ABSTRACT
Introduction In an article published in 1991, Henry Munson Jr analysed the stability of the Moroccan monarchy and argued that the country was not following the same trend as its Arab neighbours where political Islam was on the rise. Munson explained that Morocco was immune from the dangers of religious fundamentalism and that the monarchy was still very much able to use its religious legitimacy to marginalise religion-based contestation of its power. Two decades later, such an analysis seems only partially correct. While the monarchy has indeed been able to remain in control despite the death of King Hassan II in 1999, the ruling elites of Morocco have joined Arab counterparts elsewhere in attempting to stem the rising tide of Islamism. The answer of the monarchy to the challenge of opposition political Islam has rested for a number of years on the dual strategy of co-optation and repression. Hassan II, unlike Algerian and Tunisian rulers, had decided in the mid-1990s that dealing with opposition Islamists solely through repression would not secure the stability of the Kingdom and, employing some of the same strategies that he had used in the past to co-opt sectors of the secular leftist opposition, he attempted to bring Islamists into the political system. While he was only partially successful for reasons explained below, we do have today (late 2008) in Morocco an established Islamist party, the Party for Justice and Development (PJD), legally allowed to run for office in both local and legislative elections. So far, much scholarly attention has been devoted to accounting for the rise of the PJD, explaining and highlighting its support base, assessing how it fares in elections and generally attempting to analyse the impact of the emergence of a legal Islamist party into a nominally democratising polity (Albrecht and Wegner 2006). The participation of an Islamist party in legal political and electoral processes is particularly significant in Morocco because of the monarchy’s attempt to present the country as both modernising and democratising. This, however, should not lead one to assume that the PJD represents the whole spectrum of political Islam in Morocco. There are in fact two other Islamist tendencies in the Kingdom that also have an impact on how political and social life is shaped (Laskier 2003).On the one hand, there are a number of small extremist groups
imbued with a violent jihadi ideology – that is, based on the assumption of the existence of a cosmic struggle between Islam and the infidels, including all Muslims who do not share this view. Such groups are responsible for a number of recent terrorist attacks both in Morocco and outside the country’s borders However, following the Casablanca and Madrid bombings of 2003 and 2004, they were severely weakened through both mass arrests of activists and better control by the security services. In addition, owing to their extremist positions and violent tactics, they enjoy very little popular support. On the other hand, there is the very popular but semi-legal Jamiat al-Adl wal-Ihsan (Justice and Charity Group) led by a long-time opponent of the monarchy, Sheikh Abdessalam Yassine. This organisation is a significant actor on the Moroccan political scene because of its extensive welfare network and its radical political positions on social, constitutional and foreign policy matters, which pit it against the monarchy, the secular parties and even other Islamist formations. Thus, Islamism in Morocco is quite a complex phenomenon, highlighting the plural nature of political Islam, which gives rise to movements that may have very different ideological tenets and radically different strategies of behaviour. This chapter, through an analysis of al-Adl, contributes in two ways to a more general understanding of the relationship between democratisation, religion and politics in the regions examined in this book. First of all, the chapter highlights how certain Islamist actors operate within rationalistic parameters in Morocco, and how they are able to exploit the available structure of opportunities in order to increase their legitimacy and popularity. Far from simply being highly ideological actors, Islamist movements are capable of adapting to changing circumstances in their surrounding institutional environment and in the process they also re-interpret some of their ideological tenets in order to gain political advantages. Thus, Islamist movements should be considered rational actors in the same manner with which the wider literature of comparative politics treats political actors in other regions of the world. This is a rather novel approach to the study of Islamist groups, which are usually examined by attempting to identify whether they are by nature ‘pro-democracy’ or ‘antidemocracy’. Following Brumberg’s work (2002a, 2002b), this chapter argues that attempting to find the ‘true nature’ of Islamist organisations is problematic and probably doomed to failure. The chapter demonstrates that in Morocco Islamist actors tend to be very pragmatic, adapting to a changing political environment and institutions. Second, the chapter contributes more generally to an understanding of Moroccan politics. That is, rather than being a country on the path towards democratisation, the Moroccan political system is actually constantly renewing itself, especially its authoritarian nature, in order to foster both own internal and international legitimacy. The uncompromising position of al-Adl with respect to the legitimacy of the King to rule challenges the stability of the system, and this chapter contends that scholars should pay much closer attention to what happens in Moroccan society outside of stage-managed elections and the associated debates of an increasingly discredited political class. Such an analysis helps explain why the 2007 legislative elections were not the
turning point that some policy-makers, including King Mohammad VI, and many scholars believed they would be. The next part of the chapter briefly outlines how the Moroccan political system operates, and describes the position of al-Adl within the system. The chapter then analyses al-Adl’s structure and what it does. Finally, it outlines the institutional constraints which help explain why al-Adl has chosen a ‘third way’ to seek to effect political, social and economic change in Morocco.
