It’s difficult to get any grasp of Morocco, and even more so of Moroccan history, without first knowing something of Islam. What follows is a very basic background: some theory, some history and an idea of Morocco’s place in the modern Islamic world.
Islam was founded by Mohammed (also spelt Muhammad), a merchant from the wealthy city of Mecca, now in Saudi Arabia. In about 609 AD, he began to receive divine messages, and continued to do so for the rest of his life. After his death, these were collated, and form the Koran (Qur’an). Muslims consider Mohammed to be the final prophet of the same God who is worshipped by Jews and Christians, and Islam recognizes all the prophets of the biblical Old Testament as his predecessors, and also regards Jesus (Aïssa in Arabic) as a prophet, but not as the Son of God.
The distinctive feature of Islam is its directness – there is no intermediary between man and God in the form of an institutionalized priesthood or complicated liturgy, as in Christianity; and worship, in the form of prayer, is a direct and personal communication with God.
Islam has five essential requirements, called “Pillars of faith”: prayer (salat); the pilgrimage to Mecca (hadj); the Ramadan fast (sanm); almsgiving (zakat); and, most fundamental of all, the acceptance that “There is no God but God and Mohammed is His Prophet” (shahada). The Pillars of Faith are central to Muslim life, articulating and informing daily existence. Prayers are performed five times daily, at sunset (when the Islamic day begins), nightfall, dawn, noon and afternoon, and can be performed anywhere, but preferably in a mosque (jemaa in Arabic). In the past, and even today in some places, a muezzin would climb his minaret each time and summon the faithful. Nowadays, the call is likely to be pre-recorded, but this most distinctive of Islamic sounds has a beauty all its own, especially when neighbouring muezzins are audible simultaneously. Their message is simplicity itself: “God is most great (Allah o Akhbar). I testify that there is no God but Allah. I testify that Mohammed is His Prophet. Come to prayer, come to security. God is most great.” Another phrase is added in the morning: “Prayer is better than sleep”.
Prayers are preceded by ritual washing. The worshipper then removes their shoes and, facing Mecca (the direction indicated in a mosque by the mihrab), recites the Fatina, the first chapter of the Koran: “Praise be to God, Lord of the worlds, the Compassionate, the Merciful, King of the Day of Judgement. We worship you and seek your aid. Guide us on the straight path, the path of those on whom you have bestowed your Grace, not the path of those who incur your anger nor of those who go astray.” The same words are then repeated twice in the prostrate position, with some interjections of Allah o Akhbar. The prostrate position symbolizes the worshipper’s submission to God (Islam literally means “submission”), and the sight of thousands of people going through the same motions simultaneously in a mosque is a powerful one. On Friday, believers try to attend prayers in their local grand mosque, where the whole community comes together in worship, led by an imam (much like a Protestant pastor), who may also deliver the khutba, or sermon.
Ramadan is the name of the ninth month in the lunar Islamic calendar, during which believers must fast between sunrise and sundown, abstaining from food, drink, cigarettes and sex. Only children, pregnant women and warriors engaged in a jihad (holy war) are exempt. Though the day is thus hard, nights are a time of celebration.
The pilgrimage, or hadj, to Mecca is an annual event, with millions flocking to Mohammed’s birthplace from all over the world. Here they go through several days of rituals, the central one being a sevenfold circumambulation of the Kaba, before kissing a black stone set in its wall. Islam requires that all believers go on a hadj as often as is practically possible, but for the poor it may be a once-in-a-lifetime occasion, and is sometimes replaced by a series of visits to lesser, local shrines – in Morocco, for instance, to Fez and Moulay Idriss.
Islam’s development in Morocco
Morocco was virtually untouched by the Sunni–Shia conflict that split the Muslim world – but the country’s unusual geographical and social circumstances have conspired to tip the balance away from official orthodoxy. In the eighth century, many Berbers were attracted to the dissident Kharijite strain of Islam, which rejected the Sunni and Shi’ite argument that the leader of the faithful had to be an Arab, and Sijilmasa (Rissani) became the capital of a powerful Kharijite kingdom. Subsequently, Moroccans have in principle been almost universally Sunni, but Sufism and maraboutism became very strong within the religion.
Sufism is the idea that, in addition to following religious rules, people can personally get closer to God by leading a spiritual rather than a materialistic lifestyle, and even by chanting and meditating to achieve a trance-like state. Everywhere in Morocco, as well as elsewhere in North Africa, the countryside is dotted with small domed koubbas – the tombs of marabouts, Sufi holy men (though the term is also used for the koubba) – which became centres of worship and pilgrimage. This elevation of individuals goes against strict Islamic teaching, but probably derives from the Berbers’ pre-Islamic tendency to focus worship round individual holy men.
More prosperous cults would also endow educational institutions attached to the koubba, known as zaouias, which provided an alternative to the official education given in urban medersas (Koranic schools). These inevitably posed a threat to the authority of the urban hierarchy, and as rural cults extended their influence, some became so popular that they endowed their saints with genealogies traced back to the Prophet. The title accorded to these men and their descendants was Shereef, and many grew into strong political forces. The classic example in Morocco is the tomb of Moulay Idriss – in the eighth century just a local marabout, but eventually the base of the Idrissid clan, a centre of enormous influence that reached far beyond its rural origins.
The most influential marabouts spawned Sufi brotherhoods, whose members meet to chant, play music, meditate, and thus seek personal union with God. This is particularly an important part of the moussem, an annual festival associated with each marabout. The most famous and flamboyant Moroccan Sufi brotherhood is that of Sidi Mohammed Ben Aïssa. Born in Souss in the fifteenth century, he travelled in northern Morocco before settling down as a teacher in Meknes and founding a zaouia. His powers of mystical healing became famous there, and he provoked enough official suspicion to be exiled briefly to the desert – where he again revealed his exceptional powers by proving himself immune to scorpions, snakes, live flames and other hostile manifestations. His followers tried to achieve the same state of grace. The Aissaoua brotherhood made itself notorious with displays of eating scorpions, walking on hot coals and other ecstatic practices designed to bring union with God.
With all its different forms, Islam permeated every aspect of the country’s pre-twentieth-century life. Unlike Christianity, at least Protestant Christianity, which to some extent has accepted the separation of church and state, Islam sees no such distinction. Civil law was provided by the sharia, the religious law contained in the Koran, and intellectual life by the msids (Koranic primary schools where the 6200 verses were learned by heart) and by the great medieval mosque universities, of which the Kairaouine in Fez (together with the Zitoura in Tunis and the Al Azhar in Cairo) was the most important in the Arab world.
At first, Islam brought a great scientific revolution, uniting the traditions of Greece and Rome with those of India and Iran, and then developing them while Christian Europe rejected the sciences of pagan philosophers. As Europe went through its Renaissance, however, it was Islam that started to atrophy, as the religious authorities became increasingly suspicious of any challenge to established belief, and actively discouraged innovation. At first this did not matter in political terms, but as the Islamic world fell behind in science and learning, Europe was able to take advantage of its now superior technology. Napoleon’s expedition to Egypt in 1798 marked the beginning of a century in which virtually every Islamic country came under the control of a European power. Because East–West rivalry had always been viewed in religious terms, the nineteenth and twentieth centuries saw something of a crisis in religious confidence. Why had Islam’s former power now passed to infidel foreigners?
Reactions and answers veered between those who felt that Islam should try to incorporate some of the West’s materialism, and those who held that Islam should turn its back on the West, purify itself of all corrupt additions and thus rediscover its former power. As colonies of European powers, Muslim nations had little chance of putting any such ideas into effective practice. But decolonization, and the discovery of oil in the Middle East, brought the Islamic world face to face with the question of its own spiritual identity. How should it deal with Western values and influence, now that it could afford – both politically and economically – almost total rejection? A return to the totality of Islam – fundamentalism – is one option. It has a reactionary side, harking back to an imagined time of perfection under the Prophet and the early caliphs, but it is also radical in its rejection of colonialism and materialism, and its most vehement adherents tend to be young rather than old.
In Morocco today, Islam is the official state religion, and King Mohammed’s secular status is interwoven with his role as “commander of the faithful”. Internationally too, he plays a leading role. Meetings of the Islamic Conference Organization are frequently held in Morocco and students from as far afield as Central Asia come to study Islam at Fez University. For all these indications of Islamic solidarity, though, state policy remains distinctly moderate – sometimes in the face of fundamentalist pressure. The 2004 law on the status of women is a good example of this: 100,000 people marched in Rabat to support the new law, and over 200,000 marched in Casablanca against it, a sign of increasing polarization on religious questions, not unlike that in the United States.
In the cities, there has long been tension between those for and against secularization, as well as a large body of urban poor, for whom Islamic fundamentalism can seem to offer solutions. In some circles, Islam is becoming very relaxed; in Casablanca, Rabat, El Jadida and Marrakesh, young people of both sexes can be seen socializing together, young women no longer wear the veil, and have exchanged their frumpy cover-alls for flattering, and even sexy clothes, while young couples go to nightclubs and even drink socially. But against this, the number of people going to pray at mosques is on the up, and among the poor especially, Islam is becoming a mark of pride and respectability. That this is reflected in politics is not surprising, and the moderate Islamist PJD (founded in 1998) has gradually developed into a mainstream party, winning the 2011 and 2016 elections, although any programme involving enforcement of religious strictures would be strongly resented by secular Moroccans.
In the countryside, religious attitudes have changed less over the past two generations. Religious brotherhoods such as the Aissaoua have declined since the beginning of the century, when they were still very powerful, and the influence of mystics generally has fallen. As the official histories put it, popular credulity in Morocco provided an ideal setting for charlatans as well as saviours, and much of this has now passed. All the same, the rhythms of rural life still revolve around local marabouts, and the annual moussems, or festivals-cum-pilgrimages, are still vital and impressive displays.