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Young Islam
The New Politics of Religion in Morocco and the Arab World
By Avi Max Spiegel PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 2015 Princeton University Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4008-6643-4
CHAPTER 1
SHUTTLE ETHNOGRAPHY
The train that runs twice every hour from Rabat to Casablanca is the dominant commuter line in Morocco. It travels north-south, sweeping up in its midst the vast majority of the country's industry. On weekdays, it shuttles an emerging middle class from home to work, from work to home. On weekends and holidays, the train converts to a mechanized shuttle bus for families hoping to visit their relatives who reside outside of urban centers.
Its station of departure is Rabat Ville in downtown Rabat, a hundred-year-old outpost at the mouth of the city's main throughway, Boulevard Mohammed V. The train proceeds at a churning pace to Agdal, Rabat's upscale neighbor, where it takes on more workers. It then begins to pick up speed, passing through the peri-urban towns of Temara and Bouznika—places where most live, not work. It stops in Mohammedia, a coastal university town at the midpoint between Rabat and Casablanca. From there, the train barrels straight to Casablanca's main station, passing along the way rows of warehouses and factories, scattered bidonvilles or shanty towns, the city's port and old medina, and finally, the traffic- and smog-filled disconnected streets of downtown Casablanca.
The station stops along the fifty-six-minute ride tend to correspond to middle- and upper-class areas; the towns bypassed by the train line but visible in the distance tend to be lower-class neighborhoods. Young Islamists increasingly emerge from all these places: across and within this varied, municipal milieu. They are not exclusively rich or poor. Nor are they unsophisticated country folk who shun the excitement of city life. They are, for the most part, diverse urbanites.
If one wanted to find the largest numbers of Islamists in any country in the Middle East or North Africa, therefore, the first places to look would be spaces of high urban density. In Morocco, I headed not just for the capital Rabat, but also for all the areas through which the Rabat-Casablanca rail line travels—to the stops and pass-overs, to the varied cities, towns, suburbs, and even universities within its reach. But that was the easy part.
There are, it turns out, Islamist movements, and even sections within them, that are easily located, and then there are those that are more concealed. In this chapter, I want to begin to explain how I navigated this evolving, unsettled terrain. If a researcher traveled to Rabat, for example, in search of the offices or headquarters of the banned Islamist group, Al Adl, he would not find them. If he looked to recent measurements of Islamist mobilization favored among social scientists—election results or incidents of violence—the largest Islamist group in the country would also not be on display. If he went to the souq or market in the old medina or even to one of the ornate bookstores that line the wide boulevards of the new city and asked shopkeepers for material by the movement's founder, Sheikh Yassine, he would be met, as I often was, with only suspicious or purposefully unknowing stares. Even if he peered inside a mosque looking for all forms of Islamist activism, only certain legal groups would be visible. And if he ventured beyond the major cities, where Al Adl, for one, often operates under different organizational umbrellas to evade repression—with names, I discovered, such as al-Waha or al-Manar—he would have an even harder time tracking them down.
It would be as if certain Islamists did not exist. And yet, all this time, the legal political party, PJD, with its official offices, daily newspaper, public parliamentarians, and published policy papers, would be in full view. But, contrary to popular assumptions, what is excluded electorally or even repressed does not simply disappear. Rather, in terms familiar to a deconstructionist or even a psychoanalyst, such movements "return to unsettle every construction, no matter how secure it seems"
* * *
How does one locate something that is purposely hidden? When Sigmund Freud, for one, first asked an American audience to consider the "repressed," he invited them to conjure up the image of two rooms: a large hallway that led to a smaller space. Perched between these areas stood a single gatekeeper with the power to decide who could proceed from the big room to the smaller one—from the oversized yet crowded and uncomfortable realm of the unconscious to the vaunted gateway of the conscious. This is often a confused, competitive process, Freud described, as both rooms are filled with those who constantly "jostle one another" The inhabitants, one analyst wrote later, are "like a crowd of suitors hoping for an audience." In the end, that single gatekeeper, like an authoritarian ruler or military dictator, ultimately decides what is "inadmissible to consciousness."
Freud's spatial rendering, he admitted at the time, was "crude"—just as it is in this instance to evoke the overlapping relationships within and among Islamist movements. In the case of Morocco, the metaphor helps us imagine an Al Adl held back, trying to propel its way to the forefront of national politics, constantly challenging both the guard—and its fellow Islamists—only to be relegated to that large, unruly room. It is here where they continue to exist, where they occupy an often hidden (and too often ignored) methodological underworld of cybercafés, téléboutiques, text messages, mirror websites, contraband DVDs, photocopied pamphlets, cell phone screensavers, sleepovers, private house meetings, illegal or unsanctioned protest marches, semi-public avenues of democratic contestation, and student, not necessarily national, elections.
PJD, on the other hand, by virtue of its legality and its electoral inclusion, has been granted entry into the visible, accessible, familiar domain of the conscious: a world of existing datasets, parliamentary elites, government representation, state-run mosques, electoral results, polling, ministry offices, party headquarters, and even newspapers. These are Islamists who have come in from the cold.
In this light it makes sense that the vast majority of studies by social scientists, policy makers, and journalists suffer from what one of their own once called an election "preoccupation." It is so much simpler and more straightforward, for example, to research groups such as PJD, whose members sometimes converse in French, whose activists are listed in the phonebook, and whose leaders invite you for sweetened tea at their plush parliamentary offices. Who would want to risk getting arrested when doing his or her research?
The U.S. government, for one, has not had much luck or interest in deciphering the multiple varieties of Islamist activism. A classified 2008 cable to Washington, DC from the embassy in Rabat—released via WikiLeaks—revealed that diplomats could not even figure out what to call Al Adl (was it Justice and Charity Organization or the Justice and Spirituality Organization?). The authors also seemed shocked that the group "may be moving toward political participation"—even though the formation of its "political circle" had taken place a full decade earlier. This confusion was understandable. The embassy admitted that it had not had any communication with the group for at least seven years—because the last time they tried to make contact with Al Adl, the Moroccan government "protested" In a practice that has become all too common, the United States relied on a foreign government to determine which of its nationals Americans would engage.
* * *
It is true that working with a banned, illicit movement involves obvious methodological challenges. But, as with most assumptions related to the region, the story on the ground reflected a more intricate reality. It was certainly more straightforward to locate PJD initially, but not always easier to get them to agree to talk to me or, more specifically, for them to allow their members to converse openly with me or to move beyond the formal strictures of party positions and documents. Al Adl was more difficult to find, but once accessed, they proved far more eager and willing to speak freely.
This paradox is best understood by extending the psychoanalytic metaphor discussed earlier. Let's return, for a moment, to Freud's two rooms, to the realms of the conscious and unconscious. Imagine, again, Al Adl as the unconscious: hidden, even forbidden, and challenging to access. The task involved is so onerous, so steeped in pitfalls, that Freud once suggested that making the unconscious conscious was the overriding task of psychoanalysis itself. But once an analyst accesses a patient's unconscious, often through painstaking daily sessions of analysis, she is rewarded with less inhibition and constraint. PJD was at first easier to contact—to see—but it was nonetheless more difficult to penetrate their "conscious defenses" or "barriers." Their very consciousness presented as "perpetual awareness." They often exuded cooperation, yet seemed nervous or reluctant to want me to take a closer look around.
Take, for example, my first encounters with each movement. Looking back, the patterns were evident even then: the formalities, the necessary connections, the protectiveness of PJD. And then there was Al Adl: infinitely more difficult to uncover, but ultimately much more disposed to allow me to stay (and visit) after I had managed to find the door—and proved my willingness and ability to understand what I was seeing.
I first met Al Adl's second in command, Fattalah Arslane, early on in my fieldwork. When I finally reached him by mobile phone after many tries (I had succeeded in tracking down the number from a contact in England), he gave me only the name of an avenue where I could go to meet him. He asked if I had a mobile phone and then told me to call him for further instructions when I arrived. The street, it turned out, was one of the largest in Rabat. Twenty minutes into the trip there the taxi driver glanced over at me as if to ask for directions. I asked him if we were on the correct street, Shari 'al-Majid. He laughed and said we had been on Shari 'al-Majid for nearly ten minutes.
I decided to call the house. A young woman answered and immediately (and convincingly) declared that Arslane was not there, sounding as if I had dialed the wrong number, as if no one by that name actually lived there. I told her about my arranged meeting. She then asked me to hold. She returned to the phone and asked that I get dropped off at a bank on the avenue. Luckily, we had not yet passed it. The taxi driver soon deposited me in front of the closed, deserted bank. The street was empty, almost silent. No one was around except for a man selling freshly squeezed juice for a dirham a glass from a small cart out front piled high with oranges. I waited for about ten minutes. A man suddenly emerged out of a block of nearby apartments and walked toward me from across the street. This was not Arslane but rather Hassan Bennajah, a younger man, one of his deputies, and, it turns out, the head of the youth branch. (Bennajah would later become a major leader of the country's Arab Spring protest movement, coordinating marches to challenge and topple the monarchy.) It was surprising that Hassan was there that day considering that I had only told Arslane in passing, over a noisy phone connection, that I was interested in talking to young activists. Hassan then escorted me inside one of the nearby buildings.
When we entered the apartment, Arslane was sitting on a couch in his salon. A short, stout, slightly overweight man with a full dark beard and the build of a wrestler, Arslane has been with the movement since its inception and was often seen at Yassine's side. "I am ready to answer all your questions," he began. "It is better that you will hear from me than read the wrong information about us in the newspapers." Thank you, I said politely. He then allowed me to turn on my digital recorder and we sat in his living room for almost three hours. Hassan walked me out and scheduled a follow-up meeting with me so that we could talk more.
When we next spoke, Hassan again expressed his appreciation: "It is us who thank you. Just as Mr. Arslane said last time. We encourage communication. You, at least, have come to us and are ready to listen, unlike others who just judge us with little information." In the coming months, his fellow activists would often share with me a Moroccan proverb to make a similar point: "Elli ma'arfek kheserek" (He who doesn't know you, loses you). The colloquial meaning was discernible, but was nonetheless invariably followed by an explanation: if someone never takes the time to get to know you, they cannot possibly claim to understand you.
* * *
The experience of tracking down the head of PJD at the time, Saad Eddine El Othmani, the man who became the country's foreign minister in 2012, was different. His email address was found through a routine Google search; his fax number was listed on the party's website. But it took months for him to finally agree to see me. When I first arrived at the party's main headquarters, a repurposed grand villa on a leafy residential street in Rabat, I sat in the waiting room for close to an hour. The secretary, a veiled woman probably in her late thirties (but looking more like her late fifties), asked if I was a Muslim—and continued to grill me, while feigning friendly banter, about my intentions. She eventually agreed to escort me up the stairs, past the outdoor courtyard, to the secretary general's office.
Othmani, a lanky man of medium stature with a soft grey beard and a slightly high-pitched voice, greeted me at the door, smiling. A psychiatrist of Amazigh or Berber origin from the working-class southern transport town of Inezgane, Othmani is a serial smiler. He peppers his statements with grins so often that it is difficult to find a photograph of him not smiling. One cannot help but wonder whether he was, all this time, consciously trying to lend a happy, benign face to the often-feared Islamist party.
"Thfeddal" (Please), Othmani said, as he pointed to the formal sofa, next to his desk. A large, burly man with a thick mustache was sitting on a sofa opposite me, quietly mumbling my name to himself as if to sound out a puzzle, or perhaps unnerve me. Maybe that was his role. "Spee-gul." "Shpee-gal" "Sipee-gil." It was as if he was attempting to decrypt my name in his head: "American?" "German?" "Brit?" "Israeli?" "Jew?"
Othmani spoke over him and asked first about an old professor of mine at Oxford, who he knew had written articles about the party. He was concerned that he had not read all of them and made me promise that I would send him additional copies. "Did you see that I was in the United States?" he then asked. "I received an award in Washington!" He was referring to being named "Muslim Democrat of the Year" by the Center for the Study of Islam and Democracy. His voice then got higher and he smiled even wider, if that was possible. "Waash shuftee sondage?" (Did you see the poll?) He was referring to a controversial poll sponsored by an American NGO that showed that his party would post large gains in the upcoming national elections.
I nodded, and he then asked me why I wanted to see him. I cautiously said something about wishing to understand why young people were supportive of PJD. I meant it, I suppose, as a gentle introduction, a polite ice breaker. But Othmani quickly became defensive, as if wary of admitting too much success. "How do you know they do?" he quizzed me. "What evidence do you bring me to maintain that youth do support us?" He wanted proof. He then asked me what I thought before he offered his answer. I tried to pivot: "Well, these are the sorts of questions I came here to have answered." Frustrated, he grabbed his mobile phone on the large, rectangular coffee table in front of us and called the person who was serving as the head of the party's youth wing, Aziz Rabbah. "Aziz will tell you what you want to know," Othmani said, pointing to the door. He was kicking me out. But this was actually a welcome gesture—as I had been trying (unsuccessfully) to reach Rabbah for months. After Othmani's intervention, I had a message from Rabbah that evening.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Young Islam by Avi Max Spiegel. Copyright © 2015 Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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