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

Introduction

1 Introduction It is not an exaggeration to say that the future of modern society and the stability of its inner life depend in large part on the maintenance of an equilibrium between the strength of the techniques of communication and the capacity of the individual’s own reaction. —Pope Pius XII, quoted in Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media Religion is communication [al-Din ʿilam]. —Television producers for Amr Khalid, one of Egypt’s “New Callers” Over the past decade in Fez, Morocco, and throughout the Muslim ecumene, young Islamist activists have produced and distributed videos of spirit exorcisms as part of an ongoing revivalist call to Islam. The videos are formulaic but nonetheless dramatic; a well-known video circulated by an Islamist association in the old city of Fez shows two leaders of the group performing an “Islamic exorcism” to cure a young Muslim man who feels “strange, like someone’s always with me.” “Pass me the microphone,” one exorcist commands the other, “and I’ll recite on him.’” Qurʾanic verse pours forth in crystalline voice. The possessed man’s shoulders heave and shudder, his mouth gapes and drools. Then Aisha, a legendary jinn in Moroccan popular Sufism, begins to speak from his cavernous mouth, identifying herself as a 350–year-old Jew. The audience gasps. The exorcists pass the microphone several times, their echoing Qurʾanic recitation eliciting defiant screams and then pathetic whimpers as they extract her conversion . She converts and flees as the patient jolts awake, disoriented and sweating before the camera. Rituals of “Islamic exorcisms” or “legitimate curing” (al-ruqya al-sharʿiyya) and their video dissemination are recent developments, though not ones unique to Morocco. One finds them on YouTube, posted by “Islamic curers” (raqiyyin) in the postcolonial Maghrib and West Africa, Egypt, and South Asia. Across these different settings they demonstrate power and authority: to denounce and expel local, often Sufi, customs, and above all to call (yadʿu; daʿwa) their audiences to “legitimate” (sharʿi) practice. That is to say, they arise where Muslim rituals give visceral presence to competing sources of spiritual power—competing calls of 2 | The Calls of Islam Islam. If Sufism’s foreign powers (its ostensibly archaic, Jewish authorities) possess Moroccans, the video messages of “legitimate curing” are a cultural exorcism, summoning up pure Muslim subjects and publics in their very response to the technologized call. This book examines competing calls to Islam in underclass and struggling middle-class neighborhoods of the classical Muslim city of Fez, Morocco. Focusing on popular Sufi rituals of saint veneration and jinn curing, the book examines the modernization and, more specifically, the technologization of Islam’s authoritative calls: how old practices and practitioners of Sufi trance and exorcism and new stagings of Islamic exorcism and national Sufi culture summon urban Moroccans into mass-mediated politics, power, and social order. These processes are grounded in the recent history of the Moroccan king Mohammed VI’s rule: in militant Islamic terrorist attacks of May 16, 2003, and the 2011 Arab uprisings; and conversely, in an elite revival of distinctly “Moroccan” Sufism and growing state surveillance and control of Muslim practices and media. The technologization of Muslim practices, and marginal Sufism in particular, is more deeply grounded, however, in Moroccan society and politics of the twentieth century. As in other colonial and postcolonial Muslim societies, twentieth-century Moroccan Muslims witnessed technological transitions from oral, scribal, and other corporeal ritual forms of spiritual mediation to mass-market and mass-mediated stagings. In this same era Muslims witnessed a broad discrediting of once-given Sufi rituals and beliefs, and of the explicitly hierarchical and particularistic ties of person and community these reproduced, in favor of new and unprecedented mass imaginings of a national Moroccan community on a global stage. The revivalist exorcism of Aisha, technologically reproduced and reproducible , illustrates the place of the call in this modern history of religious and political deracination and reenracination. It signals Muslims’ ongoing efforts to reestablish personal ties, status, and authority through practical acts and ritual stagings appropriate to the larger-scale and anonymous media networks of national and global Islam. Just as crucial, it suggests that the call and its mass mediation are themselves Moroccan Muslims’ concerns—that local discourses and acts of religious selfhood and social life are explicitly bound up with changing discourses and acts of media. As Muslims of different genders, classes, and power have witnessed and continue to navigate the changing “scale or pace or...