Morocco maintains a continuity with its past in a way that few states in the region do. Though it has gone from sultanate to colonial protectorate to modern state, “it is the only modern Middle Eastern or Maghribi state where the pre-colonial dynasty has continued in power and traditional religio-political notions have become key components of modern identity and statehood” (Bennison 2002, 2). This continuity is most visible in the person of the king, who detains both political and spiritual power in his role as amīr al-mu’minīn (“Commander of the Faithful”). In this chapter, I highlight the enduring features that characterize the historical and institutional development of the Moroccan religious field in order to better comprehend how and why the Moroccan state governs Islam abroad. As in the case of Turkey, I focus here on the interplay of “official” and “unofficial” currents of Islam in Morocco over the last century and on the state religious administration: the Ministry of Habous and Islamic Affairs (Ministère des Habous et des Affaires Islamiques / Wizārat al-Awqāf wa-Shu’un al-Islāmīyya, hereafter Habous ministry). The purpose of this historical review is to argue that alongside idiosyncratic forms of religious governance, “official” Islam is ultimately an ambiguous notion that responds more to political necessities than theological concerns.
1 From Empire to Colony: Religious and Political Authority
The traditional symbols of religious authority in Morocco were established long before the country’s independence from its status as a French and Spanish protectorate. At the same time, it was the colonial period that transformed the religious field from one of relatively fluid power relations between the imperial centre and the provinces to a centralized system dominated by a modern administrative framework of state religious governance.
The sultanate in Morocco as a social and political institution originally arose in the eighth-ninth century under the Idrisid dynasty and coalesced around the notion of the “Makhzen.” The original meaning of the word is “warehouse” (as in the French “magasin” or Spanish “almacén,” both derived from it), alluding to the place where taxes were stored. As a result, it embodied the contrast between the “land of the Makhzen” (bled l-Makhzen), which paid taxes, and the “land of dissidence” (bled s-siba), which lay outside the central state’s control. The term has come to refer more generally to the sultan (and later king) and his central administrative complex, along with its soldiers, ministers, and official religious scholars.
After the reign of several Amazigh regimes, the Arab Saadian dynasty came to power in the mid-sixteenth century and brought back to the sultanate the additional title of “sharif,” or descendant of the Prophet Mohammed. Those who claimed such noble descent had long been held in esteem by Moroccans, for whom such a direct link to the prophet meant also having inherited his baraka (divine blessing). Baraka holds a special place in Sufi practices, meaning that a sharif’s claims to political authority always include a spiritual element. The Alawites, who succeeded the Saadians as sultans of Morocco in the seventeenth century and continue to rule to this date, were and continue to be exceedingly successful in making use of this term in order to anchor the legitimacy of their rule, along with that of amīr al-mu’minīn. The latter term designates the political leader of a Muslim community and has come to have constitutional and legal weight in the Moroccan context in connection with the monarchy.
If sharif and baraka are the key words to understand the sultan’s intrinsic political and religious authority, then bayʿa (oath of allegiance) is the term that best represents the contractual element. Though the bayʿa may not often have involved an actual choice, the ceremony carried important weight as a public acknowledgement of the sultan’s legitimacy. Historically, it has been the ulema, and especially the ulema of Fez, who have been at the forefront of the investiture ceremony, while debates over succession have been put to rest in modern times by King Mohammed V’s decision to establish primogeniture rule as constitutional law. While the Moroccan Alawite sultans could rely on their sharifian origins for their status as baraka-infused saints, this could also lead to situations in which their sacredness was acknowledged throughout the country, but not their sovereignty. As Geertz quipped, “[the Sultan] reigned everywhere, but ruled only in places” (1968, 78).
Consequently, religious authority required institutional organization, in particular with regard to the waqfs, usually translated as pious endowments or foundations and often known as habous in North Africa. The habous represent an important source of revenue and for centuries were the closest thing to public services, covering a wide variety of institutions involved in education, health, and of course religious affairs. While it was only on rare occasions that the general population was in contact with the Makhzen, their contact with the myriad manifestations of habous was a daily occurrence that affected all aspects of social life. As a result, these foundations constituted an instrument of governance that could be used to influence not only the ulema and religious élites, but more generally the population at large.
Habous come in many different shapes and sizes and are to be thanked for some of the most emblematic and impressive architectural achievements of Islamic societies. The benefits derived from them might be the use of commercial or residential buildings, or the revenue from their rents; specific products, or the profits from their sale; and at times the beneficiary might not even be human, but rather the local flora and fauna. Religious personnel in Morocco , such as muezzins, imams, and khaṭībs, received monthly allocations for their services thanks to the revenues generated by the habous, while the habous itself may serve as a residence for the cleric in question—this was often the case with khaṭībs.
In pre-colonial Morocco , habous were overseen at the local level by a nāḍir (caretaker), who in turn was supervised by a qāḍī (Islamic judge). The qāḍī, a high-ranking official who represented the religious authority of the Sultan, was appointed by royal decree along with the other main figures of Makhzen authority: the pasha (local governor) and the muḥtasib (overseer of trade and market affairs). The qāḍī had his office or “court” (maḥakma) usually right next to the main mosque of a town or city and was often the khaṭīb of the mosque as well (Luccioni 1982). Until the middle of the nineteenth century, the qāḍī of Fez was at the top of this religious hierarchy, occupying a position similar to that of the Ottoman Şeyhülislam, and was responsible for naming qāḍīs throughout the empire as well as presiding over the Qarawiyyin University (Le Tourneau 1949). The sultan remained the ultimate authority, with the—theoretical if not always actual—capacity to intervene directly in all matters concerning habous and religious affairs across the empire.
Habous and religious affairs were treated as a matter of high importance by the French colonial administration. The first article of the Treaty of Fez, which established the French protectorate over Morocco , states that “this regime will safeguard the religious situation, the respect and the traditional prestige of the sultan, the exercise of the Muslim religion and religious institutions, notably those of habous. It will include the organization of a reformed sharifian Makhzen” (Protectorat de la République Française au Maroc 1912, 1–2). Under the protectorate, the new revamped and trimmed down Makhzen was comprised of three ministries: the Grand Vizirat, the Vizirat of Justice, and the Vizirat of Habous; these three oversaw those domains that were not fully under the purview of the French colonial authorities (i.e. foreign, military, and financial affairs) (Rivet 1988).
In terms of religious governance, the Grand Vizir oversaw the activities of the zāwiyas (Sufi orders) and the sheikhs; the Vizir of Justice was responsible for appointing religious personnel; and the Vizir of Habous paid the salaries of the religious personnel and had control over the management of habous (Luccioni 1982). The diminished Makhzen constituted on paper the sovereign Moroccan government and was supervised by the specialized services of the French Direction of Sharifian Affairs (Direction des Affaires Chérifiennes), which included a division to oversee each Moroccan ministry, including the Vizirat of Habous. In order to understand the genesis of modern religious governance in Morocco , I draw on a series of publications written by Joseph Luccioni, a top French colonial bureaucrat who served for decades in the Habous Inspection Service (service de contrôle des habous) and became a special counsellor to King Mohammed V after independence. Luccioni’s perspective is that of a scholar as well as a colonial official and a firm proponent of the policies of the French Resident General, Hubert Lyautey.
When the French began their protectorate in Morocco , they had already been ruling Algeria for over eighty years and Tunisia for over thirty. In the case of Algeria, the institution of habous had been eliminated entirely by French authorities, while the extensive habous lands and real estate holdings had in most cases been appropriated by French and European colonists and the French state (Clancy-Smith 1994). Islam thereafter became a state affair, meaning that the French state paid for the upkeep of religious buildings, the payment of religious personnel, and the management of religious education; however, this colonial policy led to “general discontentment” and “a loss of interest in the religious and educative personnel appointed by the state to the benefits of saints, Zāwiyas, and marabouts” (Luccioni 1982, 163). The lack of legitimacy that people perceived in the colonial state’s system of religious governance thus resulted in an increased turn to “unofficial” Islamic currents.
Conversely, when in 1881 the French protectorate began in Tunisia, it was only seven years after the Ottoman Heyreddin Pasha had reformed the habous and created modern state structures for religious governance. The French decided to rely on these structures, and “the experience of Tunisia showed how much more convenient it was to work through an existing government machine rather than to destroy it as in Algeria” (Bidwell 1973, 64). In the new protectorate of Morocco , this realization was a cornerstone of the French version of “indirect rule” and went beyond preserving specific pre-colonial state institutions. Lyautey’s strategy was to rely on the existing dominant social structures, whether tribes or families, meaning that even after independence the majority of the country’s pre-colonial élites had maintained their status (Vermeren 2011).
Keeping the sultan’s religious authority intact also enabled French colonial authorities to indirectly intervene in potentially provocative issues, such as the reform of habous and religious affairs. Contemporary colonial publications underline the importance of these reforms and maintain they were urgently needed given the diminishing revenues that threatened the state’s ability to assure religious services (Résidence générale de la République française au Maroc 1946). The means by which to achieve these goals was through the creation of a modern administrative structure, capable of extending its influence throughout the country. Lyautey’s original policies were well heeded: the monarchy and Moroccan traditions were respected while modern European institutions and practices were progressively introduced into the state administration.
The Habous Inspection Service (later led by Luccioni) was at the centre of this new modern administration for religious affairs. As part of the Direction of Sharifian Affairs, all correspondence between the Vizirat and its personnel was first translated into French, read over, and checked by the inspection service. In his more retrospective and overtly personal writings, Luccioni admits that “even if in appearance and form everything emanated from the Vizirat, in fact, the administration of habous was, in large part, carried out by the Habous Inspection Service” (1982, 290). The de facto control exerted by the Habous Inspection Service is explained by Luccioni as being necessary due to a certain “mindset” of the Makhzen that remained resistant to learning French and the ways of modern administration. Consequently, Luccioni gave up on reforming the Vizirat and instead decided to “Moroccanize” the Habous Inspection Service by recruiting Moroccans who possessed a “double culture [Arab and French]” (1982, 294). For a period of more or less 30 years, the French Habous Inspection Service had carte blanche to consolidate the foundations of a centralized system for the administration of religious endowments, while other matters concerning religious affairs were likewise institutionalized by similar services.
The central theme of Luccioni’s testimonial is that the colonial Habous Inspection Service represents one of the major successes, if not the major success, of the French protectorate in Morocco . In terms of finances, both the annual revenue and the reserve funds of the habous greatly increased under French rule between 1914 and 1955. Local administration practices that had been blamed for the general decline of habous across the country were done away with, and control over religious affairs was increasingly centralized. Luccioni was kept on by Mohammed V as “Inspector of Habous” during the transitory period as Morocco became independent and thereafter was named advisor to the sultan himself. He remained in this position until 1967, while the entire personnel of the Habous Inspection Service (including the French officials) were incorporated into the new Ministry of Habous, “conserving their status, grade and hierarchical rank” (Luccioni 1982, 310–11). In other words, the administrative framework of today’s Ministry of Habous is in large part the heritage of French colonial structures.
The French decision to “safeguard” habous and religious affairs under the protectorate and administer them through a newly created modern state bureaucracy had a profound effect on the governance of the Moroccan religious field. French colonial authorities such as Luccioni succeeded in expanding the reach of state governance to include the entire territory; rejuvenated and promoted religious education; and rendered the habous once again a reliable source of funding for mosques and religious personnel—all in the name of the sultan. As in other colonial contexts, many of the particular attributes of the new administration were the result of an “imported state” (Badie 1992): in a telling example, the official journal of the Moroccan state, the Bulletin Officiel, does not begin with independence in 1956, but rather with the treaty founding the French protectorate in 1912.
Conversely, these modern state institutions sought to preserve the pre-existing power structures of the Makhzen, thus solidifying its authority in a way that had never been possible before. The early Alawite sultans had endeavoured to impose on the empire their sociopolitical vision of a sharifian sultan-imam who represented both the legitimate political leader as well as the legitimate religious leader; however, none of them had ever possessed the resources necessary to enforce this vision across the country. It was the French (and Spanish) colonial administrations and their armies that finally “expanded the authority over the whole territory of the greater Morocco , bled es-siba included” (Daadaoui 2011, 54), and “created a framework for national integration of a sort which had not previously existed” (Geertz 1968, 64). The fight for independence would entrench even further the figure of the sultan (soon to be king) as the central figure of the Moroccan political and religious fields, but not before his position and the content of state Islam would be challenged by the doctrines of Salafism and the adherents of the Istiqlal (independence) Party.
2 Islam After Independence: Political Challenges to a Resilient Monarchy
The history of modern Moroccan nationalism is intimately tied with Islam and more specifically with the Islamic Salafist movement, which spread across the Muslim world at the beginning of the twentieth century. In Morocco , one of the main proponents of this movement was Allal al-Fassi, who was one of the founding members of the Istiqlal Party. The contest between the sultan and the nationalist leaders of Istiqlal would be fundamental in determining who would control the Moroccan state after independence, while a new generation of Islamist challenges would confront the state’s vision of religious legitimacy in the second half of the twentieth century.
Salafism is a school of thought that advocates a return to the sources of Islam in order to reform or renew Islamic practice. The word “salaf” means “ancestor” and refers to the first three generations of Muslims who are seen as an example for all Muslims to follow. It is characterized by its literalist interpretation of the Qur’an and the Sunna and its vehement opposition to anything it considers innovation (bidʿa) in Islamic thought or practice, including most currents of Sufism. Movements inspired by Salafism have existed throughout Islamic history and generally promote an idealized Islamic past to provide answers for changing contemporary circumstances. This was the case at the end of the nineteenth century, when a series of scholars and reformers sought a means by which to counter the pressure that Western European colonialism and its modernist intellectual thought exerted on the Muslim world. The renewal of religion for these thinkers meant adopting specific Western European techniques and technology in order to resist colonial advances while eliminating the “impure” and “unorthodox” traditions that had ostensibly corrupted Islam.
The spread of this vision presaged a changing of alliances within the religious establishments of many colonial Islamic contexts, including Morocco . On the one hand, “unorthodox” Sufi orders became a target for the Salafists, while on the other hand, the ulema were targeted as “corrupted through compromise with temporal authority” and as lending “themselves to the support of tyrants” (Rashīd Riḍā in Eickelman and Piscatori 1996, 31). Salafist currents began taking hold in Morocco at the end of the nineteenth century, especially at the Qarawiyyin University, which would develop into a centre of Salafist teaching during the protectorate with the consent of colonial authorities (Vermeren 2010).
Allal al-Fassi began his studies at the Qarawiyyin in 1924 and became a recognized ʿalim by 1934. As opposed to earlier attempts to introduce Salafism in Morocco at the end of the nineteenth century, which had focused on reforming religious practice, al-Fassi called himself a “neo-Salafist” so as to highlight the active political outlook that he espoused. For al-Fassi, Salafism “was synonymous with nationalism ” (Belal 2011, 29), and the most galvanizing moment for early modern Moroccan nationalism was the “Berber Dahir” of 1930. This Dahir removed the Berber (Amazigh ) population from the obligations of Sharia law and placed them under the juridical authority of their own councils (djemaa). Since criminal law fell under French law, the Berbers were essentially no longer under the sultan’s authority. The decree caused an enormous backlash across the country, bringing together a wide spectrum of groups in their opposition and leading to the growth of the nationalist movement in the years thereafter. By 1943, the Istiqlal Party was founded with the approval of the Makhzen, as the sultan himself became increasingly active in state affairs (Zisenwine 2010).
Following the end of World War II, the sultan became a symbol of the nationalist movement now led by Istiqlal, which had issued a manifesto in 1944 calling for an independent Morocco under a constitutional government with Mohammed V as sovereign. The Istiqlal Party, though a coalition of different political tendencies itself, did not succeed in appealing to all segments of Moroccan society and was seen with growing suspicion by the Sufi orders and tribal leaders. The antagonism that the Istiqlal Salafists displayed towards Sufis had made the latter increasingly wary, while the party’s panarabist rhetoric fell on deaf ears amongst the Berber-speaking tribes. Aside from these issues, the most important danger the Istiqlal Party seemed to represent was that of a new generation, looking to disrupt the traditional hierarchies that had managed to survive the French occupation. This suspicion extended even to certain members of the religious establishment and the ulema, in that Allal al-Fassi had shown himself to be hostile to Morocco’s Maliki school of jurisprudence, which he saw as an impediment to the use of reason and an obstacle to a more dynamic and engaged understanding of Islam (Belal 2011).
The opposition between these groups came to a head with the destitution of Sultan Mohammed V in 1953, when a petition calling for his removal was signed by hundreds of pashas, military leaders, and Sufi sheikhs, and handed over to the Resident General (Ganiage 1994). The crisis brought about by the exile of Mohammed V became untenable as numerous sectors of society refused to recognize his successor, and with the Algerian war of independence close on the horizon, French authorities decided that they could not deal with two similar conflicts. In 1955, the French came to an agreement with the sultan that Morocco would become a constitutional monarchy under his authority, which led to full independence in 1956. Mohammed V replaced the title “sultan” for “king” in order to mark the change, though significantly the monarch’s authority as amīr al-mu’minīn remained unaltered.
With the departure of colonial authorities, rivalries between the king and the Istiqlal Party became more pronounced. Istiqlal had been a fervent supporter of the sultan before independence, largely because it had intended to sideline him and reduce him to a figurehead once the French and Spanish had left. However, it was Mohammed V who out-manoeuvered Istiqlal over the coming years. First, he created police and armed forces under his control. Second, he was aware that Istiqlal was backed by the urban middle classes, and thus, he secured support from the more traditional rural sectors of Moroccan society that were more receptive to the historical legitimacy of the sultan. Many of the French colonial institutions, which had relied on traditional Moroccan élites, were thus well-prepared to be renamed and integrated into the king’s new political system.
This was the case with the Ministry of Habous, created in 1955, and which had incorporated the former employees of the colonial Habous Inspection Service by 1956. At the end of 1957, a royal decree transferred the control over religious personnel and Islamic education to the Ministry of Habous (Kingdom of Morocco 1958), reinforcing its control over the religious field and explaining the addition of “Islamic affairs” to the title of the ministry a few years later. King Mohammed V appointed Mokhtar al-Soussi as the first Minister of Habous, which was significant for two reasons: as a renowned ʿālim and historian, his nomination seemed to indicate the “consecration of the entire profession” of the ulema and suggested that “their integration into the machinery of the state would occur without difficulty” (Tozy 1999, 110).
Moreover, though al-Soussi had a cabinet full of “young and unexperienced Istiqlal members,” as Luccioni saw it (1982, 310), he represented a current of Salafist-inspired thought that did not reject Sufism but sought instead to reform the Sufi orders. The cooperation between certain Sufi leaders and French colonial authorities that had led to the exile of Mohammed V had had a delegitimizing impact on many tarīqas. Nevertheless, the king recognized that it was not in his interest to discredit such a powerful tradition of political and religious legitimation. Despite the influence of Salafist currents within Istiqlal , neither the king nor the modern Moroccan state would adopt policies openly hostile to Sufism or saint-worshipping over the years to come. In the same fashion that the king could rely on the rural bourgeoisie to function as a counterbalance to the urban classes who supported Istiqlal in the political field, it was also in his interest to employ Sufi traditions in the religious field to counter the Salafists and reinforce his legitimacy in the eyes of the population.
When Mohammed V’s son ascended the throne as King Hassan II in 1961, he named none other than Allal al-Fassi as State Minister of Islamic Affairs. Nevertheless, al-Fassi resigned from the government two years later, and the Islamic affairs portfolio was permanently reassigned to the Ministry of Habous, led by Ahmed Bargach from 1961 until 1972. While Bargach demonstrated personal hostility to Sufi groups at times, Salafist tendencies never truly came to dominate the ministry. Numerous Sufi groups, such as the Aissawiya, Hamadcha, Gnawa, and Heddawa, received authorization from state authorities to hold public celebrations in the mid-1960s, a decision that was severely criticized by al-Fassi and Istiqlal’s newspaper, al-ʿĀlam (Adam 1966). For the king, the traditional actors of the Moroccan religious field—the Sufi orders and the ulema—continued to represent counterweights to the growing prominence of Salafist tendencies. Moreover, they no longer represented the powerful actors that they had in the past and could thus more easily be co-opted and fragmented within his strategy of rural alliances.
As for the ulema, following independence many of them had assumed that their training and status would continue to give them access to positions of power; however, they were quickly marginalized both within political parties and the state administration (Agnouche 1992). On the one hand, this decline was due to lingering suspicions given their role in the destitution of Mohammed V ; on the other hand, it was a result of their own tendency to become state agents, joining the ranks of the qāḍīs and jurists starting in the 1930s and consequently depriving themselves of the critical leeway they once had as independent actors (Tozy 1980). A series of reforms of the Qarawiyyin during the 1960s similarly sought to gain greater control over the Fassi ulema by integrating them into the state apparatus while weakening the university, which was divided between faculties located in different cities. Moreover, the state moved to challenge the university’s monopoly by founding a new Islamic institution of higher education in Rabat in 1964: the Dar al-Hadith al-Hassaniyya. The graduates of this new institution entered into direct competition with those trained at the Qarawiyyin during the 1970s, reflecting a strategy of divide and conquer that further reinforced the king’s position vis-à-vis the Moroccan ulema.
The 1970s saw the rise of the first Islamist movements in Morocco , influenced by the writings of Egyptian Islamist intellectuals such as Hassan al-Banna (founder of the Muslim Brotherhood) and Sayyid Qutb (the Muslim Brotherhood’s principal ideologue). One of the first was the group Islamic Youth (Jeunesse Islamique), led by ʿAbdelkrīm Muṭīʿ and implicated in the assassination of a left-wing politician in 1975. One year earlier, a former member of the boutchichiya Sufi order and one of the first education ministry inspectors, Abdessalam Yassine, had sent an open letter to the king entitled “Islam or the Deluge” in which he directly criticized the king and called on him to abide by Islamic principles. Though Muṭīʿ’s Islamic Youth was dissolved in 1976 and Yassine was placed in an insane asylum, they had sown the seeds for the two main Islamist movements in Morocco today: the Justice and Development Party (Parti de la Justice et du Dévéloppement, PJD), the political party currently in power, and the association Justice and Spirituality (ʿ Adl wal Iḥsān ), which remains outside of state control.
Over at the Habous ministry, the 1970s saw a succession of ministers with similar profiles: loyal nationalists close to the king who had extensive experience in government, administration, and diplomacy. The main responsibilities of the ministry were established in a decree in 1976, which stipulated the ministry’s formal organization for the first time since independence. The text bases its legitimacy directly on the king’s religious authority as amīr al-mu’minīn and underlines the need to fight “heretical beliefs.” It also reiterates the ministry’s control over all habous (including those of zāwiyas and shrines) and underscores its responsibility to oversee the naming of “competent” and “qualified” religious personnel at home, as well as accompany and aid “Moroccans working abroad” (Kingdom of Morocco 1976).
The same decade saw the Moroccan state move to increase the use of the Arabic language in its institutions and promote Islam within the national education system, with wide-ranging consequences for the generations born after independence. The state also began using increasingly repressive measures during these years (called the années de plomb or years of lead) that successfully choked off the support that had existed on university campuses for left-wing movements. Unexpectedly however, these policies also led to the metamorphosis of political contestation: criticism of the state, society, and the king did not disappear, but rather began to be expressed through the language of Islam and in particular the growth of Islamic associations.
Between the success of the Iranian revolution in 1979 and a series of riots that broke out in Casablanca in 1981, the monarchy became increasingly suspicious of Islamist movements’ ability to channel popular anger. As a result, King Hassan II decided to reassert the monarchy’s control over the religious field, beginning with a speech given before an assembly of ulema in 1980 in which he criticized their absence from Moroccan daily affairs—despite the fact that his own policies had kept them marginalized (Zeghal 2005). The royal pressure on the Moroccan ulema led them to issue a fatwa condemning the Iranian revolution, while in 1981 the king issued a decree to “revivify” the role of the ulema in Moroccan society through the creation of Regional Ulema Councils throughout the country and an Ulema High Council placed under his authority. For the Makhzen, the return of the ulema to political and public life was to be restricted to the religious justification of state policy.
Not all ulema were pleased with this new role. When rumblings of criticism began to emerge from Dar al-Hadith al-Hassaniyya, the school’s administration responded by increasing the surveillance of its students and faculty. Meanwhile, the regional ulema councils proved to be an effective tool for the state supervision of religious affairs: they oversaw the naming of preachers in mosques and the content of the Friday khuṭbah, which similarly came under official state control (Tozy 1992, 1999). The leadership of these regional councils was attributed to allies of throne, such as the Sheikh Mekki Naciri (a former Habous minister), whom the king made president of the newly created ulema council for Rabat-Salé in his 1980 speech.
Nevertheless, establishing such a far-reaching degree of control was no easy task. Despite a religious personnel of 20,481 individuals in 1979, according to the Habous ministry’s own statistics there were upwards of 19,000 mosques in the country in 1980, of which only 6000 were overseen by the ministry (Souriau 1980). Moreover, it was during these years that independent imams began giving sermons in private mosques, copying the style of the popular Egyptian preacher Abdelhamid Kishk; these preachers, along with the followers of Muṭīʿ and Yassine, represented precisely the kind of religious actors that the state had decided to rein in.
In 1984, a series of measures were taken that targeted these elements of Islamist contestation and provided the state with the institutional means to exercise greater control over the physical and symbolic spaces of official Islam. First, at the beginning of the year, Abdelkebir Alaoui M’Daghri was appointed Minister of Habous and Islamic Affairs. Born in Meknes in 1942, M’Daghri was a full thirty years younger than his predecessor. He had studied at all three faculties of the Qarawiyyin, as well as at Dar al-Hadith al-Hassaniyya, and represented a new generation of Moroccan religious authorities. At the same time, 40 high-level positions were created in the interior ministry specifically for graduates of the Qarawiyyin’s Sharia Faculty. These religiously minded security officials were appointed to serve under the governors of the provinces and prefectures and were tasked with overseeing the recruitment of religious personnel; the construction and management of mosques, zāwiyas, and other habous; and with acting as interlocutors with the local ulema.
The increased surveillance was accompanied by a series of court trials involving Islamist figures, as well as a new decree on mosques and prayer spaces. The decree made all Islamic buildings property of the state while also stipulating that all religious personnel must be appointed by the Habous ministry, after consultation with the local governor and the regional ulema council. It also set out strict rules for the construction of mosques, requiring once again the approval of the local governor as well as the ministry. The decree effectively marked the death knell for the mosque as the main site of Islamist contestation. On the one hand, the state had turned to more oppressive measures: some preachers were imprisoned, others were stripped of their ulema title, and only those who were appointed by the Habous ministry and local authorities were allowed to give sermons in mosques. On the other hand, mosques were rendered physically inaccessible, since public authorities ensured they remained closed between prayer times, as well as “ideologically” secure, when the Habous ministry began distributing official khuṭbah that were simply to be read aloud by the state-appointed khaṭībs (Tozy 1992; Zeghal 2005).
The official reactions to Islamist contestation were reinforced by a two-pronged strategy, steeped in the royal tradition of dividing and conquering. The first element of this strategy was to permit the expansion of Wahhabism , which the state had quietly promoted since the 1960s. Wahhabism is a strict literalist form of Salafist Islam based on the Hanbali school that developed in the eighteenth century in what is now Saudi Arabia . From the monarchy’s perspective, its ostensibly apolitical outlook served well to counter the spread of panarabist and leftist groups in the country. State support for Wahhabism existed within the Habous ministry, where M’Daghri was given the task of promoting Wahhabist preachers within the ranks of the state religious personnel. M’Daghri is generally made responsible for the rise of Wahhabism in Morocco during the 1980s and 1990s (Zeghal 2005; Amghar 2011). However, he himself places the blame on the interior ministry, stating that he had been unable to exert any control over the Wahhabis—their schools, funding, teachers, or imams—because they were being supported and protected by local authorities and state security services (Ksikes 2004). An important figure in the growth of Moroccan Wahhabism was Mohammed Maghraoui, whose network of Qur’anic schools continued to grow while he wrote tracts attacking the tenets of Yassine and his Islamist movement.
State support for Wahhabism also came from the education ministry. When Istiqlal returned to the government at the end of the 1970s, Azzedine Laraki became minister and moved to dismantle the philosophy departments in the Moroccan university system. In their place, he created a new Islamic studies programme in order to “reinforce national identity” and further marginalize the subjects that the king considered responsible for “corrupting young students” with leftist ideas (Dalle 2011). The Islamic studies departments experienced a huge success, raising in turn a new problem: the established ulema refused to recognize the graduates of these programmes as fellow ulema. Consequently, those who did not become religious education teachers or writers for Islamist magazines often ended up unemployed. At the same time, the Islamic studies departments proved to be ideal structures for spreading Wahhabism : according to Darif (2010), the directors of these departments were given explicit instructions to hire professors who had studied in Saudi Arabia . Many Moroccan authorities looked favourably on Wahhabism , due to its disapproval of collective action and engagement in the public sphere, and believed that it would reduce the number of religious challenges to the political system (Aboullouz 2011).
The second element of the state’s strategy was to create a division within the Islamist movement by co-opting those that were willing to recognize the centrality and sacrosanct status of the monarchy and inviting them to participate in electoral politics. The main goal of this strategy was the integration of a cooperative Islamist-inspired political party into the Moroccan electoral landscape, leading to today’s Justice and Development Party (PJD).
The roots of the PJD go back to a group of former members of Islamic Youth who went on to found a non-violent religious association in 1983: the “Islamic Community” (al-Jamaʿa al-Islamiyya, hereafter the Jamaʿ a ). Under the leadership of Abdellatif Benkirane , the Jamaʿa became one of the main Islamist groups on Moroccan university campuses during the 1980s, in competition with groups led by other former Islamic Youth members as well as Yassine’s ʿ Adl wal Iḥsān (Tozy 1999). During these years, the Jamaʿ a and ʿAdl wal Iḥsān began concentrating on providing social services and became important actors within the educational and public health sectors. Yassine, who remained hostile to the monarchy, had tried to rally the former members of Islamic Youth to his organization; however, the mystical Sufi side of Yassine’s movement was anathema for these young Islamist activists. As Benkirane states, they had been “raised with the principles of salafiyya” and their beliefs “came directly from the Qur’an,” and thus, they could not “digest” the vision promoted by Yassine (Burgat 1988, 23–24).
Over the next two decades, these two Islamist groups would take very different paths: while Benkirane’s movement slowly moved towards recognized status as both an official association and a political party, Yassine and his followers were continually arrested and harassed by state authorities—though this did little to diminish their numbers. Benkirane and other Jamaʿ a leaders met with M’Daghri in 1990, and were invited to participate in a series of yearly meetings organized by the Habous ministry at the king’s palace in Skhirat, where prominent Islamic scholars were invited (including Necmettin Erbakan , leader of the Turkish Milli Görüş in 1998). According to M’Daghri, the idea was to create “a space for dialogue between the institution of the ulema and Islamic groups,” so as to “build bridges” between the state and Islamist movements and convince the latter to “abandon all form of withdrawal and radicalism” (Chadi 1998; Ksikes 2004).
Despite the fact that ʿAdl wal Iḥsān opted to remain outside of the regime’s arena of controlled political contestation, the monarchy’s strategy paid off and cemented the cleavage between those Islamists who accepted to play by the king’s rules and those such as Yassine who refused (Zeghal 2005). The former group, still under the leadership of Benkirane , finally emerged as an accepted element of the social and political fields by the mid-to-late 1990s, thanks to a new set of alliances and name changes. The first step was to unite a large portion of the Islamist associative movement: the Jamaʿ a , which had changed its name to Reform and Renewal (al-Iṣlāḥ wal-Tajdīd) in 1992, merged with a coalition of Islamic associations in 1996, creating the Movement for Unification and Reform (Ḥarakat al-Tawḥīd wal-Iṣlāḥ, MUR).
The following year, the MUR succeeded in entering the political arena—with the Makhzen’s approval—by joining and then taking over a pre-existing political party, the Democratic and Constitutional Popular Movement (Mouvement Populaire et Démocratique Constitutionnel, MPDC). In 1998, the transformation was complete: the MPDC was renamed the Justice and Development Party and the party’s old guard was progressively replaced by Benkirane’s Islamist followers over the following years (Zeghal 2005). At the same time, the MUR remained a separate organization, which, aside from highlighting the distinction between religious daʿwa activities and politics, has the benefit of maintaining a legally recognized structure for the movement in case the PJD were ever prohibited.
The process by which the Jamaʿa progressively went from being in opposition to the king to becoming the loyal opposition of the king has been lauded as proof of a “Moroccan exception,” especially when compared with the chaos being wrought in neighbouring Algeria over the same time period. The death of King Hassan II in 1999 and the peaceful succession of his son similarly served to reinforce this idea. However, economic inequality and widespread poverty in Morocco ’s poor urban suburbs proved to be fruitful grounds for the development of new religiously inspired dangers. Moroccans who had been active during the Soviet War in Afghanistan and had remained tied to Osama Ben Laden’s Al Qaeda network founded the “Moroccan Islamist Combattant Group” at the end of the 1990s and would be responsible for terrorist attacks in Morocco and Spain. The shock provoked by these terrorist attacks has since led to a full-fledged reform of the religious field that constitutes the current frame of reference for the Moroccan state’s view of the religious field both at home and abroad.
3 The Reform of the Religious Field
King Mohammed VI ascended the throne in 1999 and launched a full-scale reform of the religious field in 2004. The catalyst for these reforms was a series of suicide bombings that killed 45 people in Casablanca in 2003, the worst terrorist attack in the country’s history. The attack shocked the country, even more so when it was revealed that it had not been carried out by foreigners, but rather Moroccan Salafi Jihadists from poor neighbourhoods in Casablanca . Moreover, it shattered the myth of a “Moroccan exception” concerning Islamic terrorism, and the fact that the perpetrators of the 2004 Madrid train bombings included Moroccan nationals only heightened the impression that the Makhzen had lost control over the religious field.
In response, the king personally announced the reform (or “restructuration”) of the religious field during a speech in front of the country’s ulema in 2004, which was followed up by a second set of reforms in 2008. The king evoked three main areas for reform in his speech: the first was the institutional overhaul of the Habous ministry, which included the creation of new departments for mosques and traditional education and a call for a more “modern” and “rational” management of religious endowments. Secondly, the king emphasized that local ulema councils had to be reorganized in order to effectively implement these reforms and broaden their appeal to women and youth, while he institutionalized the monopolization of fatwas by the Ulema High Council to prevent the influence of “intruders working outside the legal institutional context.” Finally, the “keystone” of these reforms was to be seen in the “rationalization, modernization, and unification” of Islamic education across the country (King Mohammed VI 2004).
These structural changes were preceded by a symbolic development in 2002, when Ahmed Toufiq , a professor and member of the Sufi Qādiriyya Boutchichiyya order, was appointed as the new Habous minister. Toufiq had been calling for greater state control over religious public affairs even before the bombings, and his Sufi background was in stark contrast to that of M’daghri , who was perceived as overly close to Saudi-style Wahhabism (El-Katiri 2013). Consequently, Toufiq’s appointment has been perceived as a part of a strategy to combat Islamic radicalism with Sufism, which has been complemented by more conventional measures such as a new anti-terrorism law passed in 2003; enhanced police surveillance of radical groups and clerics; and attempts to address the socio-economic roots of the Casablanca attacks by razing slums and constructing publically funded housing projects. Toufiq has remained the only constant in a succession of governments over the last years due to one particularly salient feature of the Makhzen system: for decades, the monarchy retained control over governmental affairs through the so-called sovereign ministries, which were run by its appointed allies instead of elected politicians. Despite the numerous democratic reforms that have been enacted since Mohammed VI has come to power, there are still two ministries that tellingly remain under Makhzen control: the Ministry of Defence and the Ministry of Habous and Islamic Affairs.
The scope of the religious reforms since the king’s speech in 2004 has been impressive. Alongside the many changes in the religious administration and Islamic education, the Moroccan state also officially institutionalized the position of female preacher (murshidāt, or “guide”). This last measure was portrayed in media sources as a veritable “revolution,” given that Morocco became one of the only Muslim countries in the world to have an official title that confers religious authority on women within the state religious administration (Borrillo 2009). Modern technologies have also been mobilized, leading to the creation of a state Islamic radio station in 2004, a television channel in 2005 and a website for the Habous ministry in 2005. From preaching activities to religious education, and from fatwa-issuing to religious publications, all aspects of religious governance have come under greater state supervision.
Moreover, the Moroccan state has progressively moved towards a system in which imams and religious personnel are treated as public employees. Such a configuration is well known in Muslim countries that had once been part of the Ottoman Empire, such as Turkey and Algeria, but has never been a distinctive feature of relations between the state and religion in Morocco before. For instance, in 2008, the king announced the establishment of the “ulema pact” (mithaq al-ʿulamāʾ), a special programme focused on improving the training of Morocco ’s approximately 46,000 imams through a series of monthly seminars led by members of the ulema throughout the country. Two years later, he founded the Mohammed VI Foundation for the Welfare and Education of Imams, which offers a series of extra benefits to religious personnel and their families. Moreover, the Habous ministry provides “allowances” to imams, and these stipends have risen exponentially over the last years: from 60 million dirhams in 2004, one decade later they reached 740 million dirhams thanks to major increases in 2009 and 2012 (Badrane 2014; Ministère des Habous et des Affaires Islamiques 2012).
The monthly sums received by imams in Morocco depend on the category to which they belong. In the first category are the mosque imams, accounting for somewhere between 8000 and 14,000 individuals, who are fully covered by the Habous ministry (Hari 2012; Ministère des Habous et des Affaires Islamiques 2009). These imams receive a minimum monthly allowance that is supplemented with bonuses if they also take on additional roles, such as khaṭīb or muezzin. Those in the second category, that is to say the remaining 38,000 or so mosque imams, are paid by mosque associations, benefactors, or the local community through a “charter,” on top of which they are supposed to receive an allowance of 800 dirhams from state authorities.
However, during my field interviews, Habous officials were careful to emphasize that these allocations were not salaries, since religious officials in Morocco are not formally public employees. Abdelaziz Derouiche, director of the mosques department at the Habous ministry, has similarly stated that the goal is not to turn mosque imams into employees of the state, contrasting Morocco with Tunisia and Algeria (La Vie Éco 2011). Nevertheless, state actions continue to demonstrate the contrary. In 2006, the ministry published a contract model for hiring imams and preachers that stipulates the working conditions as well as the corresponding echelon within the public administration pay scale for religious officials (Kingdom of Morocco 2006). Furthermore, the ministry has elaborated a series of rules set out in the “Guide for Imams, Khaṭībs, and Preachers,” while a new decree in 2014 prohibited imams from joining unions or political parties and created for the first time a legal and administrative framework for religious personnel (qayyim al-dīnī). Consequently, and despite official discourse to the contrary, one of the major outcomes of the current reforms of the religious field has been the increasing “officialization” or “bureaucratization” of religious personnel as state employees in Morocco (cf. Wainscott 2018).
Greater control over religious actors also means greater control over religious content. The 2006 contract model specifies that the contract may be ruptured without any benefits if the local ulema council finds that an individual has not been following the Maliki school and the Ashʿari doctrine (see below). The “ulema pact” similarly aims to enlist the ulema to promote the state’s vision of “Moroccan Islam” as part of an ideological battle with other currents such as Wahhabism . Furthermore, in a move to literally secure the monopoly on religious goods, the king founded the Mohammed VI Foundation for the Publication of the Holy Qur’an in 2010. This new foundation has been given sole authority over Qur’an distribution and publication in Morocco with the goal of eliminating imported foreign copies that do not correspond to the Maliki rite and the warsh-style of calligraphy and recitation used in Morocco (Interview, Director Mohammed VI Qur’an Foundation, 12 June 2011, Mohammedia).
Despite the fact that the 2003 Casablanca suicide bombers were Moroccan, a central explanatory factor for the attacks promoted by state authorities was that the attackers were inspired by Saudi Wahhabism and tied to foreign jihadist movements. The danger of “foreign Islam” does not constitute a new theme: for instance, in the preamble to the decree that founded the Ulema High Council in 1981, “the dangers of foreign ideologies” to the “identity of the Moroccan nation and its authentic values” are expressly mentioned, alluding to the spread of Shiism following the Iranian revolution of 1979. The current reforms likewise characterize Islamic currents not endorsed by the state as both foreign and dangerous—in particular Wahhabism , despite the tacit support it had received in the past.
This has led the state to “develop a veritable doctrine of religious sovereignty,” underscored by the expression “spiritual security (amn rūḥī),” which shows the extent to which the spiritual domain is included in the logic of state security (Akdim 2013). The king himself stated in his 2004 speech that the Maliki rite is the “unique historical reference […] upon which the unanimity of the nation has been built,” and that “my attachment to doctrinal unity at the religious level is similar to my constitutional commitment to defend the territorial integrity and the national unity of the homeland” (King Mohammed VI 2004). Theology has now become an official part of the political struggle in the religious field, and state religious authorities in Morocco have decided to discursively combat Saudi Wahhabism by turning to a triumvirate of national religious traditions: the Maliki rite, the Ashʿari creed, and Sufism.
The Maliki rite, based on the teaching of Malik ibn Anas (711–795), is one of the four main schools of Sunni Islamic jurisprudence (fiqh) and is followed in North and West Africa, as well as in a number of Arab states of the Persian Gulf. As a Habous cabinet member explained to me, there can be historical disagreements on political issues, “but dogmatically no. [Morocco ] has always been Maliki. There is a rite to respect, there is a tradition to respect” (Interview, Habous Cabinet Member I, 30 May 2011, Rabat). Aside from the importance of the Maliki school as a national tradition in Morocco, religious authorities claim that it represents a more tolerant and adaptable form of Islam and point to the historical example of al-Andalus and Morocco’s mixed Arab and Amazigh population. Indeed, compared with other schools, the Maliki school does give greater importance to the concept of maṣlaḥa (“public interest”) in questions of Islamic jurisprudence, thus opening the door to greater flexibility based on local community practices.
Ashʿarism refers to one of the principal schools of Sunni theology (ʿilm al-kalām), founded by Abu al-Hasan al-Ashʿari (873–935), and is particularly associated with the Maliki and Shafiʿī schools of jurisprudence. It arose at a time when a current of Islamic scholars called the Muʿtazilites had become particularly well versed in the language of Aristotelian philosophy and argued that reason alone could suffice in order to understand religious truths in Islam. The position of the Muʿtazilites provoked intense opposition from the Athariyya creedal school, which believed that human reasoning “can neither be trusted nor relied upon in matters of religion, thus making theology a sinful and dangerous exercise in human arrogance” (Halverson 2014, 2). Though proponents of Ashʿarism similarly opposed a number of Muʿtazilite ideas, they were not as hostile to reason as the Atharis; however, their attempt to strike a middle ground gave rise to a historical narrative that views Ashʿarism as a conservative, literalist movement. Conversely, as argued by Halverson, Ashʿarism holds the potential for a renewal of Islamic thought due to the relevance of rationalism and reason to its understanding of faith, which is in direct opposition to the “strict adherence to the literal outward (zahir) meanings of the sacred texts,” as promoted by its modern Athari adversaries: the Wahhabi and Salafi movements (Halverson 2014, 2). Ashʿarism can thus be ideologically used by Morocco to shore up its counterterror policy by affirming its “moderate approach that values human reason” (Wainscott 2018, 77–78).
Sufism, with its deeply rooted history in Moroccan religious practice and politics, was used as an effective tool by both Mohammed V and Hassan II to balance the influence of Salafist and Islamist currents in their times. Similarly, the current king’s decision to promote Sufi movements like the boutchichiyya and appoint its members to positions of power demonstrates the longevity of this strategy in Moroccan religious governance. For instance, despite having been generally known for its “political discretion,” the boutchichiyya order has emerged as a significant ally of the monarchy. In one of the most blatant examples of this support, it contributed greatly to the organization of a massive rally in Casablanca in 2011, meant to demonstrate its backing for the king in an upcoming constitutional referendum.
The new constitution was proposed in the wake of the Arab Spring uprisings, which had led to a series of demonstrations in Morocco in 2011. These protests came to be known as the “February 20th Movement” and challenged the Makhzen with calls for greater democratization and transparency. Faced with the vision of regimes falling throughout the Arab world and the subsequent rise of armed Islamist groups in Mali, Libya, and the Islamic State in Syria and Iraq, the Makhzen sought to maintain its control as well as conserve its image as a beacon of stability. The new constitution enacted significant democratic reforms and was followed by a record electoral victory for the PJD at the end of the year; however, the monarchy had actually been preparing many of these reforms before the protests began and on the whole managed to reinforce its position while emerging relatively unscathed from the conflict (Ferrié and Dupret 2011; Baylocq and Granci 2012).
In the religious field, the same year gave rise to a phenomenon heretofore never seen in the country: protests by imams in front of the parliament in Rabat. The main reason for these protests was the low allocations and sparse benefits received by religious personnel; however, they were also due to the fact that the Habous ministry had forbidden imams from becoming involved in political issues while also obliging them to support the new constitution and “vilify the February 20th Movement” (Hlaoua 2015). Indeed, the February 20th Movement works as a snapshot to show the fluid nature of alliances between religious actors in the political arena: while the movement received the support of a large number of youth groups and leftists, it also attracted the backing of ʿ Adl wal Iḥsān and a limited number of individual PJD members; conversely, the PJD as a whole boycotted the protests, the Sufi boutchichiya were massively involved in support of the monarchy, and state-employed imams were directed to similarly encourage support for the Makhzen in their mosques. The last years have seen further electoral victories by the PJD in 2016, while the state has continued to reinforce its training programmes for imams, which now include contingents from both neighbouring West African countries as well as the Moroccan diaspora (see Chapter 7).
The last two decades have seen the Moroccan Muslim field become the object of far-reaching reforms by the central political powers. In general, these reforms have adhered to time-honoured strategies used by the Makhzen to achieve a balance of power between the prevailing Islamic currents while preserving its own centrality. As a result, the Makhzen today remains in control of defining the limits between official and unofficial Islam and the ensuing theological contours of “Moroccan Islam.” At the same time, the reform of the religious field has furthered a tendency that began during the protectorate: the progressive institutionalization and bureaucratization of official Islam in Morocco , as opposed to the less formal mechanisms of religious governance that had been used in the past. These changes have had significant implications for the expansion of Moroccan religious activities to foreign countries, where state control is more tenuous and a greater number of actors compete to define what constitutes legitimate religious authority.
4 Conclusion
The content of official Islam is not static, and its boundaries with unofficial Islam are both unpredictable and circumstantial. Over the last century in Turkey and Morocco , religious and political actors have discursively mobilized Islam to justify a wide variety of sometimes contradictory ideas. The very diversity of claims that Islam can ostensibly support demonstrates that no one given course of action can be attributed to a supposed inherent quality of the religion. Instead, the main focus must remain on the specific interests of social and political actors, in light of the temporal and spatial contexts in which they operate.
Furthermore, alliances change. Unofficial currents are not necessarily enemies of the state: they may be temporary partners, indifferent outsiders, or may themselves be co-opted and encouraged—especially when the state is faced with more dangerous alternatives. As seen in the Turkish case, all the actors of unofficial Turkish Islam have at some point been members of the state religious establishment. Similarly, the Moroccan state support for Wahhabism starting in the 1960s may have derived in part from an older tradition of Salafism in the country, but the decision to begin tacitly encouraging Wahhabism at that particular time was the result of a political strategy to undermine leftist movements. The decision to abandon this support after 2004 was also a political decision, primarily due to national security concerns. Given this analysis, the best definition for “official Islam” in the case of these two countries is the form of Islam which best suits state interests at a precise moment in time and which is subject to changing political conditions.
The state remains a formidable force of legitimization, and having the rubber stamp of approval from a state religious institution is often enough to establish an individual actor’s legitimacy as a religious authority. As in Turkey, this mode of securing religious legitimacy in Morocco is reminiscent of Weber’s concept of legal-rational authority, in that the state-employed imam does not necessarily need to be charismatic or have inherited his function from his ancestors in order to be accepted by his mosque community. However, it includes the caveat that believers must also more generally support the state. In the case of Morocco, individuals may not think highly of politicians or ministers, but nevertheless support the amīr al-mu’minīn. In Turkey, many believers are reassured by the fact that the Diyanet is a state institution, as it is this quality which ostensibly ensures that it remains neutral and operates in the interest of the public, as opposed to other Islamic currents, which are thought to pursue their own private interests. These examples of state-linked strategies of legitimization for religious authorities are highly significant, as they represent national modalities that both Morocco and Turkey have exported abroad to the Muslim religious fields of France and Germany .
Finally, Islam remains intricately tied to national identity, though with underlying ambiguity and tensions. Despite the fact that state religious actors acknowledge the transnational ummah, the policies pursued by Turkey and Morocco , at home and abroad, are those of nation-states. Consequently, when it comes to Turkish and Moroccan communities abroad, the result has been the promotion of a nationalized vision of Islam, in which language, culture, and ethnicity are all included, recreating national boundaries within transnational religious fields. The following chapters will examine the evolution and consequences of such policies for the development of the Muslim fields in France and Germany .