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Leila Abouzeid, Year of the Elephant: A Moroccan Woman's Journey Toward Independence and Other Stories , trans. Barbara Parmenter (Modern Middle Eastern Literature in Translation Series) (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1989). Pp. 131.

Professor Willis's "Orientalism" comes out quite literally in a section in Chapter 4 headed "The Eastern Experience" where he shows both his love of archaism (a dominant stylistic trait) and mystification. For him there seems to exist a quasi-mythical land called "The East"—rather as it did for many 19th-century European romantics—monolithic and mysterious (he even compares the hajj for Africans to the Grand Tour of Europe for the English). Hence African pilgrims sought contacts (in Arabia) who could "breach the intimacy of Eastern society" (pp. 80-81), al-Hajj Umar stayed there for three years, storing up impressions of the East" (p. 84), and at last "we reach the climax of his Eastern experience" (p. 86), for he had advanced from being "one who held no prominence on the Eastern religious scene" (p. 87) to being one who "etches his cipher on the memory of the East" (loc. cit.). Here we have in just a few pages most of the Eurocentric cliches about the central lands of Islam that Edward Said chided Orientalists for—and rightly so—a decade ago. Alas this, among much else, seems to have passed Professor Willis by. Sadly, this is not the book on al-Hajj Umar's life and thought that we have been waiting for. The gap on the shelf remains. It deserves to be filled with a serious study of al-Hajj Umar's mysticism and Islamic roots of the Tijani teachings he expounded, not least their relationship to the teachings of that most brilliant spiritual successor of al-Hallaj, Ibn alArabi.