A Fassi Linguascape

Chapter one introduces the linguistic soundscape of Fez, giving a sense of the context in which laments about communicative failure arose. It provides some historical background and describes the multilingual resources and sensibilities evoked throughout the book.

Mediating Moroccan Muslims

Chapter five brings morality, literate listening, and sonic reading together to explore the semiotics of the “Moroccan model of Islam,” a state-sponsored effort to shape religious discourse and practices via media in the wake of “extremism.” In May 2003, Morocco experienced a major religiously motivated attack, in which thirty-seven Moroccans were killed. Extremist Islam, learned through foreign media, was blamed. In particular, people claimed satellite television and small portable media (like audio cassette and VCR tapes, as well as VCD and DVD disks, and more recently internet videos) had corrupted and confused Moroccans about proper Islam. One of the Moroccan state responses was to re-cultivate what they called the Moroccan model or pattern of Islam نموذج المغربي‎, namūdhaj almaghribī, a historically “moderate” Islam, which they would spread via modern radio and television stations, training institutes, and global dissemination of training materials. The Moroccan pattern of Islam included a bundle of semiotic forms promoted as uniquely Moroccan: clothing, Qur’anic recitation styles, writing scripts, textual reasoning patterns, and television/radio communicative channels for connecting Moroccans to Islam. This chapter examines critical Fassi responses to the state media efforts at semiotically shaping Islam in Morocco and the social non-movements precipitated from those responses.

Literate Listening

Chapter two explores Fassi perspectives on what it meant to engage in public life through literate listening to news in Morocco. Many scholars have argued that poor Arabic education in Morocco has left a functionally illiterate citizenry who cannot understand the formal Arabic of the news broadcast. This chapter analyzes how laments about listening failures by listening subjects (those who authorized themselves to evaluate these failures) allowed Fassis to create competing yet recognizable Moroccan linguistic practices for public participation. Some challenged scholarly ideas of what it meant to be literate and by extension a skilled reasoner. They evoked an explicit literate listening ideology: awareness (الوعي‎ lwā’ī), glossed as keen reasoning skills, came from verbal interaction with a wide range of interlocutors, not just the educated elements of society. While many Fassis who viewed themselves as literate and educated repeatedly bemoaned the misunderstandings of poorly literate Moroccans, others in Fez challenged a core “modern” ideology of writing/reading literacy as an individual skill, acquired only in schools, necessary for critical reasoning and, by extension, for news comprehension. Instead, their news reception involved distributed literacy, in which family members contributed their unique linguistic repertories to the interpretive process.

Introduction Moroccan Channels, Channeling Moroccanness

This chapter introduces the ways Moroccans engaged media despite a widespread feeling of communicative failure. It also outlines how they viewed language and media as sharing some of the same channeling qualities at the same time that they tried to distinguish their views from others. Ethnographic vignettes lay out the key laments generating relationality in Fez: media failure, language mediation, and Moroccanness. This chapter also explains the key semiotic theories on multimodality and phatic connectivity developed throughout the book.

Scripting Sounds and Sounding Scripts

Building from the rhymed prose register, chapter four analyzes the ways laments about Arabic writing have shaped practices of phatic connection in Fez. I look at the ways Fassis engaged darīja writing as a blending of multisensory channels tied to specific media platforms: folklore books, WhatsApp, advertising billboards, and newsprint. Instead of foregrounding the aural/spoken soundscape or the visual/graphic linguascape, I examine the intertwining of these sensorial channels in the sounding of darīja script and scripting of darīja sounds by reading subjects, everyday Moroccans who authorized themselves to weigh in on the politics of writing. Scholars have written about Arabic soundscapes, the acoustic environments, listening practices, and ritual sounding in which Arabic shapes public discourse and Muslim subjects. Others have focused on the emergence of Arabic dialect writing movements as expressions of political movements, local advertising campaigns, and youth-driven social change movements. Both the soundscape and darīja writing literatures hint at the multisensory channel practices and ideologies mobilized to make Moroccan persons, and they include laments about modality failures that motivated writing changes in the last decade. In the face of debates about the role of language in Moroccan national identity, Fassi everyday scriptic heterogeneity pointed to a practice of ambivalence toward written darīja in specific media platforms (billboards, websites, and mobile apps), but not others (books and newsprint). The platforms of writing mattered to the phatic work of making Moroccans in Fez.

Reregistering Media and Remediating a Register

Chapter three continues to analyze how Fassis understood moral literacy through an oral storytelling register of rhymed prose revamped for civic education via television: هدرة الميزان‎ hadra lmizān. From the late 2000s to 2016, a group of Moroccan cultural producers repurposed a rhymed prose form of darīja associated with grandmothers and street performers to convey “modern” Moroccan civic values. Most often this involved promoting equality for women. In doing so, they sought to make a linguistic register, rhymed prose, into a mediator of Moroccanness, shaping viewers’ perceptions of civic engagement through a nostalgic medium primed with equality content. Both Fassis and state media producers calibrated the channel shift as doing the same Moroccanness work: preserving or “revitalizing” a “traditional” form that connected Moroccans morally. And yet they understood it in different ways because of implicit and explicit media ideologies about how to relate to registers in specific mediums. This chapter challenges media professionals’ assumptions that the positive associations with this storytelling register, when linked with “modern” content and values, would be sufficient as a mechanism for shaping morality perspectives of Fassis. Instead, the viewing practices were more important for the register uptake, or lack thereof.

Conclusion

Using a cooking program viewing event, the conclusion reiterates how Moroccan sociality was calibrated through everyday talk about media and language. Just as a tagine (Moroccan stew and the clay pot in which it is cooked) has become a model or emblem of Moroccanness, and there are many ways and ingredients to make a tagine recognized as Moroccan, so too are there varied ways of relating semiotic mediation to Moroccanness. Fassis mobilized their heightened awareness and concern about channel/medium failures to do all kinds of uncoordinated political participation and sociality work, the phatic labor of Moroccanness.