The Calls of Islam: Sufis, Islamists, and Mass Mediation in Urban Morocco

Epilogue

137 Epilogue “The enemy,” those who respond to something from beyond the frontier of communication . . . —James T. Siegel, Fetish, Recognition, Revolution The period in which I carried out this ethnographic study was pivotal in Mohammed VI’s consolidation of control over the religious field. In the terms repeatedly offered in the decade following May 16, 2003, the king recuperated and enforced the “the spiritual security of the nation” (Arif 2008; cf. Kaitouni 2010). In practice “spiritual security” meant the state’s reassertion of control over the calls of Islam—the domestication of Sufi practice, and the repression of Islamist dissent. Put otherwise, security has meant controlling the messages and media that might provoke responses among masses now deemed the site of potential threats to the national body as a whole. The 2003 terrorist attacks did not, of course, invent the discourse of control; the monarchism that colonial-era nationalists developed as a strategic call to mass consciousness itself built on cultural history and colonial strategy. In turn it provided the ritual infrastructure for further monarchist calls in the postindependence era of Mohammed V and the postcolonial era of Hassan II. Hassan II’s domination of the call of Islam—namely, his control of its media and his lethal repression of opposing voices—was pivotal to his sustained rule. Extension and domination of radio and television in the early 1970s permitted Hassan II’s staging the most spectacular call to action in Morocco’s history, the 1975 Green March, evoked by Mohammed VI immediately following the 2003 bombing. The Moroccan state’s control of broadcast media from independence through the 1980s, and the subsequent competition in the 1990s and 2000s from other communication technologies, from small media to satellite channels to social media, is a textbook example of current public-sphere theories of Islam and media in the Muslim world. 138 | The Calls of Islam In this rapidly maturing field, Muslim politics constituted a contest over Muslim publics and, more specifically, the public mediation of sacred symbols. Diversification of technological media is framed as the democratization of the authority to establish public presence—a democratization of the capacity to call and in so doing establish oneself as the voice of the public (Mah 2000). Initial treatments of this process were markedly optimistic, often reiterating the same modernist fantasies of a universal network (Schivelbusch 1986; Mattelart 1996). Media theorists of “print Islam” and “sound Islam” envisioned egalitarian Muslim public spheres both global and local defined by the capacity of ostensibly “anyone” to claim authority (Robinson 1993; Eickelman 1985). More importantly, such a collapse of hierarchy would lead not to disorder but rather, in Eickelman and Piscatori’s words, to “overlapping circles of communication, solidarity, and . . . bonds of identity and trust” (Eickelman and Piscatori 2004, xiii; cf. Eickelman and Salvatore 2002, 99). Recent assessments by these and other theorists have been rather more cautious, emphasizing differences in power as well as in the impossibility of finally controlling circulation itself (Eickelman and Salvatore 2004; Moors 2006). Islamic exorcism is a case in point. To be sure, the proliferation of Islamic calls in the 1980s and 1990s, of which Islamic exorcisms were a part, demonstrate small media challenges both to the older exclusive scribal and oral-communications media and to state-controlled broadcast media. But the practice of Islamic exorcism and the experiences of its practitioners also demonstrate the uncertainty such technological communications can evoke at the moment they make a total and transparent space of communication imaginable. Inasmuch as exorcism signals a claim to the call available ostensibly to “anyone,” of communication detached from hierarchy, it precipitates different fears of communication , and fear of difference as communication. But while most optimistic assessments of Islam’s “democratization”—more accurately, its “massification”—have now been moderated, popular discourse surrounding more recent Arab uprisings renewed the claims. The protests that emerged in Tunisia in late 2010 and quickly spread across the Middle East and North Africa marked a significant political rupture. In Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya authoritarian figures collapsed; in Syria another may fall, but only following protracted civil and sectarian war. Protests have been violently muted in Bahrain, Yemen, and Algeria. In Iran, where protests erupted in 2009, international sanctions may yet disrupt government control. In Morocco the state has at once violently stifled protests and arrested participants and also provided some measure of constitutional reform. Participants and observers alike in these protests and revolutions have argued over the extent to which so-called social media...