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47 3 Our Master’s Call The Apotheosis of Moroccan Islam Colonial-era Moroccan nationalists reinterpreted the powers of popular Sufi (sharifian) rituals to foreground their material properties as media. More precisely, placed in the context of mass-mediated communications by which national subjects could be summoned, Sufi rites appeared in new light as the call of competing media, generating demonstrably different forms of piety and society: on the one hand, exploited masses; on the other hand, a coherent public, “the Moroccan People.” Yet the distinction between these two has remained tenuous, both for postcolonial nationalists , such as al-Wazzani, who sought a democratic alternative to the authoritarian monarchy, and for postcolonial theorists of “Moroccan Islam.” What scholars have described as “Moroccan Islam” explicitly evokes a mass public unified—enthralled, or indeed, entranced—by a culture of saint veneration, and expanded to a national scale.1 But if theorists have acknowledged the ritual and communicative power of saints by which a public forms—Clifford Geertz describes baraka as “spiritual electricity” (1983, 136)—they have neglected to describe precisely how technologically mediated rituals have summoned such a public into being.2 I do so in this chapter by examining a watershed event in postcolonial Moroccan politics: the Green March (al-masira al-khadra) of 1975, when King Hassan II summoned 350,000 men and women to walk en masse and unarmed into then-Spanish occupied Western Sahara to reclaim the territory for the Moroccan nation-state. Hassan II’s command, which marchers describe as “nidaʾ sidna” (“the King’s Call,” literally “Our Master’s Call”), succeeded in reclaiming the territory, though not without continuing conflict. More importantly, his call provoked mass enthusiasm and at least temporary national unity across social and 48 | The Calls of Islam political differences; it remains a critical current reference point in the state’s assertion and enforcement of national unity and “spiritual security” (Arif 2008; Kaitouni 2010). Examining the Green March sets the stage for post–May 16 calls of Islam by mapping out the distinctly national identity of the religious field in which these acts of the call take place (Tozy 1999). The tremendous power of the event itself, its continuing significance to political life for Moroccans as mass-mediated subjects, helps explain the predominance of the specifically sharifian, national call of Islam in contemporary Fez. It helps us grasp the social stakes of aligning oneself with or against the dominant Sufi call in urban Morocco, of belonging to the imagined community or not. At the same time, it establishes specifically mass-mediated conditions under which that call was established. In the Green March we see a regime (like the Arab-Islamic regimes in Syria, Egypt, Iraq, and Libya) at the height of its technological and social control of Islam’s call, of national television and radio not yet perforated by digital communications or small media, nor yet fully challenged by an Islamist countercall. These historically specific media conditions, rather than symbolic power alone, give credence to claims of a specifically national “Moroccan Islam,” while at the same time examining what is required for its consolidation and maintenance.3 “My Dear People” On October 16, 1975, at 6:30 in the evening, the king of Morocco, Hassan II, addressed the nation via state television and radio regarding Morocco’s claim to sovereignty over then Spanish-occupied Western Sahara. The address followed more than a year of extraordinary diplomatic action by Morocco to secure recognition of its claim, including sending left-wing emissaries to convince European leftists of Morocco’s rights, and public and secret negotiations with Mauritania, Spain, and Algeria. Hassan II’s address referred more immediately to that morning’s judgment by the UN International Court of Justice (ICJ), which acknowledged the historical allegiance of Saharan peoples to the ʿAlawite Sultanate, the ancestors of Hassan II, but nonetheless denied Morocco’s historical sovereignty (Vermeren 2002, 69; Dessaints 1976, 460). Sitting in an ornate chair, in an elegant blazer, before a bank of microphones and speaking to his “dear people” (shaʿbi al-ʿaziz), Hassan II, with punctuated vehemence and godfatherly calm, demanded a national act: “It is incumbent upon us to carry out a green march, from the north of Morocco to the south, from the east of Morocco to the west. My dear people: We must stand as one man—orderly and systematically [bi-l-nizam w-al-intizam]—to reincorporate the Sahara, and to revive our sacred bond with our brothers in...

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