Gendering nationalism. The Moroccan “Revolution of the king and the people” Up to now, analyses of Moroccan politics of gender have most of the time focused on how authoritarian reform and / or the specificities of the monarchy’s religious legitimacy have determined the country’s efforts at promoting women’s rights over the last decades. This paper intends to shed new light on the complexities of the issue by stressing the nationalist dimension of royal authority as it appears from the discursive production on the occasion of the annual celebration of the “Revolution of the king and the people”. In contrast to the processes of state and nation building in the republican regimes of the neighbouring countries, the political construction of independent Moroccan has been predominantly centred upon the figure of the king who was able to impose himself not only as the highest political and religious authority of the country. As a result of complex political struggles between the nationalist movement and the colonial powers as well as between different factions within the nationalist movement, the monarch also emerged as the sole legitimate representative of the “revolutionary” - i.e. the independentist - will of the nation. Until today, in remembrance of the broad opposition to the exile forced upon Muhammad V on August 20, 1953, by the French colonial administration, the “Revolution of the king and the people” is celebrated in the country. Based on an analysis of royal addresses delivered on this occasion since the 1990ies, the paper looks at the shifting semantics of the term revolution deployed by the monarchy as a major gendered and gendering nationalistic trope. It will be argued that while the discursive repertoires of human rights on the one hand, Islamic reform on the other hand figure prominently in official discourses on issues of women’s rights, the nationalist underpinning of monarchical legitimacy continues to shape Moroccan politics of gender on the structural as well as the ideological level.