In the name of culture: berber activism and the material politics of “popular islam” in southeastern morocco

Abstract

ABSTRACTAfter Moroccan independence in 1956, salafi critiques of the heterodox and heteroprax tendencies associated with “popular Islam” (l'islam populaire, as elaborated in particular by French colonial ethnologists and legal scholars) became enshrined within state ideology and administration. In response, over the past twenty years, a burgeoning Berber (or Amazigh) cultural movement has espoused local religious beliefs and practices as more attuned to the authentic culture of North Africa, and sought the protection of such regional idioms in the name of human rights. This article explores how a set of Amazigh activists from southeastern Morocco, while in many cases avowing a politics of secularism (laïcité), nonetheless ambivalently embrace certain practices of “popular Islam” as paramount elements of Berber culture, including pilgrimage to the tombs of “saints,” the role of marabouts and Sufi brotherhoods, the pre-Islamic (Jewish or Christian) roots of ritual life, and the general inscription of the natural landscape with baraka. Their ideology ironically dovetails with recent attempts by state actors to (re-)construct a particular, non-fundamentalist Moroccan Islam as part of its participation in the global “war on terror.” Such a material embrace of “popular Islam” challenges scholastic categories.