ABSTRACT
The formal register of Moroccan politics conveys the idea that the Boutchichi order, as this chapter shows, is apolitical. Despite these arguments, I argue in this chapter that the Boutchichi movement uses meta-hidden transcripts referred to here as kryptopolitics, a Sufi paradigm that allows us to shift from the visible to the invisible levels of perception. While retaining our ability to function at the lower realm, my theory argues that understanding and finding Sufi politics require looking at the formal, informal (identity formation, monetary donations, ritual, spectacle), hidden (collectively interpreted dreams, poems, symbolic language) and meta-hidden levels (silence, individually interpreted dreams). Stark and Bainbridge’s model argues against the demise of religion, and includes the supernatural realms, such as contact with the dead, forecasting the future, as well as afterlife rewards as part of the religious experience (1985: 5). The demise of established religions and the emergence of new religious movements are due, in Stark and Bainbridge’s view, to the failure of established religions to deliver to their consumers enough supernatural compensations, in the sense that “they offer little solace to the bereaved, to the dying, to the poor, or to those who seek to understand the enigmas of existence” (ibid.: 434). I define a new social movement as a collective movement whose rhetoric
constitutes ideologies and identities that are either opposed to or provide an
alternative to the status quo. Looking at social movements as alternatives to the status quo does not require that collective voices make their contestation within the realm of “official” bourgeois public spheres (Fraser 1993). As Nancy Fraser writes, the public sphere is not the same as the state; it is rather the informally mobilized body of non-governmental discursive opinion that can serve as a counterweight to the state (ibid.: 24). I will argue throughout this chapter that the Boutchichi order appears to be either non-political or sides with the state, but in fact it continually inscribes its resistance in a “hidden transcript” and a “meta-hidden” one that can only be decoded by following Sufi symbolism. Since Sufi orders depend on the transmission of knowledge from one generation to another for the survival of their legitimacy and power, the Boutchichi brotherhood crafts a discourse that is rooted in history. This discourse allows us in turn to show how the current leaders draw from this repository. The emphasis on Sufi supernatural values is stressed in the discourse and the history of the order, a history that becomes a reservoir of symbols and lessons from which the current political moves of the order borrow. In other words, one needs to do a genealogy of kryptopolitics in order to be able to dig out the political insurgencies of the order beyond conventional politics.
