Decentering the Colonial in Ghaouti Bouali’s Kashf al-qinā ‘of 1904

Ghaouti Bouali's 1904 treatise Kitāb kashf al-qinā‘ ‘an ālāt al-samā‘ was a groundbreaking work of scholarship on Algerian and Maghribi music, poetry, and language. However, both in its own time and since, readers have treated it as a marginal curiosity that was remote from both wider Arab and European musicological scholarship. In contrast, the following pages treat Kashf al-qinā‘ as a cosmopolitan work that emerges from three overlapping contexts: one that is primarily French colonial, one that is primarily Arab, and one that is more specifically Maghribi. By situating Kashf al-qinā‘ in these contexts, and by specifically linking these contextualizations to the structure of the text itself, the treatment offered here shows Bouali’s book to be simultaneously less anomalous and more remarkable than it might appear at first glance.