Abstract

In a land mark in travel literature documenting an excursion from the United States to the Holy Land entitled The Innocents Abroad or The New Pilgrims' Progress, Mark Twain (Samuel Langhorne Clemens) records his impressions, attitudes, and perceptions of the people and the culture of North African in his first instance of contact with the East. Twain's account of the Moor in Tangier encompasses a description of the town and its lay out, the houses, the people, the dresses, mosques, coins, rulers, women, landmarks, jails, marriage, slavery, pilgrimage, and foreign relations. The writer argues in this paper that this account, though possibly objective in the description of the place physically and serves as a documented portrait of the city of Tangier in 1867 as seen by the observant eyes of a reputable major American writer, it seems to reinforce an earlier image of the north African Muslim Arab reflected in Western literature and the literature of Orientalism.