Arabization, broadly understood as the replacement of French by Standard Arabic in schools, administrations, and courts, has been one of the major policies of nation-building in post-independence Morocco. Conceived as the linguistic aspect of decolonization, Arabization was also at the heart of a project of Moroccan modernity. Since 2011, the state’s discourse on Arabization has drastically changed. Shifting from the promotion of Standard Arabic as the only language of instruction in primary and secondary education, the 2019 framework law of education established French as the language of instruction for science subjects. The post-2011 discourse of the Ministry of Education and the monarchy on Arabization as the cause of the education system’s turmoil has become the dominant discourse. Whereas there is today a general agreement across the political spectrum on the ‘failure of Arabization,’ the views on how it failed differ. The opponents of Arabization insist that the policy per se was doomed to fail, while its advocates only condemn its implementation. In the two strands of literature on language policy and nation-building in Morocco, Arabization has been described as a legitimating policy for the monarchy, often related to Islamic legitimacy. The post-2011 counter-narrative on Arabization championed by the state challenges the previous symbolic understanding of Arabization and invites a new interpretation of the policy. In this paper, I look at the first appearance of the discourse on the failure of Arabization. I argue that, before the state adopted this discourse in 2011, the discourse had emerged in the late 1970s and early 1980s under the pen of academics in the context of the International Monetary Fund’s structural adjustment program. Using Foucauldian discourse analysis, the paper retraces the history of a marginal counter-narrative that has become dominant. The paper highlights how the discourse on Arabization as a ‘problem’ moved from a category of knowledge produced by academic scholarship in a specific economic context to a category of practice used by the state after the Arab Uprisings. By dissecting the discourse around Arabization and its symbolic character, the paper offers a more historically informed analysis of state legitimacy and nation-building.