Top Quotes: “Making Morocco: Colonial Intervention and the Politics of Identity”— Jonathan Wyrtzen
“The catalyst for the discontent was France’s so-called Berber policy, a colonial politics of recognition that reified an ethnic distinction between Arabs and Berbers. Since 1914, French authorities had installed a system of tribal courts i the middle and central High Atlas Mountains after these regions, which the French designated as “of Berber custom,” had been “pacified” (conquered militarily) and brought under French administration. In the 1920s, they also began to install a fledgling separate educational system of Franco-Berber schools in these same areas, which offered little to no instruction in Arabic or Islam. These ethnically based juridical and educational distinctions provoked little response from the Moroccan public until 1930, when the residency promulgated a decree (dahir), which the sultan signed on May 16, that put the Berber customary legal system on an equal footing with other jurisdictions and channeled criminal cases into the French courts.
This effort to further formalize a policy of ethnic differentiation catalyzed a firestorm of popular protest that roiled many of Morocco’s cities for weeks that summer. In June, a group of young, urban, Arabic-speaking activists began to campaign against what they called the Berberdahir. In their eyes the May 16 decree was a fundamental threat to the unity of the Moroccan umma, or Muslim community: they claimed it removed the Berbers from the jurisdiction of sharia and was part of a broader French strategy to Christianize the Berbers.”
“Between 1907 and 1934. the French and Spanish colonial states completed a “total pacification” of the Moroccan countryside. In North Africa and elsewhere, this type of territorial “enclosure movement” dramatically altered a preexisting political ecosystem. Prior to the colonial period, state-governed and self-governing areas (“state space” and “nonstate space”) coexisted in near proximity, belying a Weberian conceptualization of the state as holding a monopoly on the use of force in a bounded territory. Because of the region’s topography, which features mountains juxtaposed closely with more easily controlled lowlands and coastal plains, many groups historically retained high levels of autonomy and were able to negotiate the terms of their relationship with the central government or, if they were more remote, totally ignore its administrative aspirations. State space was thus negotiated in reference to a plurality, not a monopoly, of military power and was therefore in constant flux, with social groups submitting to or resisting taxation and military service depending on a shifting calculus of alliances and allegiances.”
“In the 1880s, Morocco was spared direct military intervention throughout the nineteenth century because of European diplomatic tensions. After these were resolved in the early 1900s, political space in Morocco also began to be transformed. First, Morocco’s ostensible “territory” was subdivided: France took the bulk of the territory in the center and delegated to Spain a zone of control in the north and recognized Spain’s tenuous claims in the far south (including Sidi Ifni, Tarfaya, and parts of the Sahara). Tangier was later declared an international zone in 1923 under the control of Western consuls. Next, from 1907 to 1934, both European powers progressed from seeking limited military control to seeking total military control in their respective protectorate zones. During this process, the French and Spanish authorities extended roads, pistes (rough tracks), railroads, and telegraph lines and forcefully disarmed and co-opted the military potential of the so-called blad al-siba periphery via the conscription of subdued tribes into the colonial army.”
“Although the endurance of Morocco’s Alawid dynasty (it has been in power since the 1660s) is assumed as a given in nationalist historiography and the discourse of the post-independence Moroccan state, it is actually a surprising outcome. Almost no other similar ancien régimes survived both colonization and decolonization in the Middle East and North Africa. The fact that Morocco’s dynasty did presents a striking, if underappreciated, historical anomaly that this study seeks to explain by plotting its contingent trajectory against the background of the colonial political field. At an initial critical juncture of the creation of the field, the monarchy was preserved by the French decision to implement a protectorate form of colonial rule.”
“To start the spread of the oil stain, Lyautey had indigenous affairs posts built on the borders of dissident zones. These military posts included a free health clinic and a weekly market (sug) where the French would pay inflated prices for the livestock or other wares nearby tribes wanted to sell. Ostensibly, these economic and public health benefits would entice tribes to submit, gradually expanding the area governed by the colonial state.”
“In the first week of August 1931, the Moroccan sultan, Mohamed ben Youssef, and a large delegation of makhzan officials that included qa’ids from each of Morocco’s civil and military regions traveled from Casablanca to Marseille by ship and then on to Paris by train. The state visit’s main purpose was to tour the International Colonial Exposition that was staged that summer on the eastern edge of Paris in the Bois de Vincennes. Its organizers promoted the exposition as “le tour du monde en un jour,” [a tour of the world in one day,] The sultan and the entourage were especially interested in the Palais du Maroc at the exposition. On Friday, August 7, the Moroccan entourage was met at the grand entrance, the Porte d’Honneur, by Maréchal Hubert Lyautey, who had been brought out of retirement to serve as the exposition’s high commissioner. Flanked by a mounted honor guard of spahis and the sultan’s own garde noire, the vehicles passed by the Metropolitan Section, the Cité des informations, and the Musée des colonies before turning right, past the Madagascar Pavilion’s cow skull-decorated Tour des Bucrânes to the Grande Avenue of the French Colonies. The motorcade then proceeded down the primary avenue of the exposition, passing pavilions dedicated to the French imperial possessions of Somalia and Oceania (the Tahitian pavilion); the French enclaves in India, New Caledonia, New Hebrides, French Guyana, Martinique-Réunion-Guadeloupe; and French Catholic and Protestant missions. After pausing a moment in front of a grandiose scale model of the Angkor Wat and the Indochina pavilion, the group continued past the area dedicated to French West Africa and stopped at the bronze Tower of the Army that marked the endpoint of the avenue.”
“The capitalist bottom line of this imperial civilizing mission was also addressed, and substantial space was set aside for private vendors. In addition, information was provided at each colonial pavilion for potential investors.”
“The French logics of ethnographic legibility that structured the colonial political field heightened the importance of “protecting” Berber linguistic purity and preventing the encroachment of Arabization in regions mapped as “Berber.” In theory, documentation for the tribal courts was to be transcribed in Berber and French, not Arabic. To supply needed staff for the court system (and to train sons of rural notables for the colonial army), the French initiated a separate Berber educational system for the sons of rural notables in 1919. In these schools, Arabic instruction was forbidden and French instruction was mandatory.”
“While creating French Algeria required scholars to write Algerians out of history, making protectorate Morocco involved a historiographical project that meticulously documented the country’s past. Marking off, codifying, and protecting the indigenous “traditional” Morocco served to legitimate France’s colonial intervention there.”
“Another round of legislation in 1919 changed the inalienability of communal tribal lands. A commission determined how much land each douar (or tent) in the tribe needed, then legalized the sale of the tribe’s surplus lands to Europeans. Because the makhzan no longer needed jaysh tribes to man the makhzan army, lands that had been given in exchange for military service were also expropriated. Many of the habus properties owned by religious foundations were also sold. From 1913 to 1932, the number of hectares under cultivation by Europeans increased from 73,000 to 675,000. On top of this, a substantial amount of land still owned by Moroccans was rented out to Europeans, including tribal collective lands that decrees published in 1926, 1931, and 1941 declared were legally rentable.”
“Tribes that had formerly used a mixed system, alternately grazing livestock and cultivating crops different times of the year, were forced to settle on and cultivate less productive lands, In an ecological system where agricultural production is uncertain due to inconsistent rainfall, being pushed into even more precarious zones made farming unsustainable for large numbers of Moroccan fellahin, or peasant farmers. Although the exhibit at the exposition lauded France’s soil conservation and reforestation efforts, the result of the protectorate’s policy of favoring European land use was to degrade soil quality in Morocco: much of the rural population was forced into the cities because the blad, or countryside, could no longer support them.”
“It became evident by the late 1930s that a cantonment policy to separate Arabs and Berbers was a fantasy, primarily because of processes the French themselves had set in motion, including the pacification itself and the construction of a transportation and communications infrastructure.”
“By the early 1940s, many of the Atlas notables were either refusing to send their children to the Franco-Berber schools, demanding instead that they go to the Arabic schools in the major cities, or pressuring local Berber schools (in Sefrou, El Hajeb, Khemisset) to offer more Arabic and Islamic instruction. Upward mobility in the colonial political field was tied to Arabization (and to knowledge of French), and Tamazight speakers wanted access. From the 1920s to the 1940s, service in the army, interaction with a French- and Arabic-dominated government administration, increasing economic activity conducted in Moroccan Arabic in market centers, and, above all, massive migration to cities were inexorable factors that further integrated these communities.”
“The event that catalyzed this transformation to anti-state resistance in the north came during the Spanish offensive in the spring of 1921. Starting in 1919, the Spanish had pushed with pincers from the west and east with the goal of unifying a contiguous state-controlled political field. In 1921, the Ait Waryaghar tribe stood between the two Spanish lines. In the east, the front consisted of an extended line of isolated small fortifications that were often located on high points far from a water source. In May, the Rif enjoyed the best harvest in fourteen years, creating a surplus that freed tribesmen for a sustained large-scale assault on these lines. This assault began with attacks in early June on two forward posts, Dahar Ubarran and Igheriben.
Seven weeks later, in the heat of the summer, the son, Abd el-Krim, launched a coordinated general assault on the front. The Waryaghar tribesmen focused on Anoual, the primary forward Spanish base, and the commanding general of Spanish troops in the east, Manuel Silvestre, ordered a general retreat. This devolved into a total rout as the Spanish front collapsed and the other tribes of the eastern Rif rallied to join the Waryaghar. In the end, Anoual constituted the worst defeat of a European colonial power in the twentieth century: the Spanish lost over 13,000 lives, 20,000 rifles, 400 machine guns, 129 cannons, large quantities of ammunition, and large quantities of canned food. While the Atlas jihad was never an existential threat to the French colonial state, Abd el-Krim’s victory at Anoual was a near-fatal blow to Spanish aspirations. It also presented a critical opportunity for a Rif state to emerge.”
“In the post-World War I milieu in which European colonial powers and local actors such as Ataturk, Ibn Saud, and Reza Shah actively reshaped political units across North Africa and the Middle East, Abd el-Krim, though less well known, was remarkably effective at merging military, political, and cultural state-building strategies.
The victory at Anoual provided him with weapons, ammunition, Spanish prisoners, and, perhaps most critical, symbolic power and legitimacy. After pushing the Spanish back to coastal enclaves in the summer of 1921, Abd el-Krim and his Rif forces consolidated an autonomous anti-colonial political field in the hinterland that included seventy to eighty tribal groups in the northern zone. That September, Abd el-Krim proclaimed the creation of the Republic of the Rif, and over the next months, he began to centralize authority in this territorial space by rationalizing the judiciary, tax collection, the administrative bureaucracy, and the army.”
“Women and men were also both required to perform the five daily prayers. The penalty for not doing the prayers for men was to be sent to the battlefront; for women, the fine was a chicken.”
“Although Morocco’s Jewish population has dwindled to a few thousand since independence, it numbered over 220,000 in the early 1950s, constituting the largest in a Muslim country. It is also one of the most ancient Jewish communities in the world; legends claim that its origins go back to the time of King Solomon (tenth century BCE).”
“The first Moroccan women’s political associations began to be formed in the mid-1940s. In 1946, Istiqlal formally recognized a women’s association in the party; Malika al-Fassi was its first president. The Akhawat al-safa (Sisters of Purity) was also created shortly thereafter as a women’s association for the rival Parti démocratique de l’indépendance, which held its first congress in Fes in May 1947. Both organizations prioritized literacy campaigns and worked to increase access to higher education. Both also aimed to get women directly involved in the independence struggle. While the women’s movement in the 1940s was dominated by elites who were fortunate enough to have access to education at home or in the free schools, these early women’s associations intentionally aimed to cross class barriers and create solidarity among Moroccan women of all backgrounds, although primarily only in urban areas. Meetings were organized in homes of the wives of the prominent nationalist leaders. One woman who participated, Ftoma Skalli, recollects the cross-class interaction at the home of Hajja Mekouar, the wife of Ahmed Mekouar, in Fes in the 1940s: “At our gatherings, we would have very rich women, and we would seat them next to poor women. And we used to tell them that if they didn’t like it they’d better not show up the next time.”
In Mernissi’s memoir (1994) of her childhood in the Fes medina in the 1940s, women pushed spatial and social boundaries by attending cinemas, sending daughters to nationalist schools, and wearing the jalaba (traditionally a male garment) as a sign of nationalist solidarity.”
“At a second juncture during World War I, the Alawids again benefited from Morocco’s geographic position in the west and from the fact that Morocco had an Atlantic-facing coast. The Americans began the North Africa campaign by landing in Morocco in 1942, which gave the Moroccan ruler increasing freedom to maneuver in contrast to his peer, the Tunisian monarch, Moncef Bey, who came under German rule when the Wehrmacht dug in to hold off the Anglo-American push into Italy. After the eventual Allied victory in Tunisia, Moncef Bey, who had vigorously pushed for Tunisian autonomy, was forced to abdicate by the Free French administration in 1943. While Mohamed V was spared this fate for another decade, Moncef Bey died in exile in 1948 before he could capitalize on his popularity as a nationalist symbol.
The vagaries of historical sequence and individual agency were critical factors that relate to how Mohamed V also survived the process of anti-colonial nation building. In the 1930s, the fact that the colonial power had kept the sultan in place and tried to profit from his symbolic power did not delegitimize Mohamed V in the eyes of the Moroccan nationalist movement. Instead, they tried to subvert this legitimacy framework from within, emphasizing the monarchy themselves as the symbol of national unity and sovereignty. Mohamed V thus benefited from both the colonial state-building project, which cultivated his symbolic trappings of power, and the nationalists’ decision to co-opt these resources in their own efforts at nation building. In the 1940s, the war created space in which Mohamed V expanded his own sphere of agency and autonomy between these two competing camps. When he was exiled in 1953, Mohamed V completed the transformation from sultan to king. Unlike Tunisia’s Moncef Bey, the Moroccan monarch was exiled late enough for him to still be in play in the decolonization endgame and early enough for him to have not compromised his credentials as an anti-colonial nationalist symbol.”
“Elections and the drafting of a constitution were postponed long enough to make sure that neither could fundamentally threaten the monarchy’s political supremacy. By the time the first elections were held in 1960 for local and municipal elections, the palace’s strategy of pluralization and alternance had neutralized the threat that any one party could pose a viable challenge in the Moroccan political field. Similarly, when Hassan I, who ascended to the throne after his father’s unexpected death in February 1961, announced a new constitution in November 1962, none of the Moroccan political parties had enough leverage to dictate or influence the formal (or informal) rules governing the exercise of power in post-independence Morocco. Instead of a British-style system that limited the sovereign to a figurchead role, in Morocco the balance of power had shifted by the early 1960s toward a de Gaullist style of presidential monarchy with vast executive and legislative power.”
“After occupying Spanish Sahara with the “Green March” in November 1975, Morocco fought fifteen-year war against the forces of the Frente Popular de Liberación de Saguía el Hamra y Río de Oro (Popular Front for the Liberation of Saguia el-Hamra and Río de Oro), which were seeking to establish an independent Western Sahara. The international status of the Saharan provinces remains unresolved and the “territorial integrity” the constitution’s preamble refers to indicates how sensitive this issue remains in the Moroccan political field.”
