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12 1 Competing Calls in Urban Morocco They see you, he [Shaytan] and his tribe, from where you do not see them. —Qurʾan 7:27 Much colonial and postcolonial scholarship on Islam in Morocco emphasizes “Moroccan Islam,” a national veneration of Sufi authorities and pious exemplars (Geertz 1968; Michaux-Bellaire 1926; Eickelman 1976). Historically, Sufi “saints” or “friends of God” (awliyaʾ, sing. wali; in colonial literature, marabouts) have ranged from urban and rural bearers of divine blessing (baraka), juridical science (ʿilm), or mystical knowledge (maʿrifa) to holy warriors and wise fools. But from the late fifteenth century to present, the dominant political culture now figured as “Moroccan” has been a “sharifian” tradition of Sufism, in which sacred inviolability and sovereignty are attributed to the prophet Mohammed’s descendants, shurafaʾ (sing. sharif) (Cornell 1998; Kugle 2006).1 In this tradition, the city of Fez marks the axis mundi. Established in the late eighth and early ninth centuries and by shurafaʾ Idris I and his son Idris II, Fez remained a regional economic, religious, and political capital of Muslim dynasties in North Africa and al-Andalus for the next millennium. The fifteenth-century discovery of Idriss II’s tomb, in particular, marked the regional rise of sharifian dominance in the Muslim world’s “Far West” (al-Maghrib al-aqsa) (Kugle 2006, 85–89). From the subsequent sharifian revolution in 1465, to the sharifian Saʿdian dynasty’s control of Fez in 1549, and through the twenty-first century ʿAlawite monarchy, shurafaʾ have formed every ruling dynasty of what is now modern-day Morocco. From precolonial sultanate to postcolonial monarchy, Morocco’s dominant sharifian Sufi hierarchies in Fez and other urban centers (such as Meknes, Salé, Tetouan , Marrakech, and Madagh) have supported the ruling regime and infused the social order and religious life in explicit and subtle ways. Hundreds of saints’ shrines Competing Calls in Urban Morocco | 13 and Sufi zawiyas, or meeting houses, dot Fez. Fas al-Bali, the “old city” or “medina”— distinct from Fas al-Jadid (Fez Jadid, or New Fez, c. 1300s) and from the twentiethcentury French Ville Nouvelle and twenty-first-century urban sprawl—is occasionally described as a single zawiya (Skali 2007). More broadly, different sharifian lineages have developed Sufi “orders” (turuq; sing. tariqa) of devoted adepts and peripheral followers , with different ritual practices appealing to different socioeconomic strata. In private homes and public meetings, elite and middle-class Sufi orders follow weekly and annual meditative dhikr rites (remembrance of God) of textual recitation and particular prayers (wird), which induce mild ecstasy and a sense of closeness (qurba) to God. In annual public rituals around saints’ tombs, adepts and followers of underclass orders, protected by the blessing (baraka) of the saint, perform spectacular jinn trances and (less common) acts of self-mortification—self-cutting, swallowing glass and boiling water, and devouring raw and bloody meat (Crapanzano 1973, 1977, 1980; Zillinger 2010). In private homes, men and women of these same groups perform more frequent curing rites for themselves and clients, summoning tutelary jinns to appease them with trance, tribute, and sacrifice. Observers of “Moroccan Islam,” not surprisingly, have discerned in these ritual differences and social distinctions the durable structures and processes—that is to say, the media—of political hierarchy (Combs-Schilling 1989; Geertz 1968; Hammoudi 1997; Maarouf 2007; Tozy 1999). Social distinctions have not merely found ritual expression; rather, political cultural elites and subordinates have reproduced social difference by way of ritual expression and its multiple media. Thus, historically, as sharifian lineages retained power through material signs of recognition (ritual protocols , monetary gifts, legal exceptions, closely guarded scribal decrees from the sultan [Laroui 1977, 92–97]), so too did the material ritual practices of underclass Sufi orders reproduce sharifian hierarchy from below (Crapanzano 1973; Maarouf 2007). For sharifian elites, material media of distinction marked the divine presence of baraka (among other spiritual qualities), along with the capacity to transmit its effects to adepts and followers (Clancy-Smith 1994; Geertz 1968; cf. Cornell 1998, intro.) But among the marginal folk especially, as Edward Westermarck’s exquisitely detailed preand early colonial observations show, baraka’s sacrality evoked the mysterious workings of jinns (Westermarck 1968, I, chaps. 1–6).2 Sufi trance rites offer a case in point: conceived as the presencing of jinns summoned and controlled by the baraka of the shurafaʾ, possession itself distinguished the vulgar commoners (ʿamma)—a disdained and feared source of disorder (Laroui 1977)—from the cultural, religious, political, and economic urban...

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