{"id":2987,"date":"2009-03-28T09:12:37","date_gmt":"2009-03-28T09:12:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/amrani.cc\/wp\/?p=2987"},"modified":"2009-03-28T09:12:37","modified_gmt":"2009-03-28T09:12:37","slug":"2009-3-28-moroccos-le-journal-we-are-all-shia-html","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/amrani.cc\/wp\/?p=2987","title":{"rendered":"Morocco’s Le Journal: “We are all Shia”"},"content":{"rendered":"
My friend Abou Bakr Jamai<\/a>, publisher of Morocco’s Le Journal weekly now in forced into exile because of bogus lawsuits against his magazine, sent me this week’s cover highlighting Morocco’s new religious crusade<\/a> for “the right Islam” that must be followed. <\/p>\n

This campaign is aimed at asserting the “Sunni malekite nature” of “Moroccan Islam”; its aim is to buttress the pro-monarchy traditionalism of very Morocco-specific institutions such as the “Commandership of the Faithful” (specific in that it argues that the king has the same role as a Caliph, but only for Moroccans), Sherifism (high respect for descendants of the prophet, a very Shia tradition that has since Sultan Moulay Ismail<\/a> in the 17th century been a key part of governance through a ethno-religious aristocracy) and the prominence of apolitical Sufi tariqat<\/em>. The campaign to reimpose these traditionalist values is partly a not-so-badly thought out attempt to limit the spread of salafism (I applaud that) but has also spread into paranoia about Iran-funded Shia conversion and as a way to put pressure on Islamic parties, legal and unrecognized. But it’s the kind of thing that the Moroccan regime has long done – asserting a Moroccan Islam that is nice and fluffy vs. the Islam of its opponents – and, moreover, the foreigners usually lap it up. <\/p>\n

\""We<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

My friend Abou Bakr Jamai<\/a>, publisher of Morocco’s Le Journal weekly now in forced into exile because of bogus lawsuits against his magazine, sent me this week’s cover highlighting Morocco’s new religious crusade<\/a> for “the right Islam” that must be followed.
\nThis campaign is aimed at asserting the “Sunni malekite nature” of “Moroccan Islam”; its aim is to buttress the pro-monarchy traditionalism of very Morocco-specific institutions such as the “Commandership of the Faithful” (specific in that it argues that the king has the same role as a Caliph, but only for Moroccans), Sherifism (high respect for descendants of the prophet, a very Shia tradition that has since Sultan Moulay Ismail<\/a> in the 17th century been a key part of governance through a ethno-religious aristocracy) and the prominence of apolitical Sufi tariqat<\/em>. The campaign to reimpose these traditionalist values is partly a not-so-badly thought out attempt to limit the spread of salafism (I applaud that) but has also spread into paranoia about Iran-funded Shia conversion and as a way to put pressure on Islamic parties, legal and unrecognized. But it’s the kind of thing that the Moroccan regime has long done – asserting a Moroccan Islam that is nice and fluffy vs. the Islam of its opponents – and, moreover, the foreigners usually lap it up.
\n[caption id=\"attachment_3928\" align=\"aligncenter\" width=\"450\" caption=\"\"We are all Shia, Sunni, Jewish, Christian, atheist, agnostic...\" \"]\""We[\/caption]<\/div>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[4],"tags":[537,228,35,34,194,335],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/amrani.cc\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2987"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/amrani.cc\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/amrani.cc\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/amrani.cc\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/amrani.cc\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2987"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/amrani.cc\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2987\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/amrani.cc\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2987"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/amrani.cc\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2987"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/amrani.cc\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2987"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}