Why did the Moroccan nationalist movement adopt an Arab-Muslim identity to demand independence? The main justification offered by the literature is sociological. The urban elite, mostly Arabic speaking and educated in religious institutions, created a space to promote its own culture as the national identity of the country after independence. It sidelined the Amazigh (Berber) identity, mainly rural, and departed from the common European model of nation-building based on the promotion of rural traditions as the new national culture. This paper challenges this monocausal explanation by relying on an interdisciplinary approach combining intellectual history and political theory. By analyzing the discourses of French officials and scholars under the Protectorate and of key Moroccan nationalists, the paper argues that the French Protectorate’s discourse on language, civilization, and race had a crucial effect on the way Moroccan nationalism came to be articulated. An excavation of the colonial archives (Archives berbères) reveals that the Moroccan Berbers were considered as a “good savage” waiting for a “civilization.” French colonial scholarship pictured French civilization in competition with the Arab-Muslim one in “civilizing” the Berbers. By racially distinguishing Arabs and Berbers—portraying Berbers as closer to the European race and, therefore, to the European civilization—the French colonizer instituted a paradigm of language, i.e., what language as a social category means, that the nationalist movement inverted but did not negate. The paper follows the uses of the ideas of civilization, race/ethnicity, and language during and after the Protectorate period, showing that Moroccan nationalism aimed to civilize the Berbers, using similar rhetorical methods as the French, notably claiming that Berbers came from the Middle East and were therefore ethnically Arab. The paper focuses on “Arabization,” understood by the French colonizer as the adoption by Berbers of the Arab-Muslim civilization (and thus had to be avoided at all costs), and put forward by the nationalist movement as the language policy that would revive the identity of the country and achieve cultural decolonization. The paper contributes to the literature on nation-building by showing that the Moroccan nation was not based on a national frame, but on a civilizational one, accepting the terms of the colonizer rather than challenging them. The paper concludes by highlighting how Amazigh advocates put forward the civilizational character of Amazighness in the 1970-80s, before promoting “Moroccaness,” comprising Arabity and Amazighness, that would finally become the main frame of national identity in the 2000s.