The Commander of Who?
Colonialism, Control, and Contradiction in Morocco’s Brand of Regional Islam
by Marcus Hibbeln
Female members of Istiqlal Party, Tetouan, Morocco, 1944.
“Your Majesty, your Holiness,” a Miss bint Usman began as she took the stage during Pope Francis’ visit to Morocco’s King Mohammed VI Institute, “I am from the Northeast region of Nigeria, which anyone who follows current events sees defined by extremist groups and ideals based on passion rather than knowledge… to resist this, people must become educated and it is why I decided to become educated [here].” [1] When she spoke in 2019, bint Usman had just completed her religious education at the prestigious Institute, located in Rabat, Morocco. Every year since its foundation in 2007, thousands of young African and European Muslims have applied for a spot at the Institute, which trains students in Islamic law, geography, and history to promote non-discriminatory, inclusive dialogues of Islam in public and private spaces. In contrast to militaristic responses to extremism, this preventative approach appears highly moderate and modern to the lay observer, particularly its embrace of traditional female influence in familial and social spaces. Illustrating the lessons and embodiment of state Islam, program director Abdeslam El-Azaar extolled women’s ability to mitigate violence “just by virtue of their role in society, [women] have so much contact with the people… so it is natural for them to provide advice. We can give them an education so they can offer it in a scholarly way.”[2]
El-Azaar refers to a particular form of Islam that is sponsored by the Moroccan government at home and abroad, commonly denoted as ‘Moroccan Islam’. The Kingdom itself defines this regional brand of Islam as an organic manifestation of its cultural and geographic diversity. According to a member of the Ministry of Islamic Affairs, Moroccan Islam is a “Moroccan-Andalusian-African, Arab-Berber specificity [which]… engenders a particular mentality, a way of seeing things, a [kind of] tolerance.” [3] This inclusive description seemingly explains the Institute’s training of female religious scholars to empower the country’s diverse Muslim community, but Moroccan Islam is also an artificial source of authoritative affirmation, both internationally and domestically. The King of Morocco derives his political legitimacy as ‘Commander of the Faithful’ (amir al-mu'minin) from religious credentials said to be unchanged over centuries. The unusual education of women in the Mohammed VI Institute who spread a non-confrontational Islam reinforces an image of national unity that actively promotes religious understanding and social cohesion, burnished amidst the rise of global Islamic militancy. However, Moroccan Islam’s origins long predate a modern desire to combat radicalism and its past reveals a glaring contradiction: while inclusive to a certain extent, Moroccan Islam is a non-collaborative and exclusive national force that has historically alienated large groups of citizens from recognizing it as a force for public good.
In this article, we will examine the origins of Moroccan Islam to understand why its architects within the Kingdom are frequently at odds with the members of its supposedly inclusive faith. Since the arrival of Arab invaders in the 7th century CE, Moroccan rulers have tied their political authority directly to their religious pedigrees, which in turn was directly linked to geopolitical control. Though centuries old, Moroccan Islam became closely tied to ethnic categories developed by French authorities and ethnographers during the colonial era of the French Protectorate. From these colonial roots grew a divisive history, as Moroccan Islam functioned as a French means of segregating colonial subjects and a Moroccan means of forming opposition movements. It was during the road to independence and in the early post-colonial period that Moroccan Islam’s present moderate self-image was complicated by authoritarian state efforts to regulate and claim it. Moroccan nationalists internalized arbitrary divisions between ‘Arab’ and ‘Berber,’ heavily associating Islamic culture with Arabism and adopting an ethnolinguistically exclusive form of Islam to create national unity. These popular associations aspired to unify the country but were monopolized by the state in a chokehold over religious participation that continues to this day.
From Islam’s first arrival in North Africa, rulers of Morocco have historically reinforced their claims to political authority along religious lines. Originally rooted in the scope of Arab territorial control, Islamic claims to power became increasingly shared through religious language as colonizing invaders mixed with colonized Amazigh peoples. Over hundreds of years, North African claims to Islamic legitimacy became associated with geopolitical power rather than ethnic background. Thirteen-century Arab historian ibn Khaldun characterized the Moroccan political economy of his time as a series of constant interactions between urban and seminomadic rural groups, whose territories he referred to bilād al-makhzan, the land of the government, and bilād al-sība, [4] the land outside of government control, respectively. [5] Moroccan states legitimated themselves by projecting the symbolic power of their sultans through Islamic rhetoric and ritual, which non-state peoples affirmed or rejected in delineating their own political, economic, and religious autonomy. Political power in precolonial Morocco remained relatively balanced between these hubs of regional authority. Moroccan academic Mohamed Chtatou noted such interactions frequently acquired token status, as many groups within the sība “recognized the religion’s mantle of the monarch and conducted prayers in his name, [but] failed to recognize his temporal status and, consequently, refused to pay him taxes.” [6] Varying uses of Islamic rhetoric such as this, by both state and nonstate peoples, spoke to Islam’s flexible ability to canonize existing political control, recognize foreign hegemony while preserving material autonomy, or even cite ruling injustices.
Meeting of Moroccan, French and American military officers with the Sultan of Morocco, 1943 in Dar El Makhzen (Archnet).
This association of Islamic rhetoric with geopolitical control underwent an important realignment through categories of colonial ethnicity created during the era of the French Protectorate (1912-1956). While relatively short, this colonial period and its process of state-building were crucial in developing the socio-political context in which Moroccan collective identity was imagined. On 30 March 1912, the French Third Republic signed the Treaty of Fes with the Moroccan Sultan, promising to strengthen the makhzan through political modernization, economic development, and the ‘pacification’ of the sība. [7] These military campaigns into the interior, beginning shortly after the creation of the Protectorate and concluding in 1934, fundamentally changed the relationship between state and nonstate space by making all Moroccans directly liable to the colonial state. Through the crushing of rural resistance and the construction of transportation infrastructure, the French physically knit the entire country together, eliminating nonstate space and all non-monarchical claimants to Islamic legitimacy. [8] This change in the regional balance of power temporarily suspended the use of Islamic rhetoric in support or in denial of political claims.
Such a dramatic reorganization of the relationship between makhzan and sība had particular implications for Islamic legitimacy visible through the European creation of a Moroccan colonial archive. A series of scientific expeditions, ethnographic surveys, and newly-created research institutes, this archival project affected a sweeping reorganization of Moroccan ethnic and linguistic categories which did not create notions of makhzan and sība, nor of Arab and Amazigh, but coopted them to affirm the colonial raison d’être, that French presence was necessitated by a weak ‘Arab’ state unable to control rural ‘Berbers.’ [9] This arbitrary ethnic division not only motivated military intervention but was also thought to be beneficial in forming alliances with Berbers, viewed as ready allies for the Protectorate given their perceived location outside makhzan jurisdiction. This larger division of Moroccan society and geography along linguistic lines demarcated the barriers of ethnic character as well as those of religious identity, as the French associated Islam with urban Arabism and claimed Berbers were inherently opposed to Islamic governance. A Lieutenant Colonel Henrys, who fought in the Atlas Mountains in 1913, claimed that the Berbers’ violent tendencies were due to a desire to practice their own customary law rather than submit to makhzan courts of Islamic sharia law. [10] In accordance with this imagined precedent, French policy-makers worked to shelter conquered Berbers within tribal courts that would implement non-religious customary law rather than Islamic sharia law in the hopes of isolating Berbers, pacifying them, and employing them as allies.
By the conclusion of open warfare in the early 1930’s, the Protectorate had passed rigorous legislation that tied linguistic Berber identity to cultural, legal, and religious status, effectively placing it outside of the larger Moroccan community. It was largely in response to this ethnic demarcation, and the religious and linguistic divisions at its heart, that colonial nationalism emerged as a battle-cry—“do not separate us from our brothers, the Berbers”—to foster a national identity defined as religiously Islamic and ethnolinguistically Arabic. [11] Moroccan nationalist movements began earnestly in late 1925 as university-based intellectual groups debated possibilities for governmental reform and political unity. Influenced by a powerful current of Islamic national reformists throughout the Arab world, political reform movements like Istiqlal developed as semi-popular organizations mostly constituted by urban middle-class membership. In contrast to French Berber policies seen to fragment national character, Istiqlal stressed a unified religious identity that stressed the Muslim community’s compatibility with secular civil society. [12] Prominent in defining a national community were Salafi Muslims (purist Islamic reformers), who sought the unification of Muslims around a way of life ascribed to first three generations of the Muslim community that was said to be ideal. Inclusively oriented, this identity was closely associated with the Arabic language as a colloquial and religious cornerstone: historian E.G. Joffé claimed that the Salafis, “with their Islamic background, spoke to [the common people] in a language which they could understand and accept.” [13] As the 1930’s drew to a close and the Second World War began, urban Arab activists seized upon the colonial Berber policy as a critical barrier to their project of Arabo-Islamic assimilation and thus articulated their visions for national unity. [14]
The Sultan of Morocco on his way to attend the French and American celebration in Rabat, Morocco 1942 (Archnet).
This growing pressure on legal separatism in the Protectorate was compounded by its inherent unsustainability. Sociologist Jonathan Wyrtzen argues that as upward mobility became tied to the process of Arabization in the 1940’s, many Amazigh tribal nobles refused to send their children to Franco-Berber schools. Instead, they demanded their children be admitted to Arabic schools for instruction in the Arabic language and Islamic theology. [15] The growing Arabization and Islamization of Moroccan national character was accelerated by mass migration to the cities that strengthened the popular appeal of Istiqlal; its leaders, now lacking authoritative backing and appeal to rural peoples, turned increasingly to the Moroccan sultan for endorsement. These anti-colonial nationalists pledged allegiance to Sultan Muhammad V (r. 1927-1953, 1957-1961), seeking unification around his authority as Commander of the Faithful, a position he had retained under the French and which reformers believed to confirm a historical trajectory of Arabization and Islamization. [16] While Muhammad V had privately approved of the nationalists for a decade, it was during the turmoil of the Second World War that the Sultan refused to fight against the invading Americans and sign an armistice with the victorious Germans. [17] This defiance set the stage for a public speech given on 10 April 1947 in Tangier, where the Sultan omitted his customary praise for the French and demanded unity of the country in the first open display of closeness between the monarchy and Arabist Islamic nationalism. [18]
View of the Grand Socco from the East, looking toward the Sidi Bou Abib Mosque, Place de 9 Avril 1947, (Archnet)
Though Moroccan independence was nearly ten years away, Muhammad V’s speech at Tangier was the turning point in the monarchy’s adoption of religious nationalism. Postcolonial Moroccan Islam emerged as a mass movement seeking the defense of Arabo-Islamic unity, descended from an idealized form of Islamic rulership seemingly fractured along ethnic lines by colonial ethnographers. [19] However, without the precolonial balance of power between makhzan and sība, and saddled with virulent ethnocentrism that originated in protesting French Berber policy, Moroccan Islam became a highly exclusive force in the postwar era that slipping from the hands of nationalists into a means of state control not beholden to popular participation. This accompanied a growing Moroccan orientation towards autocracy; as King Hassan II (r. 1961-1999) centralized his governance by suspending the constitution and limiting partisan influence in the 1960’s, his state claimed a monopoly on Islamic legitimacy by forbidding political parties to define their platforms as religious and largely outlawing independent ecclesiastical organization. [20] The state stepped into this void, reorienting the Moroccan Islamic community through control over all activities of the mosque—specifically preaching—regulating religious scholarship and the right to issue fatwas (religious rulings), and centralizing the provisioning of all education. [21]
Collectively, these processes constitute what Chtatou dubs the ‘coopting’ of public life in service of the state. This is accomplished by monitoring religious activity and the rhetoric behind it as monarchs and the Islamic bureau hold tight to the privilege of defining Moroccan religious character. Such coopting has been replicated on a continuous scale in mosques and prominently influences Islamic dialogue. [22] The makhzan oversees all mosques, hires all imams (prayer leaders) and requires them to undertake extensive training before being allowed to preach, and constantly monitors their community activity. Where once the mosque was a broadly accessible means to commune and exchange ideas, and even functioned as a venue for popular protest in 1930 against French Berber Policy, the state has largely managed to coopt it as ritualized space that does not allow for public dialogue, rigidly categorizing its national identity as Islamic in faith and Arabic in speech. On the whole, such state efforts promote a model of state-subject relations in Morocco, rather than one of state and citizen, which sees an omnipresence of the makhzan and its king opposing communal solidarity. [23] This top-down division of religious activity also pervades theological scholarship amongst the ulema (Muslim religious authorities), generating considerable controversy as state backing renders certain forms of Islam more or less acceptable. Historically, officially sanctioned religious policy has been far from inclusive. Throughout the 1970’s and early 1980’s, King Hassan II supported the highly discriminatory policies of Salafis in an effort to crush liberal dissent, supporters of which disparaged and attacked Sufis and non-Muslims. [24]
Although Morocco has since withdrawn its support for such exclusionary forms of Islam, its current promotion of competing scholarship in an effort “to fragment the religious landscape and institutions in order to control them,” in the words of scholar Haim Malka, clarifies the state’s insistence on control of independent interpretations of Islam. [25] Arguably, this monopoly of religious definition is central to the agenda of the modern kingdom and is the heart of Moroccan Islam’s contradictory reality. However, it has historically been challenged by a slew of actors outside the makhzan, many of whom have been encouraged or created by state religious policy. Amazigh (Berber) peoples, religious fundamentalists, and Moroccan youth movements primarily led by women in the late 20th and early 21st century have each taken on claims of religious inclusion advanced by the makhzan and its institutions. Their domestic efforts to broaden the scope of Islamic dialogue are a central part of postcolonial Moroccan history. But equally influential are the stories of foreign Muslims like bint Usman, which also influence Moroccan Islamist dialogues despite not being Moroccan. Certainly, bint Usman’s story poses the question of how the Kingdom’s projection of religious influence through the Mohammed VI Institute and through its attempts to guarantee “tranquility and spiritual security” to Muslims abroad remains ‘Moroccan’. [26] So too, it queries how the Kingdom’s postcolonial foreign policy influenced domestic understandings of its national religion and its claims of inclusivity and moderateness.