In the decades before 2011, public circulation of written texts was a political act, but not just because of the supportive or subversive content. The form of writing itself was a graphic inscription of contentious ideologies about authority, morality, and modernity (Mitchell 1988, Flagg 2004). Moroccan state language policy from the 1950s onward empowered the historical ideologies that writing was reserved for standardized language forms, Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) or French, both to facilitate literacy as well as embody and disseminate a rational orientation. Writing a news article, sign, law, public speech or textbook for the widest possible viewership privileged MSA, since that was the language variety the state imbued with public authority, visibility, and identity. The act of writing Arabic in these publicly approved forms framed oneself as aligning with a standard language ideology and the meanings associated with it, despite the persistent presence of written genres, such as plays, pamphlets, proverb collections, amulets, internet chats, mobile phone texts, advertising signs and short dialect dialogues within novels in which Moroccan writers employed a mix of local varieties (MSA, regional Arabics, and Tamazight varieties) with a variety of orthographies (Kapchan 1996, Aguadé 2006). To write in Morocco was to graphically represent bundled associations with literacy, progress, rationality, public institutions, as well as the complicated tensions between European and Muslim identity aesthetics. In the early 2000s, several groups began publishing periodicals and adult literacy pamphlets using Moroccan Arabics in a modified MSA script (collectively known as darija) with the explicit aim of challenging the centripetal force of state language policies. Some furthered state goals but in the contested form of written darija while others employed darija to challenge state policies. In this presentation, I explore how these actors contributed to the contentious reform politics of this decade by clothing Moroccan Arabics with overt and indirect resistance pressure through the moral authority of script. In particular, I focus on the language and media ideologies espoused by periodical writers that promoted state projects such as adult literacy (khabar bladna) and contested officials behaviors and actions (nishan) using written Moroccan Arabic.