in the diasporic literature.

In her article titled “Postsecular Studies”, Lori Branch affirms that postsecularism is a new critical paradigm that “opens up new understandings of religion and secularism as they have been mutually constituted and as they reconfigure themselves in culture. It also opens up new understandings of the cultural forms that mediate the secularism that emerges and the religiousness that remains in modernity” (Branch 2016, p. 94). This has pushed both literary critics and novelists to turn to religion as ‘a candidate for the truth’ as well as a category of analysis. Thus, due to the fact that the Moroccan diaspora literature has always reflected its era, Moroccan writers have started to address religious and spiritual issues. Therefore, in this essay I shall explore the postsecular and spiritual identity in Tahar Ben Jelloun’s A Palace in the Old Village. I will analyze the novel from a postsecular perspective and more specifically from a secular spiritual perspective. My argument is that postsecularism can be best seen as an invaluable analytical tool for literary narratives, and literary studies in general and Moroccan diaspora narratives in particular would benefit from an engagement with postsecular theory. The importance of a postsecular reading lies in the fact that it challenges “the hegemonic universalism of ‘secular’ reason and joins confessional reading to address the failures of the protectionist exclusionism of “secular aesthetics”. It also questions “the formation of the sacred or sacralization in a whole range of interlinked ‘secular’ spheres” (Ni 2016, pp. 51–52). Building upon this, a postsecular reading of Ben Jeloun’s A Palace in the Old Village will push us to interrogate the porous divides, to transcend the secular/religious binary, and to resist reductive truth claims.

2. Diasporic Religion and Identity

The concept of diaspora indicates a specific liminality or incompleteness. That is to say, diasporic identities are constructed within a liminal space. In the words of Bill Ashcroft, “diasporic identities are those which are constantly producing and reproducing themselves anew, through transformation and difference” (Ashcroft 2001, p. 253). Influenced by Stuart Hall (1990), Bill Ashcroft asserts that diasporic identity is not fixed and stable, but hybrid, fragile, and changing through interaction in the contact zone. Samar Dayal in this regard confirms that “the diasporic, always in the waiting rooms of the nation-space, is preserved at least from the illusion of a fixed identity and a prefabricated cultural role” (Dayal 1996, p. 196). With the advent of globalization, global diaspora, and international migration, differences are confronted, boundaries are crossed, cultures are mingled, and identities become blurred. Any research on identity and diaspora must therefore consider a wide range and heterogeneity of identities at any given time, of which diasporic identity is merely one, albeit formative, component. For many authors, writing about diaspora means confronting their own experiences of hybridity and multiple belonging (Kokot et al. 2004, p. 2). What is interesting is that despite the fact that diasporic people are exposed to adopting new affiliations, they are struggling to maintain some real or symbolic affinity with their countries of origin.

As one of the prominent diasporic identity markers, religion serves as a means of preserving cultural practices, traditions, and values within diasporic communities. As Kokot et al. write,

in the context of diaspora, religion has always remained central to paradigmatic definitions, although in current theoretical discussions, the topic of religion seems to have moved into the background. A renewed focus on both sides of diasporic practice—the mobile as well as the rooted—will bring the meaning of religion back to the fore, discussing the meaning of religion both as a factor in forming diasporic social organization, as well as in shaping and maintaining diasporic identities.

(Kokot et al. 2004, p. 7)

From the above quotation, it is important to discern that “there is no sign that scholarship on Religion and Diaspora is abating” (Johnson 2012, p. 108). Religion and diaspora are intertwined in that religion serves as a way for individuals to negotiate their sense of self within the diaspora as well as a source of comfort, solace, and resilience for diaspora members facing challenges such as discrimination, marginalization, or feelings of displacement. In this sense, religion contributes to the formation of diasporic identities. This pushes Alina Pătru to claim that religion is capable of generating “diasporic feelings and attitudes … and that the concept of religious diaspora ought to be treated as an analytic instrument useful both in the research and in the decision-making process” (Pătru 2021, p. 1).

It is worth pointing out that religion provides a sense of continuity with the homeland and helps diasporic individuals maintain a connection to their roots. It also fosters a sense of community and belonging among diaspora members. In a similar vein, religions “provide additional cement to bind a diasporic consciousness” and “enhance social cohesion” (Cohen 1985, p. 189). Furthermore, diasporic individuals navigate multiple identities and belief systems as they straddle different cultural contexts. Over time, religious practices within diasporic communities may evolve and adapt to the new cultural and social contexts in which they find themselves. This process of transformation leads to the emergence of diasporic religions and unique hybrid religious practices that reflect the intersection of diverse cultural influences. Religions in diasporas both influence and are influenced by new locations, practices, and circumstances, leading to continual transformation and adaptation when they become diasporic religions. In Western countries, Islam has evolved within diasporic Muslim communities, adapting to local cultures and norms. This results in the emergence of European Islam, influenced by interactions with new environments and issues like pluralism and discrimination. These communities have established institutions blending traditional Islamic teachings with local values, reflecting adaptation processes. The continual transformation of Islam in diasporic settings illustrates the dynamic interplay between religion and environment, showcasing mutual influence and adaptation. Diasporic religions consist of the customs of uprooted social groups whose connection is not mainly centered on religion, but whose behaviors, expressions, and emotions towards a distant homeland are influenced by and expressed through a religious framework (Johnson 2012, p. 104). For Johnson, religions serve as vehicles for diasporas, even as diasporas, in key respects, ‘make’ religions (Johnson 2012, p. 108). Phrased differently, “diasporas do not merely express or carry religions: in a certain sense, they make them” (Johnson 2007, p. 42). This indicates that religion and diaspora are mutually affected in the sense that diasporic religions are memory performances of place, staged in a space, and how they are shaped by the tension between past memories and present cultural transformations.

To borrow Paul Christopher Johnson’s terms, “religions serve as important carriers of diasporas, even as diasporas extend religions into new places and situations of practice, sometimes invigorating them, sometimes threatening them, always transforming and remaking them”. He adds that when indigenous, national, or global religions become diasporic religions, they are transformed into something different due to their newfound mobility and extension across various locations. This transformation requires them to adapt and reintegrate into new circumstances and environments away from their original origins (Johnson 2012, p. 95). Diasporic religions reflect the dynamic nature of religious traditions as they interact with new environments and cultures while maintaining connections to their original roots. This shows that diaspora members adapt their religious practices and beliefs to conform to secular norms in their host countries, leading to the emergence of hybrid identities that blend cultural, religious, and secular influences. This displays the fact that diasporic religion is postsecular in nature. Postsecularism challenges the strict boundaries between religion and secularism, emphasizing the continued significance of religion in contemporary societies. In the context of diaspora communities, postsecular perspectives highlight the ways in which religion remains a vital aspect of identity and community cohesion. Postsecularism provides a framework for understanding how diasporic individuals negotiate their religious identities in secular contexts, recognizing the ongoing relevance of faith and spirituality in shaping individual and collective experiences within diasporic communities. This postsecular spirit can be found in contemporary literary expressions (El Amrani 2021, p. 12).

Postsecularism and secular spirituality are clearly manifested in Tahar Ben Jelloun’s A Palace in the Old Village. Postsecularism is an epistemology that merges reason and revelation, in that both secular and religious voices are calling for a rapprochement between faith and reason. The postsecular is caught in a double bind between religion and secularism. “The postsecular”, to use Ratti’s words, “neither proselytizes secularism nor sentimentalizes religion” (Ratti 2013, p. ixxi). It preserves the best aspects of both religion and secularism, while siding with neither. The postsecular critique therefore argues for the need for a turn beyond secularism, moving beyond the secular/religious binary opposition. Most theorists of the postsecular, in fact, go to great lengths to say that postsecularism is not about the end of secularism, but rather about an attempt to overcome, as Vincent Geoghegan has succinctly put it, “the antinomy of secularism [and] religiosity in a manner which recognizes the strengths and weaknesses” of both (qtd. in Huggan 2010, p. 754). Talal Asad rightly notes that “to make a rigid division between the sacred and the secular is surely to impoverish both” (Asad 2003, p. 9).

By the same token, in the words of Graham Huggan, faith and reason (religious–secular) “are better seen as mutually enriching and, in the process of dialectical convergence, are mutually transformed” (Huggan 2010, p. 754). “Postsecularism may be more valuable as a critical methodology—as a specific set of ways of reading narrative—than as an indicator of social realities; and that it is more useful in this sense to the literary critic than to the sociologist” (Huggan 2010, p. 754). Put precisely, written mainly by new voices from the non-western world, postsecular narratives openly destabilize the religious/secular dichotomy. Postsecular texts, including Tahar Ben Jelloun’s A Palace in the Old Village, critique Eurocentric secularism and institutional religion and promote religion as an individualized faith independent of organized religion. Furthermore, the term secular spirituality is meant “to convey the contemporary phenomenon of spirituality as experienced in different spheres not associated with structured, institutionalized religion” (Du Toit 2006, p. 1251). Du Toit also confirms that “secular spirituality, being the potential of all experience to assume a spiritual dimension, affects everyone. It is not confined to the religious or transcendent sphere but characterises the profane, secular life world” (p. 1253), and therefore it “seeks to integrate the natural and supernatural dimensions of human life meaningfully” (p. 1251). That is to say, secular spirituality is based on a convergence between the material and the spiritual, the spiritual and the techno-scientific; it serves as a bridge between faith and reason, religion and secularism. It is, as Celia Kourie puts it, a refusal of “secular-life-as-not-spiritual” (Kourie 2006, p. 80).

3. Interrogating Postsecular Identity in Tahar Ben Jelloun’s A Palace in the Old Village

One of the most controversial literary figures of the Maghrebian literature in general and the Moroccan diaspora literature in particular is Tahar Ben Jelloun. In his “Deconstructing Home and Exile: The Subversive Politics of Tahar Ben Jelloun’s With Downcast Eyes, ”Salah Moukhlis maintains that Tahar Ben Jelloun was criticized for being “a self-orientalizing author who ‘prostitutes’ his work to his French audience”. He “has constantly been under attack by critics accusing him of exoticizing his culture, writing primarily to cater to the needs of a Western audience, and feeding male fantasies about women by orientalizing his own people” (Moukhlis 2006, n.p). Referring specifically to Ben Jelloun’s Sand Child (1985) and Sacred Night (1987), Anouar Majid locates him amongst a clique of Westernized writers whose work contributes to reinforcing the epistemological attack on Islam. He confirms “the West’s crusade against Islam has been joined by Westernized Muslim writers such as Tahar ben Jelloun, Driss Chraibi, and the Indian-born Salman Rushdie, who have all attempted to depict Islam as a reactionary force that has set back or destroyed the freedoms of women and writers and eclipsed the traditions of non-Arab peoples” (Majid 1998, p. 325). Yet, I may venture to say that Ben Jelloun brings his Western readers closer to understanding the Arab Muslim world than any other Maghrebian writer. His works do not undermine Islamic values or beliefs. Rather, what is questioned and contested in his works is the very tendency to sustain male hegemony and superstitious practices in the name of Islam. Ben Jelloun is against the use of Islam as a means for political exploitation and an excuse to normalize subordination and maintain dominance.

A recipient of Western literary awards, such as the Prix Goncourt, Tahar Ben Jelloun has become a prominent Maghrebian author. His fiction has circulated widely; his novels L’Enfant de Sable (1985) and La Nuit Sacrée (1987), for instance, have been translated into several languages, granting him entry into the sphere of world literature. In her article entitled “Between Francophonie and World Literature in French: Tahar Ben Jelloun’s Evolving Authority”, Mary Anne Lewis contends Tahar Ben Jelloun “is often read as representative of and speaking for, alternatively, Moroccans, Africans, Arabs, and so on” (Lewis 2016, p. 308). Ben Jelloun’s novel A Palace in the Old Village was written in French in 2009 and translated into English by Linda Coverdale in 2011. Through the novel, Tahar Ben Jelloun tells the elegiac and moving story of Mohammed, an ordinary man from a small village in Morocco, who feels completely lost in the fast moving, modern world.3. Mohammed had to change “from one time to another, one life to another”. In 1962, this young peasant was persuaded to leave his remote village in Morocco and join the immigrant labor force in France. Now forty years later, he is about to start his retirement and this new situation preoccupies and worries him deeply. Mohammed, the protagonist of the novel, is portrayed as “a prisoner” (Ben Jelloun 2011, p. 5), suffering from an identity crisis. He “was passing from one time to another, one life to another. He was changing centuries, countries, customs. He felt as if his head were too small to deal with all that, and he paced like a caged animal. Too many new and unexpected things. Too many changes” (p. 98). Hence, Mohammed was not ready to keep abreast of the changes around him and refused to integrate into French society. He says the following:

I’ve been sad even since I came to France, a country that has nothing to do with my sorrow but hasn’t managed to make me smile, to give me reasons to be happy, that’s simply how it is. I can’t help it and I’m not the only one…we’ll never be one hundred percent Frenchified. Let’s be honest, that’s not our thing. We’re Moroccans, Algerians, Tunisians, Libyans—we’re not going to pretend, just to get some documents, and it’s not good when guys who can’t even speak correctly call themselves French.

(pp. 43–47)

One can infer from the above quotation that Mohammed never feels at ease in France and is still a product of his own culture. Said differently, he finds it hard to adapt himself into a secular French milieu. Indeed, life in the secular West is repeatedly depicted in Tahar Ben Jelloun’s novel as unsatisfactory and fragmented.

Since cultural conflict is expressed through the prism of the private, domestic sphere, the theme of broken or dysfunctional families is a recurring one. For instance, Mohammed loves his children, but wishes they were less European. Their lack of interest in their heritage annoys him. His children consider France as home and do not share their father’s fascination for the old village in Morocco. They “would speak nothing but French to him, which made him deeply unhappy. He had patiently taught them a few elements of Berber, but for nothing: they persisted in speaking French and made fun of him when he mispronounced it” (p. 17). His “kids did whatever they wanted. He had no say” (p. 24). According to Mohammed, “the spirit of family…was no longer honored in France. This slippage shocked him”. (p. 77). He says “it’s hard to talk to our children about our roots. They’ve no idea what home means to us” (p. 26). Alienated in France, Mohammed says “my children have Arab features and gestures, but they claim they are “assimilated”, a word I’ve never understood” (p. 50). He advises his son not to “forget where you come from, my son. Tell me: is it true that you call yourself Richard? Richard Ben Abdallah! It doesn’t go together, you’ve fiddled with the first name, but the family name betrays you” (p. 51). Thus, Mohammed cursed “Lala França for stealing his children” (p. 121).4 He is lonely, depressed, lost and unable to fathom what is happening around him.

Grappling with emotional and psychological grief due to the fact that his children have “become little Europeans” (p. 32) and his “family had broken up” (p. 115), Mohammed finds himself and protection in his religion and ancestral roots. This shows that his anger and sadness stem from his lack of authority and inability to teach his ‘assimilated’ children the value of Islam and his native country’s traditions. By implication, a contemporary accelerated form of globalization creates a sense of insecurity within individuals. To seek comfort and resistance, they resort to religion. Mohammed is not aware of the global changes in values and ethics, and he does his best to fortify himself against these transformations by turning to Islam and his spiritual roots. In the novel, he is portrayed as a God-fearing man and “a faithful believer” (p. 176). For him, the Quran is both a source of his inspiration, his existence and his comfort:

He opened the Koran and pretended to immerse himself in it. Even though he couldn’t read it, he loved the company of this book. He loved its calligraphy, its binding of green leatherette, the whole aura of its importance. It was the only book he’d taken with him on the day he’d left Morocco. It was wrapped in a piece of white cloth that had been cut, following tradition, from his father’s shroud. This book was everything to Mohammed: his culture, his identity, his passport, his pride, his secret. He opened it delicately, pressed it to his heart, brought it to his lips, and gently kissed it. He believed that everything was there. Those who can read find within it all the wisdom of the world, all its explanations.

(p. 9)

Ben Jelloun here attempts to present Islam as faith, as a spiritual practice; a religiosity which is not associated with any political doctrine or organization. For Mohammed, Islam is elevated above all other identities; it comforts and empowers him. Islam is, in fact, the sole identity signifier that defines him and shapes his life. Mohammed’s religiosity is a paradigmatic example of what is so-called ‘Moroccan Islam’, a moderate Islam that is closely integrated and reconciled with Moroccan cultural specificities. When Mohammed was homesick, lost, and estranged in France, the Quran was the only thing that soothes him.

It is worth noting that Islam is a redemptive force for Mohammed in the face of his retirement and extremist French secular lifestyle. It is Mohammed’s weapon against the intrusive and invasive influence of Western secular culture:

Forty years in France hadn’t changed him. Not one whit. He remained intact, inviolable, impeccable: naturally and hermetically sealed. Nothing of France had found a place in his heart or his soul. It hadn’t even been a conscious, deliberate decision. He was what he was; nothing could change him. There were millions like him. They emigrated as if encased in armor, fiercely resisting all outside influence: we have our lives, our ways, and they have theirs. Each to his own—no intrusion, no meddling. Mohammed never even lifted a finger to defend himself against what he called the contamination of LaFrance, for he was foreign, utterly unreachable. The village and its traditions back home lived on in him, coming between him and reality. He was in his world, where he lived without much introspection. His touchstone for everything was Islam: My religion is my identity. I am a Muslim before being a Moroccan, before becoming an immigrant. My refuge is Islam, which calms me and brings me peace; it is the last revealed religion, destined to close a lengthy chapter that God began a long, long time ago. Here they have their faith, and we have ours. We are not made for them or they for us. The contact is clear: I work, they pay me, I raise my children, and then one day we all go home to our house, yes, because the house is my country, my native land.

(pp. 134–35)

The most important point to be drawn here is that Islam is exclusively the most important constituent of Mohammed’s identity. Islam is his source of peace, calm, and pride. As a matter of fact, for Mohammed, “Islam was more than a religion: it was a code of ethics, a culture, an identity. What would my father be without Islam? Mourad wondered. A lost man. He finds religion soothing. He loves his rituals; they bring him a peace sense of well-being” (p. 112). It can be inferred that Mohammed’s identity is primarily rooted in Islamic consciousness. This indicates that he defines his identity in religious terms. Despite being a migrant worker in France for forty years, “Mohammed’s mind was elsewhere, however, in Mecca or the mosque of his childhood. His thoughts had turned toward the village, back to a colorless time of strange solitude” (p. 13). Thus, through his novel, Tahar Ben Jelloun focuses on the role of religion in the lives of ordinary Muslims. He seeks to confirm that for many French Muslims of immigrant origin, religion now provides a culture that France itself has not managed to instill. Simply put, Islam, according to Ben Jelloun, provides individuals a context of meaning and a hopeful sense to survive in the West. In his article titled “The Aura of Authenticity”, Aamir R. Mufti opines that there is a “mood” in current scholarship and theory in which religion as “belief, ritual, institution, worldview, or identity” is seen as a means of healing the “shattered totality of life in modernity” (Mufti 2000, pp. 87–88). In this regard, Ben Jelloun may say that Islam is the constitutive feature of Moroccan or Arab identity.5 In other words, he wants to emphasize that Muslims turn toward Islam as a source of identity, meaning, stability, development, power, and hope.

To seek solace and salvation, Mohammed not only resorts to religion, but to his home as well. As I said earlier, home is often invoked as sacred, as a crucible of meaning and identity in the contemporary diasporic world. In particular, land and landscapes adopt a spiritual meaning. In their book titled Mapping the Sacred: Religion, Geography and Postcolonial Literatures, Jamie S. Scott and Paul Simpson-Housley remind us that colonialism began with the “invasive appropriation of physical land and material resources”. The sacredness of the land is then altered as a consequence of the establishment of invasive territories and borders. Postcolonial writings therefore enact and represent the way in which land and landscapes, as a result of colonialism, “maybe viewed as now sacred, now desacralized, now resacralized” (Scott and Simpson-Housley 2001, p. xxvii). In A Palace in the Old Village, Ben Jelloun depicts homeland as a sacred space that might provide remedies to social ills and alternatives to current troubled living conditions in the diasporic world.6. Although Mohammed has lived and worked in France for almost forty years, he never considers it his home. Home, for him, will always be the village that he grew up in. He admits “here in Yvelines I have never felt at home…I am not at home where I live. Perhaps my children don’t ask themselves that question, so much the better, but that means…that I came here so I wouldn’t feel at home and they would” (Ben Jelloun 2011, p. 53). His village “was a part of his body and whole being” (p. 97) and he is nostalgic to his childhood days which had “the taste of pure honey and argan oil” (p. 13). For Mohammed, his village is a sacred space and its rituals have a spiritual significance, not contaminated by the intrusive forces of globalization. Indeed, in the diasporic literature, home is where individuals feel a deep sense of belonging, welcome, and fulfillment, typically associated with their ancestral land. Through the novel, it is evident that home and religion are synonymous in that “religious performance becomes more important as a source of ethnic affiliation and for maintaining memories of home” (Johnson 2007, p. 41).

What is at stake here is the fact that Mohammed is the only one who is attached to Morocco, whereas his children “see it through the eyes of foreigners, and most of them don’t even speak the language, so the truth of it is, it’s our fault, for not teaching them Arabic or Berber” (Ben Jelloun 2011, p. 27). He told his children not to

forget where you come from, where your parents come from; it’s important: wherever you go, always remember that your native land is written on your face, and it’s there whether you like it or not. Me, I never had any doubt about my country; you kids today, you don’t know what country you’re from, and yes, you say you’ve been Frenchified, but I think you’re the only ones who believe that—you think the police treat you like a 100 percent Frenchman…Wherever you go, whatever work you do, you can count on one thing, that Morocco will never let you go, will always be with you, impossible to forget, because Morocco is emigrating with you, following you, guiding and protecting you, sticking to your skin, so you must never get discouraged, never hesitate to talk to your compatriots when you feel homesick.

(pp. 50–94)

As a migrant worker, Mohammed is spiritually attached to Morocco. For this reason, he does not want to leave his body in a French grave and hence he prefers “to die at home, not with strangers, foreigners who know nothing of my religion, my traditions” (p. 70). In order to escape the long, boring hours of retirement, Mohammed returns to his village and builds a palace with his life’s savings; Mohammed’s house “wasn’t a house anymore; it was a corner of paradise, a kind of palace with gardens, parks, animals of all kinds. A tale from One Thousand and One Nights. A huge carpet woven by hundreds of hands…The house of happiness, of harmony and peace” (pp. 125–132), which will accommodate his whole family. In her article entitled “Unlike(ly) Home(s) “Self-orientalisation” and Irony in Moroccan Diasporic Literature”, Ieme van der Poel argues Tahar Ben Jelloun’s A Palace in the Old Village “describes the definitive return to the country of origin” (van der Poel 2012, p. 224). Mohammed’s return to his village is a spiritual journey in the sense that he wants to seek his spiritual roots and rescue his children and grandchildren from a ‘meaningless” secular life in France.7. Putting it crudely, Mohammed’s spiritual return to his village can be read as an escape from and criticism of a French secular life as not being spiritual. Mohammed believes the secular life in France has deprived him of his children and spiritual security. In short, the return to the ‘sacred’ village is a manifestation of Mohammed’s quest for spirituality; his homecoming journey is a spiritual one.

Interestingly, A Palace in the Old Village may generally be read from a post-ideological perspective and more specifically from a secular spiritual perspective. “The novel is a comprehensive and well-informed social and political critique of both France and Morocco” (p. 225). It is also a critique of both Eurocentric secularism and Islamic fundamentalism. It counters the reductive representations of Islam fostered by Islamic extremism. Ben Jelloun uses the character of Mohammed in such a way as to resist the luring discourse of radical Islamism.8. Although Mohammed is a devout Muslim and faith plays a big role in his life, his views are moderate. It is obvious that Mohammed is against the institutionalized and politicized forms of Islam. More simply put, Mohammed’s religiosity is individualized and private, away from a political religion.9 This is embodied in his contempt for the imams in his community who foment radicalism:

Mohammed would have liked to reply but hadn’t the courage to tell the imam, for example, that it was imbeciles like him who praise jihad, babbling of paradise and martyrdom, yes, retards like him who send floundering young men who can’t find their own way in life off to die, because liars and hypocrites like him push youngsters into the arms of death, saying: you’ll be real martyrs, as true and good as the ones in the days of the prophet, and you’ll be buried in clothes soaked in the blood of sacrifice, not in the shroud of an ordinary death! Make your ablutions in preparation, for it is better to enter the house of God cleansed in readiness for eternal prayer.

(10)

The passage quoted above is an evident indication that Mohammed is against both the politicization of Islam and the fundamentalist discourses of religious radicalism. Mohammed has no interest in politics and finds solace and strength in Islam as a spiritual practice. Islam in A Palace in the Old Village is largely divorced from politics. It is seen as an instance of spiritual involvement, or secular spirituality; a spirituality that is independent of organized religions or institutions. Ben Jelloun presents Islam as a personal matter of faith, expressed in everyday practices in the private sphere.

Through his novel, Ben Jelloun points out that it is important to separate politics and religion. For him, religion is a personal matter, which concerns the relationship between the individual and God. To use Islam for political ends is pure demagoguery, a means of oppressing people. In brief, Tahar Ben Jelloun’s works are not meant to undermine the values of Islamic religion, but to condemn the very tendency to exploit this religion for rationalizing inacceptable cultural practices. He seems to say, “the mistake we make is to attribute to religions the errors and fanaticism of human beings” (qtd. in Jaggi 2006, n.p). This demonstrates the fact that religion is not always the site of the exclusive and particularistic. “Religion’s influence on the public sphere is complex because people can invoke it for different purposes. It has what scholars have called a “Janus face”, serving as “the carrier not only of exclusive, particularist, and primordial identities but also of inclusive, universalist, and transcending ones” (Corstange 2012, p. 118). On the other hand, Ben Jelloun has a critical stance against ‘prohibitory secularism’, an anti-religious version of secularism, and he is in favor of ‘inclusive secularism’ that tolerates religion.

It is quite interesting that although Mohammed’s son Mourad, who is married to a Spanish woman named Maria, is deeply assimilated into a French society and disconnected from Islam, he becomes frustrated and indignant when his wife attacks Islam. Ben Jelloun wants to show here that Islam is based on Fitra, a natural tendency, and hence Muslims might be spiritually strong despite their disconnection from their religious heritage. In his visit to Spain, Mourad often

wondered why the Spanish were more successful than Moroccans, and his wife had come up with an answer that shocked him: it was because of religion, because of Islam! Outraged, Mourad reacted as if he were an imam—although he himself never observed a single Muslim ritual. When Maria tried to clarify what she meant and described how Francoism has used the Catholic Church to cling to power, Mourad was hurt. Islam could not be a force for backwardness! Maria carefully explained that no religion on earth encouraged change and modernity.

(Ben Jelloun 2011, p. 112)

Through Maria’s explanation and Mourad’s emotional response, Ben Jelloun emphasizes the importance of faith as a personal belief system that should not be solely defined by political associations or historical contexts. By highlighting the spiritual aspects of Islam, the author presents faith as a source of individual identity and moral guidance rather than a tool for political manipulation or control. Ben Jelloun distinguishes between personal faith and political manipulation of religion. Mourad’s outrage at the suggestion that Islam could be a force for backwardness highlights his personal connection to the faith separate from any political connotations.

Through Maria’s explanation of how Francoism used the Catholic Church to maintain power in Spain, Ben Jelloun endorses the idea of religion–state separation by highlighting the detrimental effects of a close relationship between religion and the state. By shedding light on the negative consequences of such a close relationship, the author suggests that when religion becomes a tool for political control, it hinders progress and modernization. Maria’s assertion that no religion encourages change and modernity can be seen as Ben Jelloun’s commentary on the potential conflict between religious doctrines and societal progress. The contemporary perception of Islam and state as inseparable entities is a historical construction rather than an essential part of Islam. Early Islamic history includes examples of religion–state separation, and it is a mistake to see Islam as inherently rejecting such separation. It must be acknowledged here that one of the key reasons behind the flourishing of science and economy in the Muslim world between the eighth and eleventh centuries is that “Islamic scholars enjoyed and insisted on more independence from state authorities from the eighth to the mid-eleventh century, in comparison to subsequent centuries” (Kuru 2019, p. 116). Nevertheless, the political power in the Muslim-majority countries nowadays is monopolizing the religious affairs, claiming that it protects Islam from being hijacked by jihadists or fundamentalists and, at the same time, it prevents the emergence of independent scholars who could produce new readings and interpretations of Islamic texts. With this point in mind, Ben Jelloun wants to argue that state power inherently and inevitably corrupts any religion, including Islam.

By writing about Islam more as a faith and less as a political or institutionalized system, Ben Jelloun aims to defend Islamic humanism and highlight an individualized form of religiosity. Throughout the novel, Tahar Ben Jelloun affirms “if we don’t criticize ourselves, we’ll never get anywhere” (Ben Jelloun 2011, p. 5). Ben Jelloun here carries out a kind of cultural auto-criticism. By criticizing both Islam and secularism, Ben Jelloun calls for the secularization of Islam and spiritualization of secularism. In one of his interviews, Tahar Ben Jelloun asserts that

some people have turned religion into a war ideology. Perhaps this is why the West views Islam as a threat and a terrorist ideology…A new dialogue must be resumed between us and the others to ensure continuity and coexistence between future generations in the West and the Muslim world. We must overcome the state of mutual ignorance…It is the duty of the West to shoulder its responsibility and open up to the Muslims and imbibe itself with the history of Islam and its enlightened civilisation and not to join the others in turning Islam into a religion of hatred while it is perfectly innocent of it.

(Al-Saghir 2019, n.p)

Thus, Tahar Ben Jelloun is a public intellectual who is critical of French laws about immigration, citizenship requirements, the headscarf affair, and laïcité, as well as a postsecular writer who moves beyond static dogmas, calling for a dialogue between Islam and the West and the secular and the religious. Taking great comfort in his Muslim faith, Mohammed attains a sense of the sacred without allegiance to any religious movement or doctrine. He finds his rooted identity in spirituality and postsecularity. Another manifestation of secular spirituality in the novel is personified by the fact that Ben Jelloun advocates the need to promote the co-existence of religion and secularism. In the words of Yehudit Ronen, “Ben Jelloun’s dual identity as a Moroccan Arab Muslim and a French-speaking European enables him to appeal to both cultures and to maintain a dialogue between them, upholding the values of interculturality” (Ronen 2001, p. 3). Ben Jelloun himself confirms he tries to play the role of intermediary between two cultures, two identities, and two worlds. He is a good translator of religion and secularism, Morocco and France. In his novel, he attempts to construct a bridging of tradition and modernity and a rapprochement between the profane and the spiritual. He says, “j’écris pour dire le Maghreb à la France et la France aux Maghrébins. J’essaie de rapprocher peuples et cultures avec ce que je sais faire” (qtd. in Bourget 2002, p. 92). Adopting a middle-of-the-road, non-confrontational approach, Ben Jelloun’s fictional world is structured along the two axes of tradition and modernity, religion and reason.

In A Palace in the Old Village, however, Mohammed fails to play the role of intermediary between France and Morocco, Islam and secularism. Despite Mohammed’s homecoming finally bringing him a kind of peace, he realizes that his village, a symbol of traditional Islam, does not warmly welcome him. He feels that he is accepted neither by France nor by his village. This is because he is not conscious of the changes around him and therefore, he is depicted as having a static mode of thinking which has made him unable to reconcile between religion and secularism, France and Morocco. When Mohammed was sure that “his children wouldn’t come, he decided to fall ill, gravely ill. That was the solution” (Ben Jelloun 2011, p. 116). Lonely and extremely sick in his village, Mohammed says

If I were in France, he thought, I would be in a hospital, where doctors and specialists would confer over my case and give me medicine to help me sleep without nightmares. Perhaps they would even summon my family to my bedside. LaFrance is a wonderful country because it takes good care of its sick. Here you’re better off never setting foot in a hospital; I’m telling you for your own good!

(p. 166)

At issue here is the fact that Mohammed discovers that his decision to return to Morocco turns out to be a fiasco. Although he has spent forty years in France, he never praises it. But, when he realizes that he is dying, he praises France for taking care of “its sick” and accordingly prefers to die in the “comfortable…colonial armchair” (p. 167). It is discernible that Mohammed finds solace neither in secular France nor in his religious village. Therefore, Tahar Ben Jelloun criticizes both Islamism and secularism for not being able to provide meaning and solace, and the death of Mohammed is a case in point. It is obvious that Mohammed’s death is due to his failure to bring together Islam and secularism. Ben Jelloun wants to tell us that if Mohammed had reconciled Islam and secularism, his life would not have been such a failure.

Importantly enough, Mohammed’s death can be looked at as what some critics refer to as the end of ideologies. In this sense, Tahar Ben Jelloun tries to claim ideologies such as secularism and Islamism have become “exhausted”, to use Hamid Dabashi’s adjective (see Dabashi 2012), and thus we are witnessing the emergence of a postsecular era where religion and secularism are mutually inclusive. In A Palace in the Old Village, Ben Jelloun contends the secular and the religious do not exclude, but rather complement each other. In this regard, Talal Asad argues “the secular…is neither continuous with the religious that supposedly preceded it (that is, it is not the latest phase of a sacred origin) nor a simple break from it (that is, it is not the opposite, an essence that excludes the sacred). I take the secular to be a concept that brings together certain behaviors, knowledges, and sensibilities in modern life” (Asad 2003, p. 25). With this in mind, Ben Jelloun’s novel can be viewed as a postsecular text in that it seeks to find the common ground between religion and secularism. Mohammed’s death has a symbolic meaning; it refers to the failure of French multiculturalism and ‘laïcité’ because of their essentialist and extremist standpoints as well as to the end of an Islamist project that calls for the return to the pristine age of Islam in which the Qur’an and hadiths are the only guiding principles for Muslims. What is more, in the original French text Au pays, Ben Jelloun uses both Dieu and Allah throughout the novel. As a postsecularist, he wants to address the French and Maghrebian readers, oscillating between home and abroad, Western modernity and Muslim tradition. In the English version, however, the translator, Linda Coverdale, uses only the word God because she addresses the global audience. Indeed, both choices fit in the postsecular theory in the sense that both the writer and the translator promote a “postsecular imagination”, to borrow Manav Ratti’s terms, and secular spirituality, contributing to the ongoing debate about the emergence of postsecular literature, postsecular society and postsecularization in the world. Further, through his novel, we notice that Ben Jelloun negotiates religion and secularism and hence his work belongs to a type of fiction that goes beyond secularism. Put in different words, it is obvious that through his work, he does not reject the secular, but brings it in a constant dialogue with the religious. Ben Jelloun does not privilege religion as a source that is an alternative to secular modernity. This implies that he does not elevate religion above secular rationalism, but he privileges a postsecular form of identity that valorizes a nonsecular secularism and a non-religious religion. Mohammed’s son and daughter married Europeans and this refutes Rudyard Kipling’s infamous poetic line that the “East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet” and Samuel Huntington’s clash of civilization theory. Hence, Ben Jelloun’s novel goes beyond the orthodox dichotomies of home/exile, East/West, Self/Other, colonizer/colonized, and secular/spiritual.

Intriguingly, the death of Mohammed at the end of the novel is also an indication that the assumption of a pure and unchanged identity is no longer valid today. The novel clearly shows that the perceived notions of identity as a historically and geographically determined entity are unsustainable in a postcolonial and global context. Salah Moukhlis asserts “more than exotic and entertaining stories, Ben Jelloun’s work aims seriously at decolonizing Moroccan and French sociologies from essentialized concepts of cultural purity. Reading Ben Jelloun is giving up our sense of continuity and abandoning our traditional understanding of reality. The truth in his writings is that there is no one truth, no coherent structure, and no stable identities” (Moukhlis 2006, n.p).10 Mohammed’s loss stands for the sorry state of all Maghrebian countries and by extension other Arab countries. His death is a proof that, as Abdellah Laroui puts it, “the refusal of Western culture does not in itself constitute a culture, and the delirious roaming around the lost self shall never stir it up from dust” (qtd. in Amine 2018, p. 11). Mohammed yearns for a pure and uncontaminated identity in his village, but he is not aware of the fact that both his village and villagers have changed.

It can be argued that the villagers did not accept Mohammed because they themselves are like Mohammed. They are lost and fragmented and hence they need to find something which can bring them protection and comfort. That is why, when Mohammed dies, they believe God has sent them a saint. In the eyes of the villagers, Mohammed is “our saint, who has gone far away to return by the grace of God” (Ben Jelloun 2011, p. 175). Thus, the superstitious villagers declare Mohammed as their saint after his death:

By the fortieth day, the earth had swallowed up his head. Someone cried out, Gone! Mohammed has gone to God! The village has its saint! We have our saint! God has not forgotten us! The house has not been built for nothing; it will be his tomb, his marabout! God is great! God is great! An old woman sitting on a stone spoke up: Wonderful! We haven’t any water, we haven’t any wheat, we haven’t any electricity, but we have a saint!

(p. 175)

The villagers do not welcome Mohammed because they themselves are suffering from an identity crisis, and when Mohammed dies, they declare him a saint. Having a fragmented identity, the villagers are in need of a spiritual identity to be used as a bulwark against the drought and poverty that are plaguing the village. It is important to point out here that Tahar Ben Jelloun criticizes the traditional religious dogma that hinders any kind of rational cultural and religious reform. Significantly enough, a postsecular reading of Ben Jelloun’s novel challenges us “to take up the ethical and political burden of looking beyond this textual world to a diversity of ontological realities and to the real social conditions that enable real persons to live well in the real world” (Ni 2016, p. 65). “Ben Jelloun is not only a writer but also an intellectual involved in bringing light into the darkness: in his former home, Morocco, by opposing old, entrenched ideas, in his new one, France, by fighting a growing racism” (Ohana 2003, p. 66). In fewer words, Ben Jelloun is a true intellectual who tells painful truths and exposes the evil that exists beneath the shiny surface of society.

4. Conclusions

All in all, throughout A Palace in the Old Village, Tahar Ben Jelloun claims that the old boundaries separating the secular and the religious have already crumbled. As a liberal Muslim voice of reconciliation and moderation, Ben Jelloun proposes the notion of transmodernity, or postsecular modernity, in which both modernity and tradition, religion and secularism co-realize themselves in a process of mutual creative fertilization. Similarly, Bill Ashcroft argues “it is in the area of global culture that the key to local agency may be found. The message of local responses to global culture is the same message delivered by colonial experience: no matter how oppressive the system, or how ubiquitous its effects, it is not immune to appropriation and adaptation by local communities for their own benefit” (Ashcroft 2001, p. 209). It is of paramount importance to point out that both global culture and local culture might find their agency in the postsecular project that reduces the gaps between the West and the Global South and goes beyond the self/other and us/them animosity. This is embodied in the burgeoning trend in literary studies that calls for a postsecular vision of the world. It is obvious that we are witnessing the emergence of postsecular literature and criticism initiated by postcolonial and migrant writers. Employing postsecularism as a critical tool to examine A Palace in the Old Village, Ben Jelloun is upholding postsecular values by negotiating instances of extremism and communalism that mark the failures of both organized religions and Eurocentric secularism.

Throughout his novel, Ben Jelloun attempts to spiritualize secularism and secularize Islam, acknowledging the human yearning for spirituality and some sense of religious belonging as central and inherent to human nature. Ben Jelloun passionately advocates for and enthusiastically celebrates diasporic religious practices and postsecular identities, which serve as catalysts for fostering a long-term and critical discourse that includes tradition and modernity, religion and secularism, and the global and the local. His contributions not only encourage the development of a harmonious world based on dialogue rather than monologue, but also support the discovery of interconnection and mutual understanding across varied cultural and ideological frameworks. Like Ben Jelloun, Mohammed Arkoun challenges extremist forms of secularism and religion. Adopting poststructuralist tools in his analysis of sacred texts, Arkoun, as a progressive Muslim intellectual, reads Islam outside the conceptual framework of orthodoxy. He re-reads and re-interprets Islam progressively using modern analytical methods in order to redefine Islam as a viable alternative to Westernization. Considered as a diasporic Maghrebian intellectual, Arkoun presents a view of a humanistic Islam that is very similar to Ben Jelloun’s postsecular spirituality.