Regionalism, Islamism, and Amazigh Identity: Translocality in the Sûs Region of Morocco according to Muhammed Mukhtar Soussi

The Sûs region at the center of this article has been marked by the passage of caravans and the trade routes linking North and South.¹ Many of the people there owe their fortune to the translocal commercial network that extends from Casablanca to Paris. As a result of the constant flow and passage of people and ideas, the Sûs can be called a hybrid region. Although sometimes regarded as a region refractory to external political power, it is nevertheless linked religiously to the outside Muslim community by a number of translocal brotherhoods, the Jazuliyya, Nasiriyya, Darqawiyya, and Tijaniyya.²

For a time these brotherhoods had a certain amount of local political power. Yet this did not change their network role of integrating the region into the religious sphere of Islam, which was regulated by the central authorities. This article seeks to show how translocal discourse—in this case the discourse on Islam in the Sûs region—can integrate the particular and the informal or, to quote Jacque Berque, reconcile closure and openness. I focus on the emergence of translocal discourse in the writings of Muhammed Mukhtar Soussi (1900–1963). Soussi was an intellectual who witnessed the transformations of colonial and postcolonial Morocco. It is particularly intriguing that, despite his belonging to the peripheral region of the Sûs, his writings exemplify how local culture can successfully insert itself into the larger frame of Arab-Muslim culture. A number of bio-bibliographical studies exists on similar cases, among them Berque's study of Hassan Youssi (1631–91) or Dale F. Eickelman's book on Abderrahman El Mansouri (d. 1975).³

In this context, Soussi promises to be a highly illuminating example, given that he spent more than twenty-five years in search of knowledge before his temporary stay in politics and his nomination as minister in later life. Thus Soussi was both a scholar and a politician, a traditionalist and a modernist, but, above all, a native of the Sûs whose writings focus on the local at a time when ideas of Arab-Muslim identity dominated intellectual circles. In short, the question is how to combine the person who praises the virtues of a peripheral culture with the person fully integrated in a global culture. How to reconcile his Amazigh (Berber) origins with the fact that he played an essential role in shaping the Arab-Muslim orientation of the national movement. The Sûs region differs from other cultural centers in that its population is both culturally and linguistically Amazigh, including the elites, to which Soussi belonged.

Muhammed Mukhtar Soussi: Historian and Minister

A Biography

Mukhtar Soussi was born in 1900 in the village of Idougadir situated in the Ilgh valley in the western Anti-Atlas about one hundred kilometers south of Agadir. He was born into a Sufi family renowned for its erudition and its century-long teaching tradition. His father, Hajj Ali Darqawi, was head of the Darqawiyya zawiya (lodge), which had several thousand disciples. When he died in 1910, Soussi was ten years old.

European infiltration in Morocco was already palpable at the time of Soussi's birth, and in 1912 Morocco became a French protectorate. Between 1910 and 1918, Soussi attended different schools in the Sûs. He left his native region for the first time in 1918 to pursue higher education at the Ecole Ibn Youssef in Marrakech (1918–23), Qarawiyyin University in Fez (1924–27), and various schools in Rabat (1928–29). During his studies, Soussi met a number of influential intellectuals and politicians, among them the Salafists Abi Choaib Doukkali, al-'Arbi al-Alawi, and, most important, Allal al-Fassi. Doukkali and al-Alawi gave him an understanding of the importance of religious symbols for the cohesion of the Muslim community. Together with other young nationalists, he established the first national movement groups, especially al-Hamassa, a cultural association.

Soussi left Fez and Rabat and moved to Marrakech, where he founded a school and devoted himself to education. Many of his students were later...