OSAMA ABI-MERSHED (Editor) Social Currents in North Africa HURST & COMPANY, LONDON Published in collaboration with Center for International and Regional Studies, Georgetown University—Qatar in 2018 by C. Hurst & Co. (Publishers) Ltd., 41 Great Russell Street, London, WC1B 3PL © Osama Abi-Mershed and the Contributors, 2018 All rights reserved. Printed in India The right of Osama Abi-Mershed and the Contributors to be identified as the authors of this publication is asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988. A Cataloguing-in-Publication data record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN: 9781849048279 This book is printed using paper from registered sustainable and managed sources. www.hurstpublishers.com CONTENTS vii ix Acknowledgements Contributors 1. Social Currents in North Africa Osama Abi-Mershed 2. Islamist Parties and Transformation in Tunisia and Morocco Francesco Cavatorta and Fabio Merone 3. Sufism and Salafism in the Maghreb: Political Implications Ricardo René Larémont 4. Labor Protest in Morocco: Strikes, Concessions, and the Arab Spring Matt Buehler 5. The Amazigh Movement in a Changing North Africa Paul A. Silverstein 6. Thou Shalt Not Speak One Language: Self, Skill, and Politics in post-Arab Spring Morocco Charis Boutieri 7. The Politics of the Haratin Social Movement in Mauritania, 1978–2014 Zekeria Ould Ahmed Salem 8. Keeping Up With the Times: The Growth of Support from Non-State Actors for the Polisario Liberation Movement Alice Wilson 9. Film and Cultural Dissent in Tunisia Nouri Gana 10. “Curating the Mellah”: Cultural Conservation, Jewish Heritage Tourism, and Normalization Debates in Morocco and Tunisia, 1960s–Present Aomar Boum 1 11 31 51 73 93 117 143 165 187 205 293 Notes Index v 1 SOCIAL CURRENTS IN NORTH AFRICA Osama Abi-Mershed The contributions to this volume are the outcome of two research workshops on “Social Currents in the Maghreb” organized by the Center for International and Regional Studies (CIRS) at Georgetown University at Qatar in January and June 2014. Scholars in the field of North African or Maghrebi studies were invited to reflect upon their specialized disciplinary or methodological approaches to the region, and comment on the overall validity of North Africa as a cohesive geo-historical unit for social scientific analysis. Such critical reassessments of the disciplinary contours of North African studies have become all the more desirable in light of the momentous and unforeseen socio-political upheavals, known as the Arab uprisings, that started in Tunisia in December 2010. The “territory-crossing” reach and substantive implications of the uprisings have compelled North Africanists to review some of the paradigmatic and procedural assumptions in their field of studies, and to don fresh conceptual and methodological lenses when reading Arab societies more broadly. To this end, participants in the CIRS workshops were encouraged to contemplate the following academic questions: have the Arab uprisings exposed heretofore under-estimated regional commonalities for historians 1 SOCIAL CURRENTS IN NORTH AFRICA and social scientists to explain? Can post-uprising research promote greater analytic rigor and disciplinary synergies in North African studies, to the benefit of more varied trans-regional and comparative perspectives on national developments? In a recent assessment of the field of North African studies, James MacDougall and Robert Parks noted that it remains fragmented and polarized between the structural and general methods favored by political scientists and economists, and the more localized and particular lenses of sociologists and cultural anthropologists.1 This “multi-scalar dilemma,” or the forced correlation between macro- and micro-level phenomena and considerations, is best illustrated by the proclivity among North Africanists to confine the historical unity of the Maghreb to its “formative” colonial past, while affording the territorial nation-state undue primacy in post-colonial case studies. The tendency, according to MacDougall and Parks, “has restricted possible research agendas and the insights that might be gained from combining different levels of analysis in different locations across political frontiers.”2 With this and similar verdicts in mind,3 the CIRS workshops sought, first, to consider the regional implications of the popular protests of 2010–2011, and second, to test the capacity of individual case studies to suggest a unifying analytical and conceptual understanding of the region as a whole. With regard to the first concern, the contributors to this volume— renowned scholars in the disciplines of political science, history, sociology, anthropology, and media studies—have engaged deeply and critically with the latest social scientific literature on the Maghreb. Separately, their theoretical and empirical approaches to the subject matter aim to situate the distinct structural properties of North African societies, and their individual historical and material specificities, within the broad context of regional and international developments. Taken as a whole, their individual findings confirm that the scientific legibility of North Africa is not fully captured in fixed political divisions and periodizations, or by state- and elite-centered processes alone. Rather, their chapters refine the geo-historical unity of the Maghreb by accounting for social connectivities and flows within the nation-state and across political boundaries. Accordingly, the chapters collected within this volume demonstrate that non-institutional phenomena across time and space—in this case, the congealing of individual ideals and experiences into group practices and social mobilizations—are equally formative to the ongoing project of post-colonial sovereignty, to social construction and deployments of state power, and to local outlooks on social equity, economic prospects, and cultural identity. 2 SOCIAL CURRENTS IN NORTH AFRICA Second, the workshop participants were called upon to engage with the overarching theme of “social currents”, defined here as the manifestation in collective social practices and actions of the experiences and values held in common by members of a given society, and which are essential to their individual identification with larger social groupings. In attempting to historicize the impulses that motivated the Arab uprisings, the organizers of the workshops aimed to shed light on the weight of collective identifications in mobilizing socio-political action across North Africa and the Middle East. Social currents were to serve as the prism through which to take meaningful stock of the multiple individual principles, dispositions, and pursuits that merged into the collective and transnational protests of 2010–2011. Here, the insights of Émile Durkheim (1858–1917) concerning the connections between the moral norms that govern a given society and the collective actions of its individual members may offer an instructive vantage point for historical and sociological analyses of the Arab uprisings, and perhaps provide the common conceptual and empirical thread linking the various contributions to this volume.4 Durkheim starts from the principle that social groups are as bound together by material relations and factual contracts as they are by the normative beliefs, moral consensus, and rules of conduct that undergird the stability and perpetuation of any social order in a particular time and place. He devised the notion of a “collective consciousness” to describe the mental processes by which individual beings come to identify with larger social groups and structures. The collective consciousness exercises an internal regulative effect on autonomous social actors. It entrenches a collective moral discipline that sanctions or prohibits the decisions and practices of individual actors. Yet, according to Durkheim, the common beliefs and dispositions of individual actors are also externally visible to the extent that they are integral to the established socio-political order. They are legible “social facts” because they are products of, and subject to, various routinized forms of social control: Society is not simply an aggregate of individuals, but is a being which has existed prior to those who today compose it, and which will survive them; which influences (acts upon) them more than they influence it, and which has its own life, consciousness, its own interests and destiny.5 Durkheim’s social facts, in other words, are historically and sociologically observable in their propensity to induce individual members to act according to group filiation, shared values, cultural standards, and collective patterns or social currents rather than personal preference.6 To this effect, the 3 SOCIAL CURRENTS IN NORTH AFRICA volume’s contributors have considered a range of formal or internal social facts in North Africa in an effort to determine their role in priming the mobilizations of 2010–2011, as well as detect their resonance in subsequent socio-political developments. Several chapters underscore the salience of normative beliefs and rules of conduct in maintaining (or challenging) the established socio-political order. They consider a range of official and popular projects to redefine the moral contract between North African states and societies, whether undertaken by governments, labor associations, Islamist parties, educational reformers, grassroots activists, or producers of cultural signifiers. Some contributors have situated their understanding of social currents within the formal politico-legal institutions of governance and their socio-historical effects on systemic political alignments, distributions of wealth, and group affiliations. Others have focused more intently on the ideological mediations by which North Africans are reproduced as subjects of state power: educational systems, mass media communications and representations, cultural and artistic productions, etc. Their combined approaches to social currents in North Africa compel us to reflect more profoundly on the institutional structures and ideological stimuli that have informed recent group behavior and political mobilizations in the Maghreb, and to articulate more theoretical understandings of the social factors that caused the collective needs of North Africans to pressure or outpace the existing regulatory order, establish new social solidarities, and in many cases, trigger a mass social movement. Indeed, by exposing the differential, often coercive, power of collective affiliations and beliefs upon the individual negotiations with the social environment, several contributors raise critical questions concerning the longterm historical consequences of the tumultuous events of 2010–2011, from the workings of religious beliefs in the public sphere to the moral economies of language instruction and cultural production. Their analyses of the institutional and cultural parameters of social currents in the Maghreb leave little doubt that while the uprisings may turn out to be transitory and evanescent, their legacies will endure in the material and mental transformations that have been bequeathed to future generations of North Africans.7 More significantly, their distinct assessments of the renegotiated fields of political action in the wake of 2011 introduce conceptual paradigms with which to account for the new social facts that have recently empowered North Africans to act collectively. Together, the following chapters deliver critical comments on the genealogies of behavioral and ideological norms in contemporary North Africa, 4 SOCIAL CURRENTS IN NORTH AFRICA offer insightful perspectives on the new rationalities of governance after 2011, and raise important conceptual interpretations for the field of North Africa studies to consider. In their review of the Islamist currents in Morocco and Tunisia, Francesco Cavatorta and Fabio Merone investigate the socio-political decisions and maneuvers taken by the Justice and Development Party (PJD) and the Nahda Movement (Ennahda), respectively, to gain access to state power in the aftermath of the 2011 uprisings. Their findings challenge directly the notion of a “post-Islamist” phase in Arab politics, and raise critical observations regarding the political compatibility of Islamist principles with democratic governance. More significantly, their study of the electoral strategies of Ennahda and the PJD exposes the increasing diversity in the socio-political discourses and practices of the two parties since 2011. According to Cavatorta and Merone, formal institutional realities and the imperatives of electoral success compelled Ennahda and the PJD to behave like institutionalized parties in their respective political systems. They negotiated their entry into coalition governments by modulating their political platforms and compromising on core Islamist aims, such as the establishment of an “Islamic State” and the application of shari‘ah law. These political compromises were not without risks to the Islamist credentials of the PJD and Ennahda, as disaffected constituents may turn to informal communal or familial avenues to attain the desired societal transformations. Thus, according to Cavatorta and Merone, the advances gained by the PJD and Ennahda since 2011 have not only introduced a more refined Islamist identity and agenda into state politics, but have also stimulated important social transformations in the private sphere. In a similar vein, Ricardo René Larémont reviews the uneasy and turbulent historical relationship between North African governments from Morocco to Egypt and their resident Sufi and Salafi organizations. Echoing the comments of Cavatorta and Merone, Larémont’s analysis suggests that the widening range in the political practices of Islamist parties is also producing different conceptual interpretations of foundational Islamist, in this case Salafist, notions and models. He breaks down the broad networks of Salafi or Sufi associations, active since the nineteenth century, to underline the existence of distinct sub-currents within each, and presents the post-2011 context as a critical historical juncture in the evolving interactions within the State-SalafiSufi triad. In the aftermath of the Arab uprisings, resurgent Salafi organizations, notably the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, the Ennahda Movement in Tunisia, the Justice and Construction Party in Libya, and the Justice and 5