Moroccan Identity Research Articles

"The Interplay of Sacred and Profane in Moroccan Cinema: Portrayals of Sainthood in 'The Unknown Saint' Film"

This study conducts a thorough examination of the portrayal of sainthood in Moroccan cinema, probing whether it accentuates the secular or divine aspects of this spiritual tradition. By closely analyzing Alaa Eddine Eljem's film "The Unknown Saint," we delve into how its storyline navigates the intricate interplay between social and religious dynamics within Moroccan society. Set against the captivating backdrop of Agafay desert near Marrakech, the film unveils the tale of a thief who inadvertently buries stolen money in a remote hill, later designated by villagers as a tomb that evolves into a revered shrine for a saint. This narrative unravels themes of spirituality, tradition, and societal complexities. With a skilled ensemble cast led by Anas Elbaz and Saleh ben Saleh, the film emerges as a groundbreaking exploration of sainthood within Moroccan cinematic landscape. Beyond its central plot, it addresses pertinent issues such as healthcare, drought, and superstition, offering audiences a profound contemplation of Moroccan identity and culture. Through our analysis, we aim to deepen insights into how Moroccan cinema grapples with the intricate nuances of Sufism and its enduring relevance in contemporary Moroccan society.

The Berber Question And (Re)Imagining The Nation In Contemporary Morocco

This paper aims to emphasize that the French colonial intervention in Morocco represents a metamorphic historical turning point that should not be bracketed from the general process of revisiting the teleological assumptions about what constitutes the contemporary Moroccan Identity. It sets the challenge of problematizing the Nationalists’ cultural agenda whose insistence on a fetishized continuity with the precolonial history has eclipsed the disruptive effects of the colonial configurations and symbolic struggles of groups who were cast aside though they were at the center of anti-colonial resistance. Telling Morocco’s colonial history from a third perspective would bring hitherto neglected and silenced actors, in our case the Berber tribal groups under the spotlight, and draw together both elite and not elite actors into the scope of analysis. The premise behind analyzing the Berber oral poetry which was composed and sung on the eve of colonial expansion, is to understand the standpoint of these “peripheral groups” over matters of political allegiance and Jihad, away from the totalizing narratives of the official historiography. These artistic outlets are primary sources of a significant importance because they provide unexplored details of how Berber groups endured living at the center of the struggle between the colonial administration and the Arabophone nationalist elite. They demonstrate also the complex adjustments and inter/ intra- tribal negotiations these groups have to go through to reconfigure those mechanisms of power that sought to annihilate their subjectivities as agents of change

To the Nation, Belong the Archives: The Search for Manuscripts and Archival Documents in Postcolonial Morocco

AbstractThe trajectory of the Hassan II Prize for Manuscripts, a government initiative begun in the late 1960s to locate rare manuscripts in private collections, is a potent example of the role Arabic-script manuscript culture played in post-colonial nation-building in Morocco. This article presents the history of the Hassan II Prize for Manuscripts, demonstrating how Moroccan bureaucrats used the recovery of archival documents and especially historic manuscripts in Arabic-script, as part of a multi-faceted nation-building project after European colonization. Their project included connecting historic manuscripts to Moroccan identity and territorial sovereignty. It contends that the ramifications of linking these policies with documentary heritage would affect what came to be discovered, valorized, and preserved in the “national collection” and subsequently, what histories could be written.

Co-producing knowledge and Morocco's musical heritage: a relational paradigm for colonial scholarship

ABSTRACTThe musical dimensions of the Moroccan Protectorate invite us to rethink certain tenets of colonial history, especially lingering nineteenth-century attitudes about ‘indigenous’ populations as ‘savage’. By the mid-twentieth century, efforts to comprehend Moroccan music were far less motivated by domination and submission than other agendas, beginning with ‘cultural protection’ to justify French presence, the Protectorate's priority since arrival. Publications and promotion of Moroccan music reflected French desire for long-term impact on the region. This enterprise depended on Moroccan as well as European support, addressing local needs and creating alliances with both urban and rural elites with their own political agendas. Offering archival evidence of the French Protectorate's institutional involvement in renovating Andalusian music – never before examined, yet so important in post-colonial Moroccan identity – and, despite colonial occupation, Moroccan musicians’ agency, this article focuses on the interactions between French administrator Prosper Ricard, Algerian-born musician/ethnographer Alexis Chottin, and Moroccan musicians equally concerned about their music's future. Many are here given voice for the first time. Drawing on these stakeholders’ expertise and experiences, they co-created new musical knowledge despite power asymmetries, sustained the musical practices of urban and rural populations, and encouraged traditional, hybrid and modern identities. In their newly-created Conservatory of Moroccan Music, music festivals, and Radio-Maroc, relationships shaped through shared responsibility for outcomes emerge as significantly more complex than between ‘superiors and subalterns’, reaching parity at the Fez festival (1939). Their multifaceted work continues to influence knowledge and praxis today. To understand this requires a new paradigm for colonial scholarship.

The silent inquisition: Islamophobic microaggressions and Spanish Moroccan identity negotiations in contemporary Madrid

This article explores Spanish Moroccan experiences with Islamophobic microaggressions in contemporary Madrid. It seeks to fill an important gap in the literature on religion and racial microaggressions by moving beyond the usual psychologistic explanations to show how these acts reflect Spanish historical-racialized structures, where Muslims were regarded as the Other. In utilizing in-depth qualitative interviews and participant observations, the author reveals how Spanish Moroccans are negotiating and responding to Islamophobic microaggressions at work, educational institutions, and the public sphere. Ultimately, this research shows how these microaggressions reinforced a Muslim-first identity framework, which allowed them to strategically link their experiences and identities to a collective, historical memory of Muslim Spain.

Colonial al-Andalus: Spain and the Making of Modern Moroccan Culture

Colonial al-Andalus: Spain and the Making of Modern Moroccan Culture

Od Berberów do Amazighe, czyli ukształtowanie się nowoczesnej tożsamości berberskiej

The Berbers, an indigenous people of North Africa, belong to the group of “nations without a state.” For centuries, they were marginalized by the Arab majority or manipulated by European colonizers. Since the mid-twentieth century in North Africa, a movement for a Berber and Pan-Berber identity has been growing strongly. The movement has disseminated the neologism “Amazigh” as the endoethnonim of this group of peoples. The process of building (creating) a Berber identity has been slightly different in Morocco (where the stabilizing role of the monarchy has been highlighted) and in Algeria (where it has taken more violent forms). With the rise of Berber self-awareness in North Africa and the activity of the Berber diaspora in Europe (mainly in France), civil society organizations (associations) were established in Morocco and Algeria to defend the rights of the Berber minority. After many attempts and despite the resistance of Arab elites the Berber language and culture were recognized by the state authorities as equivalent to the Arabic component of the Algerian and Moroccan identity. State institutions (the Institut royal de la culture Amazighe–the IRCAM–in Morocco, and the Haut Commissariat à l’Amazighité–the HCA–in Algeria) were established for the revitalization of the Berber culture and language (tamazight).

Jewish women in intercommunal political movements in colonial Morocco

ABSTRACTThe goal of this paper is to study Jewish participation in intercommunal – Muslim, Jewish, Christian – Moroccan women’s organizations that promoted national Moroccan socio-political aims, and to analyze their origins, effects, demise and memory. The paper focuses on a unique organization - Union des Femmes marocaines (Union of Moroccan Women) – which, for almost ten years during the colonial period, had carried out intercommunal work for shared Moroccan causes. The study reveals that during the period that intercommunal women’s associations operated (1943–1952), they were first French-oriented and dealt with issues considered, from a gendered perspective, to be within women’s domain (i.e. helping the poor and needy, doing charity, fighting for women’s education), but from 1947, they “Moroccanized” and worked towards general political Moroccan aims. The paper refers to a relatively unknown chapter in Moroccan history, and opens a new perspective of the Moroccan identity of Jews before their massive emigration from the country.

Degrees of untranslatability: Muhammad Shukri’s quest for representation

ABSTRACTThe publication history of Moroccan writer Muhammad Shukri’s autobiographical book Al-khubz al-hafi is paradigmatic of the role played by national contexts in the reception of world literature, and of the rigid hierarchies of prestige associated with each field of cultural production. Originally published in English translation by Paul Bowles in 1973, in French translation by Tahar Ben Jelloun in 1980 and in Spanish translation by Abdellah Djbilou in 1982 – the same year as the first publication of the text in Arabic appeared – it quickly became an international sensation. In this article, I pay special attention to the role played by the Moroccan Hispanophone literary community in the late twentieth century, and by the Spanish language, in the crafting of Shukri’s original narrative. I contend that the narrative simultaneously seeks to invite and resist its own translation, by going beyond formal and ideological expectations, and that the ultimate untranslatability of Shukri’s fictionalized biography is not a defense of an essentialized Moroccan identity, but rather reflects a constant triangulation among Morocco’s diglossic reality and the European languages of his translators.

The Ummah racial project: Arab satellite television, Islamic movements, and the construction of Spanish Moroccan identity

ABSTRACT This article explores how non-western, transnational racial ideologies impact Muslim minority identity negotiation and construction in contemporary Spain. It argues that Spanish Moroccans are increasingly racialized towards a Arab-Muslim identity through two transnational scapes, international Islamic movements and Arabic satellite television. These scapes co-opt and mobilize the concept of the Ummah, a traditional Islamic legal prescription that traditionally emphasizes the primacy of Muslim identity and community. In co-opting the Ummah, these scapes reinforce ideological affinities to an Arabized version of Islam that racializes the ethnically diverse Spanish Moroccan community towards a Arab-Muslim first identity. This study contributes to the study of race in the global system by seeking to understand the identity formation of Spanish Muslim minorities in the context of larger non-European, transnational racial ideologies.

The Politics of Moroccan Identity between Colonial Intervention and Local Struggles. The Berber Crisis as a Case Study

This contribution aims to emphasize that the French colonial intervention in Morocco represents a fundamental historical rupture that should not be bracketed but instead must be integrated within a process of revisiting the teleological assumptions about what constitutes the contemporary Moroccan Identity. It sets a challenge of problematizing the Nationalists’ claim that Moroccan identity represents a continuity with the pre-colonial one because their cultural agenda, which insists on the supremacy of an Arabo-Islamic high culture, elided the colonial configurations and symbolic struggles that occurred in that transitional period. This period established a new type of political field in which the key dimensions of Moroccan identity were dramatically transformed and have been indelibly politicized in a way that makes tracing them a prerequisite to get an accurate understanding of their subsequent development. This contribution takes the Berber Crisis as its case study because the May 16 decree catalyzed the birth of an urban Nationalist movement which would eventually shape the identity politics of the Moroccan post-independent state. The significance of this case study lies in the fact that it would bring into light a plurality of other actors that were symbolically marginalized in the process of anti-colonial nation building, though they were at the center of identity struggles. Since the objective is to capture the complexities and contradictions of that critical period, this contribution would approach the topic from an interactional perspective which would disclose the interplay of power that existed between the (colonial) state and society, and which resulted in a continuous struggle to negotiate the legitimacy of the existing Moroccan political order .

Visible, Invisible: A Portrait of the Intersection Between Whiteness and Moroccanness in the Netherlands

This article explores the influence of appearance on experiences of race and racism in the Netherlands. It is based on one semi-structured, in-depth interview with a 20 year-old performing arts student who, despite his outward appearance of being white, has Moroccan heritage. The intersection between whiteness and Moroccan identity in the case of the interviewee is considered in terms of the Dutch national image, racial passing and Dutch visual culture. The results of the in-depth interview provide insight into the exclusivity of the categories of white and Moroccan in the image of Dutch identity, as well as the claims to a post-race Netherlands.

Trapped on the island: the politics of race and belonging in Jazīrat al-Maghrib

ABSTRACTDrawing on ethnographic engagement with Moroccans and sub-Saharan Africans from varying socioeconomic positions this article interrogates how notions of race and belonging – or blackness and nationhood – are changing as Morocco transitions into a new destination country for migrants, refugees, and asylum seekers. Examining Jazīrat al-Maghrib as an historic and contemporary crossroads striving to maintain control over its physical and symbolic borders, the trope of island-ness emerges. Rising violence against Morocco’s expanding sub-Saharan population is examined through collected narratives of citizens, migrants, and governmental officials and analyses of Moroccan popular media, revealing the racial dimensions of new political categorizations. The dangerous conflation of race, class, and presumed ‘illegality’ affects not only the most vulnerable, but all who could be racially categorised as non-citizen subjects. This article reveals the concrete effects that shifting sociopolitical landscapes have on Moroccans who identify as black and elite sub-Saharans who identify as part of Morocco’s diverse and well-established university programme, contending that as political entanglements between Morocco and surrounding regions expand, so too does the desire for a distinctly Moroccan identity, ensuring a continuation of the historic Jazīrat al-Maghrib.

No man is an island: globalisation and resilience in the Fez zillīj tradition

ABSTRACTThis paper examines the ‘island’ construct by focusing on one case study of cultural production: zillīj tile work in Morocco. This artisanal craft form is a hallmark of Moroccan identity, yet also remains fervently appropriated by the outside world. The goal here is to flush out the complex and often competing forces in such a dynamic. Through interviews with craftsmen and a critical assessment of issues related to expertise and production, we learn that in Morocco this art form is situated in ever-widening zones of influence and investment, from a nucleus of daily production-related practices, to the professional tensions in local and regional politics, to the global presentation of zillīj as Islamic cultural heritage. It is not until we test the assumptions and realities of the relationship between craft and religion, however, that we begin to differentiate the globalised rhetoric from a strong core of local resilience.

Femme écrite du cinéaste Lahcen Zinoun: Corps à corps dansé de l’écrit et de l’image

Abstract This article looks at the film Written woman (Mouchouma) by the Moroccan filmmaker and dancer Lahcen Zinoun, which was released in 2012. The work is centered on an Amazigh poet, marginalized by her profession as a prostitute, whose body is tattooed – inscription/writing of her story and of History. It is based on multiple quests – mystical, historical, cultural – through an anthropologist who travels to the Atlas Mountains to investigate the life of Mririda N’Aït Attik who passed away around 1930. Seeking an actress for the film he wishes to make to pay homage to this figure, he falls madly in love with Adjou Aït Ashaak, a prostitute who works in the same brothel as Mririda did. Through their conversations, the viewer learns about the signification of her tattoos (images/signs), the danger of erasing such a heritage, the power of the arts to which the film refers: painting, writing, literature, music, dance, which help reach other dimensions, align the individual with telluric forces, inscribe wounds to better transgress them. The migration of one art form to another brings about exile and recalls the values of many facets of Moroccan identity, and the importance of halting violence.

(Re)Locating space in Hakim Belabbas’s khayṭ al-rūḥ and Farida Belyazid’s bāb smā maftūḥ

Abstract This article is a re-reading of both Hakim Belabbas’s khayṭ al-rūḥ and Farida Belyazid’s bāb smā maftūḥ from a postcolonially inflected concern. It attempts to consider how khayṭ al-rūḥ (‘Threads’, 2003), and bāb smā maftūḥ (‘A Door to the Sky’, 1988), focus excessively on the aesthetics and poetics of the city space, respectively, Abū al-ja’d and Fez, as a powerful structuring force that is twistingly manipulated to become a homogenizing icon of Moroccan identity. Such heavy concentration on spatial configurations of the city locales as sites of contestation over the construction of Moroccan identity results in counter-effects. The article argues that the filmic aestheticization of locality shifts into the creation of a set of anxieties and a knot of ambivalences that render the film directors’ attempt to foreground a new version of the native’s space vulnerable to the conventional orientalist tradition of the Other’s space representation. Both Belabbas’s and Belyazid’s works become complicit with the dynamics of folkloric space and with the orientalist tradition characteristic of colonial cinema set in Morocco during precolonial and colonial periods.

The Status of English in Language Policy Models Proposed for the Moroccan Multilingual Context

This paper suggests a language policy model for Modern Morocco, which can respond to both, the national needs of identity and the demands of Globalization, These two needs are the two major forces that shape the status of the various languages involved in the Moroccan sociolinguistic context, including English. The paper concisely describes how different sociolinguistic phenomenon produced by the ex-colonial powers shape the status of the different languages involved in the Moroccan multilingual context (i.e. language conflict, language competition, language selection and linguistic militantism). It also gives a detailed account of the different approaches and language policy models proposed by various Moroccan intellectuals and linguists in order to face such a de facto multilingualism. Finally, it proposes a multidimensional model that may contribute to reducing tensional relations between the different linguistic varieties cohabiting in Morocco, meeting the requirements of the Moroccan identity, and responding to the needs of modernity, prosperity, science and technology imposed by globalization.

Identidad cultural del alumnado marroquí: estado de la cuestión en los centros de educación secundaria públicos de Andalucía

The migratory fluency in Spain, receiving immigrants and losing Spanish population to other countries is a reality. The Moroccan population emerges as the second largest nationality of immigrants living in Spain in 2014. After Catalonia, the Autonomous Community of Andalusia is the second highest proportion of immigrants of Spanish Moroccan territory. To address the knowledge of the cultural identity of students from Morocco in Andalusia, our study aims to determine the perspective of Moroccan students of the public high schools of Andalusia in relation to their own cultural identity. The study population is composed of Moroccan students enrolled in the public high schools of Andalusia, reaching a final sample of 891 students. We rely on a quantitative methodology, using the descriptive method and a survey design. The main axes of our data collection instrument revolve around arrival and trajectory in Spain, contact with their homeland, their views on Moroccan traditions, aspects of their current life and their prospective vision of their future life. The main results of our study highlight the positive assessment students have of public high schools in Andalusia which make their experience in Spain, even to wish for their children to continue in the country; and the importance attached to this collective continuity and transfer of powerful Moroccan feeling they have. In conclusion we can say that there is a strong sense of Moroccan identity in the group under study, it is even higher when referring to the cultural field.

I Speak Tamazight, but in Arabic: Contesting the Cultural Terrain in Morocco

The Moroccan novel, being part of the Arabic novel, is a very recent invention. However, in Morocco the novel has become an emblematic genre, which has known a momentous development. This article attempts a critical analysis of three recently published Arabic novels (Morocco) from a cultural studies perspective by highlighting the translational dimensions inherent in their writing, as well as their tendency to redirect attention to more urgent issues related to Moroccan identity.

The deterritorialised self in Laila Lalami's Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits

ABSTRACTThe most recurring image of the Mediterranean in recent years has been that of the overloaded migrant boat, an image often accompanied by the tragic story of shipwrecks and death tolls. Laila Lalami's novel, Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits, expands upon this tragic image, challenging narrow categorisations of Moroccan emigrant identity. Lalami creates a discursive space that disrupts the myth of the nation and subordinates considerations of Hispano-Moroccan relations to the individual narratives of four Moroccan emigrants. The novel – in three parts titled, ‘The Trip', ‘Before', and ‘After’ – opens with the Mediterranean crossing; it begins where the international discourse about North African immigrants generally ends. In the subsequent sections, Lalami redefines the emigrants, exploring their individual trajectories and the processes that lead them to their ultimate destinations. The end result – both for those characters who make it to Spain and those who must return to Morocco – is a liminal, deterritorialised self that challenges not only the immigrant narrative but also the cultures between which these people travel. Ultimately, Lalami's construction of diasporic and migrant identity reveals an untethered selfhood, one in constant movement, transit, and mutation. ‘Home’ is radically redefined, existing only in these individuals themselves, identifying with neither Morocco nor Spain, belonging instead to a liminal space caught somewhere in the middle of the Mediterranean Sea.