Regulating Islam: Religion and the State in Contemporary Morocco and Tunisia by Sarah J. Feuer (review)

Sarah Feuer’s elegant new book, Regulating Islam, responds to the long-standing absence of comparative work on the relationship between religious education and state-building. While a number of single case studies exist, best exemplified by Gregory Starrett’s masterpiece Putting Islam to Work: Education, Politics, and Religious Transformation in Egypt (University of California Press, 1998), the time was ripe for a rigorous theoretical treatment of the issue — exactly what Feuer offers. Feuer argues convincingly that variations in religious education can be explained by three main factors, “the interplay of each regime’s legitimating ideology, political opponents, and institutional endowment” (p. 6). She identifies three indicators of religious regulation: the religiosity of the school curriculum, the changing power balance between state-regulated and independent institutions of religious learning, and crucially, state control of the credentials for teachers of Islam. But the genius of the work lies not only in its theoretical framework but also in the empirical richness of the later chapters. The combination of these two elements, careful theory and detailed empirics, assure that the book will stand the test of time — as both a reference on Moroccan and Tunisian religious regulation and educational politics and as a framework for understanding the politics of religious regulation in other contexts.

Feuer’s three factors are carefully conceptualized. For example, for the first factor, the regime’s ideology of legitimation, Feuer categorizes regimes that rely heavily on religion as “traditionalist,” not traditional, “because many of the twentieth century’s political regimes and social movements grounding their legitimacy in religious notions were thoroughly modern in their interpretations of religious texts and teachings, and in their tactics of political consolidation and social mobilization.” She continues, “That they styled themselves as embodiments of tradition did not reflect a historical reality so much as a self-conscious equating of (a particular reading of) religion with tradition” (pp. 17–18). The other two factors are similarly nuanced. The theoretical chapter in general is refreshingly self-aware of its own limitations, admitting that the empirical variation is “undoubtedly more complex” than the theory.

Employing John Stuart Mill’s method of difference, Feuer compares how, despite an extraordinary number of similarities, Morocco and Tunisia reached very different relationships between the ruling regime and the content of religious education. Chapter 1 fleshes out the theoretical argument. Chapter 2 analyzes her three factors of interest (ideology, opposition, and institutions) in Morocco from independence to the beginning of the Arab Spring. Chapter 3 analyzes the relationship between these three factors and the three indicators of religious regulation. The chapter provides a rich history of Moroccan educational politics from the time of independence. Chapters 4 and 5 repeat this pattern for the Tunisian case. The final chapter analyzes changes to religious regulation in the context of the Arab Spring, examining the role of religious regulation in explaining why Morocco in particular and the monarchies in the Middle East in general were forced to give fewer concessions than other regimes in the region.

For scholars seeking to apply the theory, the operationalization of the second factor, the religious demands of the opposition, may be inadequate. In its present formulation, it is unclear when an opposition movement begins shaping religious regulation. Additionally, the current formulation of this factor overstates the role of the opposition and understates the role of the regime. There is substantial evidence in the Moroccan case that the state shaped the nature of the opposition, including the strength of various trends, through the religious education curricula and severe repression.

As detailed by Feuer, the state increased the religious content of the public schools beginning in the 1970s (p. 57) but did not face a formidable Islamist opposition until the late 1980s (p. 22). Feuer accounts for the change as a result of the pressure of ‘ulama and religious nationalists (p. 64) in the 1960s and 1970s. But an alternative reading is that fear...