Experimental Visions of Modern Morocco: Expertise, Popularization, and Everyday Technologies in the Work of ʿAbd al-Salam al-Diyuri

Abstract

AbstractThis article examines the work and trajectory of ʿAbd al-Salam al-Diyuri, a Moroccan engineer educated in Egypt who became a nationalist writer, editor, and publisher during the last decade of the French Protectorate (1912–56). One of only a few Moroccan engineers trained in Arabic during this period, al-Diyuri developed a vision of modernization rooted in the popularization of technical knowledge that distinguished him from colonial engineers as well as nationalist elites. French experts exercised an epistemic dominance over the practice of engineering under the protectorate as well as after Morocco's independence. In this context, al-Diyuri's arguments traced the contours of an alternative future for the country—one that tied decolonization to the cultivation of technical competencies among the public at large. This article follows the path of a nationalist engineer and intellectual whose work both embodied and attempted to move beyond a contradiction between the democratization of knowledge and the demands of development.