For almost two decades, the Moroccan state has increasingly sought ways of shaping the country’s religious discourse, even as King Mohammed VI tries to uphold his image as liberal reformer and guide the liberalization or “opening” (infitah) of the country’s political and economic spheres. Following the 2003 Casablanca bombings carried out by members of the Salafiyya Jihadiyya, much of this intervention has evoked protecting a “moderate” Maliki- and Sufi-inspired “Moroccan” form of Islam from “foreign” influences. In the aftermath of the U.S.-led “War on Terror,” moreover, and amidst the rise of ISIS, this state project has taken on global meaning as well. In 2014, then, the state’s Ministry of Islamic Affairs took a striking new step in this interventionist project by founding the Mohammed VI Institute for the Cultivation of Imams (Ma‘had Mohammed al-Sadis l-takwin al-a’imma), which aims more at recruiting students from Europe and other African nations than from within Morocco. As part of a larger project examining the Institute’s contemporary resonance, this paper examines some of its promotional materials and other elite discourse surrounding its founding and mission, while also putting this discourse in historical perspective. I suggest that in the most basic sense the Institute turns the state’s otherwise-protectionist stance regarding “Moroccan” Islam into a neo-imperial project of Islamic knowledge production, one that Morocco lays claim to through a heritage of Maliki jurisprudence that it shares with West African nations from which it recruits students. If we consider regional histories of Qur’an recitation practice alongside jurisprudence, however, the stakes of such a project become much clearer. Today, the Moroccan state has made promotion of a lesser known “Moroccan” recitational variant called riwayat Warsh a cornerstone of its local religious activities. At the same time, a brief survey of relevant Islamic manuscript archives reveals that the adoption of riwayat Warsh across West Africa coincided with the Moroccan Saidiyyan dynasty’s defeat of the Songhay and territorial expansion into the region. I argue, therefore, that the Institute embodies an attempt by the monarchy to reclaim its authoritative status over the geographical expanse of this “Warsh zone,” and thus the fullest extent of an earlier, Moroccan empire. I conclude by considering some of the ramifications of this type of educational neo-imperialism within the broader context of Morocco’s expanding trade relations with other African nations, and its continued occupation of the Western Sahara.