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  • Morocco’s State Islam: Securitization, Legitimization, and Authoritarian (-Neoliberal) Modernization
  • Salim Hmimnat (bio)

Introduction

State Islam, or official Islam, refers to a set of institutions, policies, and actors, whereby a governmental authority regulates the religious sphere and manages its extensions into the other political and societal fields. This regulatory process is authoritarian in essence since it tends to concentrate religious authority in the state’s hands. With the help of the religious bureaucracy, state-sponsored Islam produces an orthodox, conformist version of Islam that endeavors to legitimize the prevailing regime and support its strategic choices policies.

In the post-independence era, most Arab and Muslim countries have rushed to “etatize” their religious sectors in the endeavor to strengthen their emerging nation-state building projects. However, their approaches towards official Islam(s) remained, until the popular uprisings of the Arab Spring, divergent due to their specific contexts and ideological orientations. [End Page 1] In a comparative theoretical study, Michael Robbins and Lawrence Rubin suggest two factors to explain Muslim states’ varied strategies towards official Islam: first, the type of the existing political system (i.e., republican or monarchy); and second, the pre-existence or lack of ancient inherited religious institutions.1 This study concludes that monarchies whose legitimacy rests on religion, such as Morocco and Jordan, have shown more interest in supporting official religious institutions. Both countries also have proved more successful in co-opting these institutions into the religious bureaucracy. In contrast, republican regimes like Egypt have been more reluctant to support religious institutions (e.g., Al-Azhar). At the same time, Tunisia’s former President Habib Bourguiba had opted for marginalizing such religious institutions for fear that they could become a potential threat to the progressive secular regime’s power and legitimacy.2

Three regional events constituted turning points that put official Islamic institutions back in the forefront: the 1979 Iranian Revolution, the 11 September 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center in New York and on the Pentagon outside of Washington, DC, the growing global jihadist insurgency, and the 2011 Arab Spring protests. In light of these specific contexts, the interest in official Islam has been often associated with a regime’s pragmatic approach, associated with a “security-legitimacy” nexus intended to deal with opponents, whether they are secular forces, Islamist movements, or extremist jihadist groups.

Morocco, on the contrary, presents a significant case study showing that the early interest in official Islam was shaped by a more complex vision that goes beyond such limited concerns. Apart from the “security-legitimacy” nexus, an additional variable came into play, that is, the involvement of official Islam in the modernization-development process. Accordingly, Morocco’s experience with the evolving religious policy since the 1980s suggests the need to place official Islam within a more complex three-dimensional framework: securitization,3 legitimization, and authoritarian modernization. This crosscutting framework goes beyond the narrow securitization perspective, whether in its earlier form related to containing [End Page 2] the Islamists (the 1980s and 1990s) or in its subsequent form related to confronting extremist jihadist movements (2000-). The problemizing of official Islam in this broader analytical perspective enables a better understanding of its functional role in Morocco’s modern state-building and development process.

This article highlights the competing ideological visions and policy agendas that frame state Islam in dealing with socio-political challenges in transitional Morocco over the last four decades. It speaks to two areas of scholarship about state-religion relations. The first area concerns the growing bureaucratization of religion and its regulation within the framework of public policies. The second area deals with the role of the cultural factor of religion, in particular in devising “multiple modernities”4 that differ from the Western-centered modernization models.5

Up to 9/11, the Islamist movements had received much scrutiny as the foremost dynamic actor in the politico-religious sphere in the MENA region. In contrast, far too little attention was paid to the growing dynamic of the state’s religious policies. Even when interest in the official religious field started to grow, especially in the aftermath of 9/11, an increasing amount of analysis remarkably fell into what can be called the “contextual...

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