Al-kamahiyatiya (Asitism): the politics of waiting and not waiting for change

Abstract

Torn between desire and hope, patience and impatience, those waiting for change in Morocco have, since independence, been articulating their rejection of the way the queues of dignity and social justice are getting intolerably static and crowded. This article 1 reasons with cultural and socio-political gradations of waiting in the Muslim and Moroccan tradition to discuss how the dynamics of waiting and not waiting reflect the poor people’s methods of tolerating or challenging the prevailing truth. We theoretically and empirically make sense of the way political stagnancy and social nothingness culminate into what we call a state of (asitism) or (as-it-is-ism), a proponent as it were of obdurate stagnancy, deferral of personal and collective expectations, and persistence of social plights and economic ills, that are continuously informed and challenged by waiting and non-waiting protocols. To get to grips with asitism as a conceptual tool and ontological phenomenon, this article takes into consideration how and why the subjects revolt, whether it be by seeking migration opportunities to Europe; by illegally crossing the borders; or by otherwise expressing their denunciation of the way politicians seek to dupe them into more waiting. However, even when they refuse to wait for the promises politicians make to be verified as truthful or fake by not taking part in the elections or by boycotting a particular party, we contend that they simply deploy the time they have for a different wait, hence re-organising themselves in a different queuing order.