Arabization, broadly defined as the replacement of French with Standard Arabic in schools, administrations, and courts, has been a core element of nation-building in Morocco after its independence in 1956. As a decolonial language policy, Arabization symbolized not only cultural independence, but also a Moroccan renaissance project through the modernization of Standard Arabic, making Arabization resonate with an endogenous modernity project. Yet, the association of Arabization with decolonization has been slowly replaced by serious doubts regarding its suitability as a language policy. In the education sector specifically, Arabization has been widely identified as the main culprit for the deterioration in the performance of schools. Whereas there was in the 1950s and 1960s a consensus on—or at least a consensual non-opposition to—the need for Arabization as a policy of national unification, there has been since the 2010s a general agreement across the political spectrum on the ‘failure of Arabization.’ Most recently, in 2019, the Ministry of Education decided to revert to French as a language of instruction of science subjects, acknowledging the ‘failure’ of Arabization to deliver in the education sector. While the discourse bracketing Arabization with failure has entrenched itself in the public sphere, including in academia, no formal evaluation of the policy has been ever conducted. How has the discourse on the ‘failure of Arabization’ become dominant in Morocco and what implications does it have for nation-building? Using Foucauldian discourse analysis, I investigate language entrepreneurs’ discourses on languages generally and Arabization specifically from the late nineteenth until the early twenty-first century in four corpora representing four Bourdieusian fields: the political (state, political parties, labor unions, and student unions’ documents), the social/cultural (civil society language advocacy, especially associations promoting Amazigh (Berber), Darija (Arabic vernacular), and Standard Arabic), the expert/academic (academic literature on languages), and the artistic (music and literature). Based on six months of fieldwork consisting of interviews and archival research (newspapers, magazines, and conference proceedings), I contend that the discourse on ‘the failure of Arabization’ constitutes an ideal lens through which to approach nation-building in Morocco. The paper argues that this discourse, far from discrediting the state for an unsuccessful policy, has been used by the monarchy as a tool to forge alliances, disparage its competitors, and gain leverage in redefining ‘Moroccanness’ away from ‘Arabness’ in the aftermath of the 2011 uprisings.