ABSTRACT
In present day Morocco, Al Adl Wal Ihsane (AWI), or Justice and Charity, is an Islamist party that is excluded from the formal political game, unlike other official Islamist groups like the Justice and Development Party (PJD). Most analysts of Moroccan Islamism count AWI as the most popular and powerful Islamist movement in Morocco (Tozy 1999; Zeghal 2008; Maddy-Weitzman 1997). The membership of Yassine’s group is estimated at tens of thousands, organized in small networks of ten, whose members regularly interact and work while reporting both horizontally and vertically (Darif 1995). Its leader Abdessalam Yassine, who died gracefully in December 2012, broke away from the Boutchichi order to found AWI, which has neither official status nor seats in the current Moroccan parliament. AWI does not seek official recognition because it is opposed to the Moroccan government, and does not wish to participate in it, as shown by the internal motto of the movement, as told by Roukia R, one informant who belongs to the movement, who said: “we did not make any move towards political participation in Morocco because we
believe that the whole game is rigged.” In order to understand AWI as a social movement, this chapter employs two theoretical approaches: dream analysis because dreams are a medium of communication for Sufis, and social movement theory because it maps its relationship to the Moroccan state and other political actors. Post-Islamism is one explanation of Sufi resurgence in Morocco: an orthodox
Sufi movement on the one hand and an offshoot that changed its apparatus. Some French academics put forth the concept of “post-Islamism” to describe the crisis of Islamic movements in the Middle East and North Africa (Roy 2002; Kepel 2000). Post-Islamism was used to describe the shift of Islamism toward practical compromises vis-à-vis politics. Moreover, the theory of postIslamism argues that the resurgence of Sufi movements is symptomatic of this concept, in that they created a secular space which shifted religious activism away from the state. According to the academics who discuss post-Islamism, the political discourse becomes tainted with spirituality and ethics. Post-Islamism theory could be beneficial for the study of AWI since “it could
explain multiple recent phenomena, including the advent of the moderate Party of Justice and Development (PJD) and the unprecedented visibility of the Butshishiyya Sufi order” (Lauziere 2005: 242). According to Henri Lauziere, “Yassine’s interest in mysticism had a tactical value,” because Sufism was marginal among the Nationalist Moroccan leaders (ibid.: 244). As a matter of fact, Yassine re-appropriated mystical elements for two main reasons: as a former disciple of the Boutchichi order he had a repertoire of contention full of mystical symbols, and he wanted to mobilize more people. Yassine praised the virtues of his Boutchichi master al-Haj ‘Abbas for liberating him from the shackles of ignorance and archaic forms of Islam (Darif 1995: 64). Is AWI a case of post-Islamism? Or does its reality lie dormant beneath our visible conventional ways of analyzing Yassine’s movement?
