The Moroccan nationalist movement gained significant political and intellectual traction in the wake of the watershed 1930 Berber Decree. After eighteen years of French occupation and wars of resistance, a cadre of Moroccan religious elites sought to mount the first organized political opposition to colonial rule. As perhaps the foremost leader of this movement, the ʿalim and political activist ʿAllal al-Fasi (d. 1974) worked within the mosque setting to preach his avowed embracement of the transnational Islamic revivalist movement known as Salafism. However, unlike many of his Salafi-oriented contemporaries across the Muslim world, al-Fasi understood this religious revival as contingent upon political liberty--a freedom achievable only by attaining Moroccan independence. From his pulpit at al-Qarawiyin University, al-Fasi repeatedly exhorted his listeners to adhere to the virtues of the pious ancestors and organize politically against those who contravened them—namely the French and their Moroccan collaborators. As a young, iconoclastic, and highly charismatic activist in the 1930s, al-Fasi incorporated this spirit of uprising into a conflated religious and political revival, effectively energizing his vast following and drawing the sharp ire of French authorities and traditional ʿulamaʾ alike. Using sources acquired in Morocco and France, my paper shows the ways in which al-Fasi and his cadre appropriated the language of Salafism, nationalism, and youth uprising to construct a cohesive identity for Morocco’s nascent nationalist movement. While previous scholarship has examined Salafism as an instrument of al-Fasi’s politics (Waterbury, 1970; Lauzière 2008), my access to al-Fasi’s sermons, early writings, and French intelligence dossier demonstrates more fully how al-Fasi’s vision of the Moroccan state embraced religious reform in a particularly intricate and potent way. Nevertheless, I show also how al-Fasi’s ideas and shrewd political maneuvering represented an iconoclastic mindset within his traditional milieu of religious elites, a phenomenon that frequently hindered his public campaign against the French and their Moroccan collaborators. Although al-Fasi’s early struggle ended with his exile in 1937, I argue that the original efficacy of al-Fasi’s movement ultimately played a crucial role in embedding Moroccan Islamic identity within the nascent Moroccan nationalist identity, a fact bearing significantly on how we understand the dialectic of Moroccan political and religious institutions thereafter.

How is national identity shaped in the post-colony? This paper focuses on a crucial aspect of this question in Tunisia: namely how the ex post (re-)construction of national historical narratives contribute to the shaping of collective identities in post-colonial context. More specifically, it shows how Tunisian nationalist leader and first president Habib Bourguiba produced official historical accounts of the nationalist struggle against French rule in order to minimize the role played by the traditionally-trained Zaytuna Mosque ‘ulama’. Such narratives represented the religious scholars as ideologically backwards, accommodationist towards the protectorate, and socially secluded from the Tunisian independence movement. Yet Bourguiba’s selective depiction of Tunisian nationalism accounts for an important exception: those ‘ulama’ who subscribed to his societal project and were coopted by the state after independence. The result, as I show, was the implicit delineation of those ʿulamaʾ worthy of state inclusion versus those who were not—in effect, “good ʿulamaʾ” versus “bad ʿulamaʾ.” Using primary documents from the colonial era, my paper seeks to more precisely contextualize this assertion and deconstruct this binary that pitted “traditional” ‘ulama’ against “modernist” ones. Using these sources, I show that this narrative incorrectly depicts the role of the ulama in the independence movement, and that local units of the Destour and Neo Destour Parties were actually filled with ʿulamaʾ educated at the Zaytuna. This serves as a paradigm for addressing the broader theme of state intervention in the dialectic between Islamic authority and the construction of national identity. Thus, as Bourguiba kept a public presence, albeit sharply limited, of religious scholars, I demonstrate how this early moment in Tunisian statehood serves as a foundation for how the state would appropriate and rearticulate historical narratives in order to serve a particular societal project.

This paper looks at Tunisian public order cases, with a particular focus on those cases that punished blasphemous acts in the wake of Tunisia’s Arab Spring (2011-present), reflecting a new anxiety about a ‘besieged’ sacred. In an unprecedented move, Tunisian prosecutors used public order articles from the penal code alongside the press code to pursue a series of blasphemous acts, ranging from the desecration of the Qur’an to the publication of caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad. Amidst significant post-Arab-Spring political changes, this preoccupation with the sacred found itself repeatedly supported by Tunisia’s almost unchanged legal system, including by judges who doled out sentences decried by human rights organizations. This anxiety about blasphemy in Tunisia was furthermore enshrined in the new 2014 Tunisian constitution in its so-called “blasphemy article,” which, while guaranteeing freedom of religion, adds a novel prohibition against “violating the sacred.” The article further declares the Tunisian state “the guarantor of religion…. and the protector of the sacred.” Using primary sources from the blasphemy cases in question, including citizen petitions, police reports, and court judgments, this paper examines the stories various agents tell in an attempt to name and locate the “crime” in question and to frame it within Tunisian law. It pays specific attention to the narratives at work, and the interpretations initially given in legal, non-legal or quasi-legal language that later find successful expression in laws that significantly predate the crimes under scrutiny. This paper thus looks at how old institutions - a virtually unchanged legally system, with the same actors using the same laws - have behaved in novel ways in the post-Arab Spring moment. It asks: how flexible of a tool may the law be? Why these prosecutions, and why now? In line with larger discussions within the Tunisian legal community, this project also wonders: when, in these particular cases, might other referents (like personal beliefs or religious law) fill in the ambiguities and the cracks in civil codes? This paper will allow one window onto the transformation of the Arab Spring country considered the most successful, raising questions about religious freedom, freedom of expression, and their limits.

This paper focuses on a particular moment in Egyptian history in order to explore the shifting boundaries between religious and political authority. It zooms in on July 8th 2013 when the Sheikh of al-Azhar, Ahmed al-Tayeb, announced on Egyptian television that he might go into seclusion (iʿtikāf) if the people of Egypt “didn’t take responsibility” and “stop the bloodshed”. This statement came in response to a massacre on the outskirts of Cairo that resulted in the killing of 51 people, most of whom were supporters of ousted-president Muhammad Morsi. Sheikh al-Tayeb’s threat to go into seclusion presented itself as a curious puzzle, both because it seemed like unusual behavior for the Sheikh of al-Azhar and because Sheikh al-Tayeb never actually went into seclusion (though the violence got worse). This paper seeks to make sense of this puzzle through a semiotic analysis of the rhetoric and content of Sheikh al-Tayeb’s July 8th statement and by relating his statement to the Sheikh of al-Azhar’s role in the political sphere before and after the 2011 Egyptian revolution, as well as to the relationship between al-Azhar and the Egyptian state in the late 20th/early 21st centuries more generally. Through this discussion, the paper elucidates how Shaykh al-Tayeb seeks to discursively reconstruct his authority as Egypt’s religious guide and to interpellate an Egyptian moral public that is subject to this authority. Ultimately, the paper suggests that Shaykh al-Tayeb’s threat to retreat foregrounds the limits of the Shaykh of al-Azhar’s engagement in politics and the political sphere more generally. While scholars of al-Azhar and the ulama have focused on the institutional dynamics of al-Azhar (Nathan Brown 2011, 2013), as well as on the political reemergence of al-Azhar’s ulama in the late 20th century (Zeghal 1996, 1999, 2007), little attention has been given to the discursive modes that the Shaykh of al-Azhar uses to construct his authority. As such, this paper addresses this gap in the literature, exploring the relationship between discourse and authority, religion and politics, in the tumultuous context of post-revolution Egypt.