From the public self-immolation of Muhammad Bu Azizi to the determination of Egyptians to occupy the metaphorical "public square" with a bodily occupation of Tahrir Square, the centrality of the body to the politics of the Arab Spring demonstrates the need to read politics in North Africa as embodied. These public politics illustrate the fundamental integration of the human body with the body politic, the need to see the human body as a forum and signifier for political debate. This paper adopts the position of phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty, that human subjectivity is possible only in and through the body; the body is the source of being from which the subject extends to the world. Liberal political citizenship is a fallacy, for it treats the citizen as a collection of legal rights abstracted from the body. The spectacular failure of this model of sovereignty is evident from Egypt to Tunisia. We consider different models of body and body politic in North Africa: a precolonial, Sufi body politic in Morocco before 1900, made visible through health and healing practices, the divorce of body and mind in liberal citizenship, and Islamic modernist efforts to re-integrate the body and the Islamic umma (in the work of Sayyid Qutb, for example). We read contemporary protest politics, state repression, public confrontations, media images and social media imagery, and the destruction of Sufi shrines as texts. Corporeality is an important lens through which to understand the nature of sovereignty (and debate over its terms) in the Arab Spring.

Over the past two decades throughout the Muslim ecumene, Islamists and Islamic revivalists have taken up “legitimate Islamic curing” [ruqya shar‘iyya], comprising spirit exorcism and rituals of counter-sorcery. In instructional media and curing rites I have observed in urban Morocco, Islamic curers pose “legitimate” curing as a moral and medicinal antidote to older established curing rites in the Muslim world, including talismanic writing and Sufi-based popular trance. Indeed, in Morocco and elsewhere, Islamic curers explicitly frame their cures as reformist acts of da‘wa—the “Call-to-Islam”—videorecording and disseminating the most dramatic jinn exorcisms online and in local bookshops. This paper examines the rise of “Islamic curing” as part of a broader contemporary mass mediation—the technologization—of material, ritual Muslim practices, including the older curing rites that Islamic curers seek to eradicate. What relationships can we discern between the technologization of curing rites, the criticism of older ritual cures, and the mass-mediated call for a pious Muslim body politic? Conversely, what does it mean that an explicit discourse and practice of the technologized call in a Muslim polity takes the form of an exorcism? Indeed, what specters are Islamic exorcists expelling when the cure is, explicitly, a video-recorded and disseminated call? The answers to these questions, I suggest, illuminate implicit elements of exorcism within all reforms of modern, mass-mediated Muslim bodies politic. That is, thinking calls to Islam as exorcisms of mass-mediated social bodies highlights a key political problem embedded in other technologized calls to religious reform: how to promote unified (and uniform) belief and practice among a mass-mediated community expanded, distanced (and thus differentiated) by the very media that would ideally summon and bind them?

Moroccan cuisine is iconic throughout the world, a selling point for the country’s tourist industry and a hallmark of Moroccan identity. Yet Moroccan cuisine as it is experienced in everyday contacts is changing. This paper examines how globalization has altered the consumption of food in Morocco, and in turn, the links between food and Moroccan identity. In particular, I attend to changing gendered meanings of food production and consumption, and concomitant transformations of body image and female identity. While the domestic/public dichotomy is still salient in associations of women’s space with domestic space, distance from food preparation is increasingly a mark of social distinction. Among both working and non-working women, Moroccan female identity is increasingly divorced from associations with the time consuming preparation and consumption of traditional cuisine in favor of regimes of time saving and productivity. An increase in wage labor, altered work schedules, the influx of supermarkets, and the decline of the extended family unit, are all contributing to the changing meanings of cuisine, as well as changing forms of embodiment, in everyday life. Moroccan identity is increasingly associated with consumption, which is encouraged by media and government. Yet the “convenience” of pre-prepared foods additionally has negative health incomes, resulting in an increase in diabetes, heart disease, and other “lifestyle” diseases. The nutrition transition has been accompanied by rising obesity rates, and an estimated forty percent of the female population is overweight or obese. Simultaneously, one out of ten women suffer from chronic energy deficiency, and stunted growth among children, though in decline over the past twenty years, is still common. Because of vast socioeconomic disparities and standards of living, generalizations about Moroccan women should be made with care. Yet from city to country, processes of globalization are altering the gendered embodiment of the Moroccan female citizen. Based on anthropological field research in Morocco, this paper attempts to interrogate globalization’s effects on cuisine, gender, and national identity.

At the end of the 16th century tobacco was introduced into Morocco from West Africa, setting off a debate on the religious and legal status of smoking. Social and intellectual historians of the Middle East such as Rudi Matthee, James Grehan, Lutz Berger and ‘Abd al-Aziz ‘Abdallah Batran have discussed the numerous treatises for and against smoking written by scholars in the 17th and 18th centuries both in terms of the history of consumption in the Middle East and in terms of the response of the Islamic legal tradition to a previously unknown drug. In this paper I return to the smoking debates with the aim of exploring how the many 17th century participants who debated the issue drew on medical knowledge in their construction of both the human body and human consciousness. While the debate on smoking raged around the Islamic Mediterranean, I focus on Moroccan authors from the 17th century, while referring to later additions to the debate as well. I draw both on published accounts, such as those of the rebel Ibn Abi Mahalli (d. 1022/1613) from his Rihla, in which he included a long defense of smoking, drawing in his turn on the work of famed scholar of West Africa, Ahmad Baba al-Tinbukti (d. 1036/1623), as well as on works still in manuscript, such as the treatises of ‘Abd al-Rahman b. Muhammad al-Fasi (d. 1036/1626-27) and Muhammad al-‘Arabi b. Yusuf al-Fasi (d. 1052/1641-42). I describe how these authors drew both on the definitions of intoxication, inebriation, and anesthesia laid out both by physicians and the Maliki legal scholar al-Qarafi (d. 684/1285). I conclude by showing how they both debated ways in which consciousness could be altered and also offered us a window onto how Muslim scholars employed medicine as an authoritative discourse within Islamic jurisprudence and sought to discipline the body and its appetites.