from the political parties with the largest parliamentary blocks and their coalitions with smaller parties; state media run by non-appointed directors with their own political agendas and media ideologies; entrenched shadow state power movers (الدولة العميقة [addūla al‘amīqa]) with their own economic interests tied to foreign governments and corporations; self-interested local politicians and bureaucrats whose work was to find a way to benefit from their positions; and corrupt police and military personnel who did not enforce the law so much as selectively apply it for their gain. In other words, the state meant different things at different moments, and so their laments of state communicative failures did not always emerge as a sustained movement against the state.
Fassis I worked with were critical of aspects of government, media, education, and language, yet fiercely nationalistic and often defended the king and their country as much as they criticized him and the state. These Fassis, who did not self-identify as part of any given class formation or political movement, seemed to paradoxically hold deep distrust of the state, consistently call for reform, and yet offered widespread support for the king’s constitutional referendum in 2011; they constantly critiqued the relationality failures of state media, and yet it continued as a regular presence in their everyday domestic lives. On one hand, we might view them as unreflexive subjects, failures of “modern development” projects in their unflinching support of an outdated political project (Tambar 2012); yet on the other hand they relentlessly critiqued the failures of state projects no matter the political orientation of those in power. I don’t offer an objective notion of critique in this book, but rather explore shifting mobilizations of what it meant to engage in laments about the failures to connect appropriately. I hope these chapters will aid us in reimagining critique as a generative tool of both liberal and nonliberal self-identifying Moroccan Muslim collectivities (Asad 2009). My interlocuters challenged assumptions about the role of schooled literacy, presupposed affective personas, and a spoken/written language divide in creating critical, politically conscious, reasoning media subjects. In doing so, they enacted the kinds of unrecognized political projects shaping Moroccan relationality.
My research spans six years before the Arab uprisings and five years afterward. As each of these chapters illustrate, mediational laments and the practices they precipitated involved a great deal of interactional work, the work to calibrate points of similarity and difference, to align or confront, to foreground or background the kinds of work channels should do. Laments of communicative channel failure surfaced when I started asking about social life and media in Fez. This failure focused on aspects of the mediums themselves, the channels connecting interlocutors, whether electronic (such as television stations, WhatsApp, billboards, magazines) or linguistic (spoken standard Arabic, rhymed darīja prose, orthographic form, collective Qur’anic recitation). I hope you see how mundane and yet productive of Moroccanness relationality these laments as communicative reform were. اجي تشوف وتسمع (‛ajī tšūf watsma‘: Come, see and hear).
In 2008, Fez celebrated its founding over 1,200 years ago by Moulay Idriss II, a descendant of the prophet Muhammed whose father, Moulay Idriss I, laid the foundations of the Moroccan state. Arabic of some kind has been a key index of Fez and Morocco since the Idrissi origin story, despite the widespread presence of Amazigh languages. Movement of populations and people, with their language varieties and identities, has been central to the history of Fez, especially its urban life. Moroccans recount and periodize their history as a series of foreign dominations: Phoenicians, Romans, Vandals, Byzantines, Arabs, French, Spanish (F. Laroui 1977). An oft-cited wave of Arab tribal groups in the eleventh century significantly impacted the rural/urban language varieties in the area (Ennaji 2005, 59). In addition, the Maghrib connected West Africa, Europe, and the Arab East through the caravan trade routes (J. Miller 2001), with Arabic as a key lingua franca of those exchanges. Each of these framings has done important work in marking the essence of Moroccanness relationality in Fez.
The city in particular has been oft-characterized as the core founding place of Islam, Arabization, intellectual life, urbanization, and trade in Morocco (Pennell 2003, 33–37). According to nationalist narratives, Fez accommodated refugees from Qairawan (Tunis) in the ninth century and Andalusians, Arabic-speaking Muslims and Jews fleeing the Spanish conquest, from the ninth through the fifteenth centuries. During the twentieth-century French colonial period, administrators attempted a divide-and-rule policy explicitly through educational, linguistic, and legal formulations. They created French schools in Amazigh communities (nominally because they didn’t speak Arabic) and developed a “Berber” legal system based on “customary practice” and not connected to the Moroccan Islamic legal codes (Hoffman 2006). The divisions were not just between Amazigh and Arabs, but among Arabs themselves. The French attempted to educate a corps of elite, modern, French-speaking, civilized Arabs to administer the protectorate without reference to dangerous Pan-Arab and Pan-Islamist ideologies emerging from elites studying in the Arab East (Benmamoun 2001, 100). Fez was one of the places from which the French recruited sons of Moroccan elites to “civilize” through a simplified French-language education in an attempt to break the oppositional power of the Arabic-trained Muslim scholars coming out of the networks created by al-Qarawiyyiin University (S. Miller 2013, 122–23). Founded by a woman from Tunis in the ninth century (in the third century of the Muslim calendar), al-Qarawiyyiin had been granting scholarly degrees and training judges, teachers, and local administrators through its network of Qur’anic schools (Eickelman 1985). In addition to the Qarawiyyiin educational network, Fassi scholars such as Shaykh Muhammad al-Kattani were also involved in mobilizing broad-spectrum opposition among elites, merchants, artisans, rural tribesman, and laborers through Sufi الزاوية (zāwīya). These worship gathering places, both the zāwīya and Qarawiyyiin schools, fostered learning through devotional practices and facilitated social interactions and the discussion of political and religious reform that alternated between supporting and criticizing the sultan (Bazzaz 2010, 4, 9)—all via a mix of orally recited Qur’anic-influenced Arabic and spoken darīja (see Chapter 5). While admittedly only a fraction of the Moroccan population received any degree of schooled literacy training before the mid-twentieth century, many of those trained through the Qarawiyyin system became the drivers of political reform. This included Muhammad ‘Allal al-Fasi, the force behind the independence political party Istiqlal, and Muhammed al-Fassi, the first minister of education in independent Morocco. Fassis claim the colonial francophone policy was successful enough that the post-independence educational policy designed by French-educated Hassan II included French and fuṣḥā Arabic curriculum, despite the protests of Fassi Moroccan nationalists who sought a pan-Arab identity through standard Arabic. In a widely circulated anecdote, one related to me by one of my Fassi colleagues, a member of the committee designated to draft the new curriculum expressed surprise at the changes made to the original draft by Hassan II, especially in regard to the number of Arabic courses replaced by French. When he questioned the king, the response was, “I am bilingual, and I desire all Moroccans to be bilingual like me.”
Since independence, the contribution of Fez to the national imaginary continued, but its economic and intellectual life has withered in comparison to other cities, such as Casablanca, Tangier, Marrakesh, and the capital, Rabat. In the last four decades, urban flows have moved old Fassi elites out of their ancestral, “traditional” ornately tiled courtyard homes in the medina to Rabat, Casablanca, and high-rise apartments and villas of the Fez ville nouvelle (Hachimi 2005; Newcomb 2009). Fassis who moved out of the medina have lamented that the sounds of the street and neighbors’ intimate conversations enter through apartment windows in ways unknown to the quiet interior-facing medina dwellings. They have also decried the rural Arabic and
