6. Moroccan Intellectuals Between Decolonisation and the Arab Cold War

Socialist regimes in the Arab world during the decolonization period in the 1960s/70s excluded the monarchic kingdom of Morocco from the realm of the Non-Aligned Movement and the revolutionary intellectual fervour sweeping the region at the time. This in turn affected Moroccan intellectuals and writers. This chapter asks: how did Moroccan intellectuals engage with the decolonizing movement while negotiating their position in relation to the Arab world and France/Europe? Intriguingly, most of them took to writing novels as a form to express their political views. The chapter therefore further asks, how did their novels carry the mark of the ideological struggle of the time? And how was the local debate on “engagement” shaped by these struggles?