Sufism and Salafism in the Maghreb

During much of the twentieth century, practitioners of Sufism faced extensive criticism from both the jihadist and the anticolonial Salafi communities, who claimed that Sufi beliefs and practices were heterodox, if not heretical. Even though Sufism had been an indigenous and popular form of religious expression within the region for years, their consistent and heated denunciations of Sufism eventually led to the decline in its practice in the Maghreb. Following this decline, at the end of the twentieth century, political leaders (particularly in Morocco and Algeria) attempted to revive Sufism as a pacifist alternative to jihadi-Salafi beliefs and practices, which they believed encouraged political militancy and threatened the state. This chapter examines societal and state efforts first to discourage Sufism and encourage Salafism during most of the twentieth century, and then to reverse course and try to revive Sufism during the twenty-first century, as an attempt to counter the threat of jihadi Salafism. While there are many Sufi orders in North Africa, this chapter focuses on the larger and more influential orders, including the Shadhiliyya, the Shadhiliyya-Jazuliyya, the Shadhiliyya-Darqawiyya, the Qadiriyya, the Tijaniyya, the Sanusiyya, and the Qadiriyya-Boutchichiyya.

Thou Shalt Not Speak One Language

It is the contention of this chapter that official promotions of multilingualism partake in a broader neoliberal state strategy to shield highly stratified and unequal economic interests by placing the heavy burden of global adaptability on individual speakers as students, laborers, and citizens. In its rhetoric, this strategy endorses individual multilingualism as an instrument for balancing out opportunity and access among the population. Policies on multilingualism reify previous hierarchies by recasting certain languages as those of modernity, opportunity, and progress within the actualities of global market capitalism. In sum, the chapter exposes current modes of discrimination that determine who is left out of national and global discourses on development. It also raises urgent questions about the possibility of public deliberation in an ostensibly developing and democratizing Morocco, questions that resonate with the wider Maghreb region and especially within the Algerian and Tunisian contexts. This chapter aims to probe the relationship between multilingualism and diversity with two aims: first, to examine the social impact of Moroccan multilingualism within the frame of global market capitalism, and, second, to use social experience to unsettle the assumed tautology between institutionalized diversity and liberal democratization.

The Amazigh Movement in a Changing North Africa

This chapter traces transformations in Amazigh militancy over the past fifty years. Its engagements have gradually shifted from particular demands for cultural and linguistic recognition toward a broader advocacy for social justice, political transparency, and economic equity that parallel those of student, labor, feminist, and human rights movements. These are demands that congealed in the 2011 mass demonstrations across North Africa and that explicitly sought to transcend extant ethnic and religious divisions within the region. Today, the Amazigh movement’s imagination of a broader cultural-geographic space of Tamazgha (Barbary) stretching from the Canary Islands to the Egyptian Siwa oasis continues to provide an alternate model for thinking beyond the narrow national interests that had sunk previous, official efforts to enact North African unity. Even as Amazigh activists remain fractured along generational, class, and indeed regional/national lines, their efforts at organizing through “world” federations, supranational bodies, diasporic resources, and delocalized social media point to alternative vectors for rethinking North Africa beyond a set of discrete nation-states. The Amazigh movement thus provides a salient lens for examining contemporary social currents in North Africa.

Islamist Parties and Transformation in Tunisia and Morocco

This chapter surveys the most important debates generated by these research agendas, and argues that, despite some impressive contributions, their focus remains generally limited to certain aspects of Islamist politics. Specifically, post-2011 research agendas continue to dismiss the relevance of party politics due to the longstanding belief—quite justified in most cases—that parties in the Middle East and particularly in North Africa are insignificant political actors. In light of the events of 2011, however, it is necessary to examine party politics more closely, especially the ideologically driven Islamist parties that often hold the key to the success or failure of regime change in the region. Scrutinizing Islamist parties can reveal critical social, political, generational, and ideological factors affecting Islamism as a whole, including the Salafi trend. More specifically, scholars must overcome their tendency to overlook the profound diversity, fragmentation, and tensions that exist within Islamism proper. Such diversity plays a role not only in the political institutional arena (i.e., electoral competition between different Islamist parties), but also in social domains, where there are heated ideological debates and diverse instances and forms of activism within the Islamist sphere that many observers have yet to fully grasp and analyze. Finally, the chapter points to the seeming paradox of the thesis of post-Islamism, which in some ways has been confirmed rather than challenged by the arrival of the Moroccan Party for Justice and Development (PJD) and the Tunisian Ennahda to power.

Social Currents in North Africa

This introductory chapter offers a critical reassessment of the disciplinary contours have become all the more desirable in light of the momentous and unforeseen sociopolitical upheavals, known as the Arab uprisings, which started in Tunisia in December 2010. The “territory-crossing” reach and substantive implications of the uprisings have compelled North Africanists to review some of the paradigmatic and procedural assumptions in their field of studies, and to don fresh conceptual and methodological lenses when reading Arab societies more broadly. To this end, the chapter addresses the following questions: have the Arab uprisings exposed heretofore underestimated regional commonalities for historians and social scientists to explain? And can post-uprising research promote greater analytic rigor and disciplinary synergies in North African studies, to the benefit of more varied transregional and comparative perspectives on national developments?

“Curating the Mellah”

This chapter discusses the movement of cultural renovation and marketing of Jewish heritage in Tunisia and Morocco and its ties to the development of a Jewish cultural tourism that targets Israeli tourists of North African and Ashkenazi descent. It also analyzes the political and social debates about Israeli relations with Morocco and Tunisia, and Jewish-Muslim relations that have been generated by this movement of cultural preservation. This chapter argues that this movement has a philo-Semitic dimension given its focus on Jewish capital and tourism revenues rather than on a serious national debate about the place of Jews as citizens in Morocco and Tunisia. While Jews are admired as successful business owners and traders, they are socially and religiously stigmatized because of their direct or indirect links to the conflict between Israel and Palestine. Therefore, negative perceptions of Jews are seen largely through debates revolving around the appropriateness of normalizing relations with Israel, especially after the Arab uprisings. Even with the damaging political impact of the Arab-Israeli conflict on perceptions of Jews in Morocco and Tunisia, governments are still using their countries’ historical Jewish heritage to market a living Jewish culture in North African cities and villages.

Film and Cultural Dissent in Tunisia

The purpose of this chapter is to address the value of cultural politics in the gradual emergence of a dissident social imaginary. Perhaps because of the rigidity of censorship and the severity of self-censorship during the successive dictatorships of Bourguiba and Ben Ali, one of the remarkable constants of Tunisian cultural products is that much of what would count for political dissidence has been couched as forms of social or cognitive dissonance, in which the norms of social intelligibility collapse and with them all sorts of taboos, evident in postcolonial Tunisian films. This chapter seeks to disentangle the common genealogies of cultural resistance and dissidence that have characterized the artistic ventures of a number of filmmakers in postcolonial Tunisia. This chapter outlines the trajectory of Tunisian thanks to innovative and committed filmmakers whose neo-realist artistic vision shaped today’s cinematic landscape in Tunisia. The major part of this chapter is devoted to a discussion of select postcolonial dissident films, examining the critical latencies of each film along with the ways that each helped capture and articulate, at least retrospectively, Tunisians’ mass discontent with the authoritarian regimes of both Bourguiba and Ben Ali.

Keeping Up With the Times

This chapter focuses on how the Polisario Liberation Movement has transformed itself and the support networks from which it benefits. Interested in how continued attention to longstanding support from Algeria may have led analysts to overlook the growing importance of support from other nonstate actors, this chapter looks at how the Polisario undertake new activities that were not facilitated by Algerian support. This chapter draws on both existing studies of the movement and experiences from extensive fieldwork in the Sahrawi refugee camps from 2006–2014. First, it briefly discusses the increasing importance of the support of nonstate actors for armed movements since the end of the Cold War. Then, it turns to the case of the Polisario, examining its beginnings as a typical anticolonial liberation movement, and then subsequent economic, political, and demographic transformations in light of which the Polisario has either shifted policy or stuck to longstanding principles. It goes on to describe nonstate forms of support that have become increasingly important. Finally, it examines the broader implications of these new, intensifying forms of support for Polisario’s position as this support has blurred the boundary between an armed and unarmed movement.

The Politics of the Haratin Social Movement in Mauritania, 1978–2014

The Haratin have sought equality and justice primarily through fighting the stigmas attached to slavery and by challenging the political marginalization that has secured their subordination. This chapter explores the context in which the Haratin movement began, the evolution of the rhetoric it has used to articulate dissent, its politics, and the growing diversity of the organizations that have devoted themselves to the Haratin cause. It outlines the ways in which the generational divide among activists has shaped the movement’s actions without changing its core demands. It devotes to analyzing the patterns of conflict and cooperation over time, not only within the movement, but also in its rather ambiguous relationships with other social and political actors. It seeks to explain how the complex intersectionality of ethnic and cultural identities has made it difficult at times for non-Haratin communities to accept the legitimacy of the Haratin cause. The chapter then argues that not only has the Haratin movement been an important player in Mauritania’s various attempts at democratization, but also that so-called “political liberalization” has allowed the movement the opportunity to advance its social and political agendas.

Labor Protest in Morocco

This chapter is divided into four sections that outline the origins of Morocco’s labor unions and detail their involvement in the country’s uprisings of 2011. First, the chapter surveys the historical foundations of labor unions in Morocco, focusing on the colonial and postcolonial periods. This early history demonstrates that Morocco’s unions have a history of inciting violence to advance their agenda, especially in urban areas, which have historically served as centers of opposition to the monarchy. Second, the chapter sets the baseline to show that, like in Tunisia and Egypt, the period preceding the Arab Spring was marked by increased labor unrest in Morocco. Third, it examines union mobilization during the height of popular protests against Morocco’s regime, from February 2011 to June 2011. Finally, the chapter closes by discussing what demands the unions secured from their activism and reviews the key implications from the political historical narrative. The empirical record bears out the argument that labor unions used unrest connected to Morocco’s “Arab Spring” to realize some of their core material demands.