ABSTRACT
This chapter presents the effacement, to resituate at Rudolf Otto's Moroccan experience in colonial context. Despite situating Otto's discovery in space, Frick's account manages to efface the political context within which the experience allegedly took place, a context that we can only designate with the word colonialism. Speaking at Otto's graveside service, Heinrich Frick recalled "Otto's own description of how he had once, in remarkable circumstances, encountered the power of the Holy with utter clarity". Frick's account takes the form of a hadith whose chain of transmission is relatively short: Frick heard the tale of the discovery of the Holy from Otto himself, and Otto certainly ought to have known. Otto's report of his encounter with the Holy in a Moroccan synagogue appeared in a piece of travel writing: a set of letters from North Africa that he sent to the Protestant theological magazine, Die Christliche Welt, in 1911.
