Religion and Power in Morocco

by Henry Munson

In this book a well-known anthropologist traces the evolution of the political role of Islam in Morocco from the seventeenth century to present times. Integrating history and anthropology in a way very different from Clifford Geertz's famous study of 1968, Henry Munson organizes his book around a series of conflicts that have exemplified the myth of the righteous man of God who dares to defy an unjust sultan.
Grounding his book in the relevant indigenous texts and on two years of ethnographic fieldwork, Munson suggests a more solidly substantiated alternative to the "social history of the imagination" advocated by Geertz, and he illustrates the consequences of neglecting the historical and symbolic contexts of events by examining Geertz's interpretation of the conflict between the seventeenth-century scholar-cum-saint al-Yusi and the sultan Mulay Ismail. Munson argues that the religious facets of power cannot be understood without reference to factors like force and fear, and he suggests that anthropological analyses of "sacred kingship" in Morocco have often been distorted by their neglect of such matters - and by their failure to distinguish between the religious rhetoric of rulers and the religious beliefs of those they rule. Munson examines the social historical roots of the fundamentalist opposition to the regime of King Hassan II, who has reigned since 1961, and the reasons for its relative weakness when compared with its counterparts in Iran and Algeria. He shows to what extent Moroccan fundamentalism is rooted in classical Islamic notions of "just rule" and to what extent it represents an invented tradition similar to recent forms of politicized revivalism in other religions.

Genres: Islam, Politics

256 pages, Hardcover

First published July 28, 1993

Reviews

[Brian Griffith · Rating 5 out of 5]

Munson's account highlights the dramatic tensions between radically different versions of tradition in Moroccan history. To an outsider’s view, North Africa presents a public image of strict social conformity, and religious orthodoxy. But within North Africa, a vast gap has repeatedly appeared between two different kinds of orthodoxy. First was the orthodoxy of local communities, with their strong bonds and traditions. In the hands of these communities, both Christianity and Islam were mainly expressions of ancient values, such as hospitality and group solidarity. For these traditionalists, an injunction to love one’s neighbor as oneself might seem an obvious piece of common sense. The moral was driven home in a thousand traditional tales: Once upon a time the ancestors knew hardship, and lacked sufficient food and drink. Yet they shared what little they had—and behold, there was enough.

The other orthodoxy was that of the rulers, with their claims to absolute power over the people and resources of a desiccated land. This was a basically political and economic, rather than a religious orthodoxy. But it infringed on religion, in that it sought to identify the ruler’s interests with the will of God, and establish the rulers as objects of reverence. For a modern example, when King Hassan II of Morocco spoke at the commissioning of a new army general (in the 1970s), he said: “Anyone we entrust with a civil or military mission must reflect our mission, that of the commander of the faithful, obliged to serve as the divine shadow on earth” (p. 127). At that time, the Moroccan army was engaged in the will of its master, namely annexing the southwest Sahara, and exterminating the local resistance.

These two kinds of orthodoxy (that of the rulers and of the local communities) both claimed the same God and the same holy book as their sources of inspiration. Aside from this claim, the two orders of religion bore little or no resemblance. To the outside world, it was the orthodoxy of the rulers that appeared as the “official” form of religion. This, it seemed, was the outer vestment of Middle Eastern and North African civilization. When sultans like Hassan II spoke of their own power as the essential element in Islamic culture, the outside world often believed them. But within North Africa, the claims of rulers to God-like omnipotence were less readily believed. The divine right of sultans was not popularly accepted as an article of true religion. It was a belief of central importance only to the rulers themselves.

Of course local people and their clerics seldom attacked the ruler’s beliefs in public, and silence could be taken for consent. To challenge the divine right of kings often brought the death penalty more speedily than any other possible heresy. As King Hassan II said to his country after a coup attempt in 1972, "God has placed the king on the throne to safeguard the monarchy, and to do this the Maliki school of Islam stipulates that he must not hesitate, if necessary, to eliminate one third of the population infected by evil ideas to protect the two thirds of the population not so infected" (p. 134).

Naturally, the Moroccan people did not greet these sentiments with wholehearted enthusiasm. But also naturally, they usually phrased any criticism of such rulers in indirect language. Statements of general religious principle could be made to simply affirm the communal values violated by the sultans. So a series of Moroccan proverbs called down the wrath of God on unjust rulers:
• The oppressor will not be helped by God.
• The oppressor is cursed by God and despised by the people.
• There is no protection from the call of the oppressed to God. (p. 144)

In a side of traditional North African culture veiled to the outside world like the dark side of the moon, those who stood up against despotic warlords were commonly revered as the greatest saints of Islam.

[Daniel Burton-Rose · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book opened my eyes to the political landscape in Morocco when I lived there in 1997. I believe the author was barred from the country for laying the King so ideologically bare.