Re-Imagining Religion and Politics: Moroccan Elections in the 1990s

Abstract

Anthropologist Benedict Anderson argues that national and religious communities are imagined. They transcend the boundaries of face-to-face communities but are also less than universal, with “finite, if elastic, boundaries—sovereign, and with a deep, horizontal comradeship.”1 The affinities of religious and political identities are actively shaped and constrained by how both the elite and nonelite conceive them. Although not infinitely malleable, political and religious identities are not fixed and enduring, as some of their adherents claim.