Ahmed Khanani - All Politics are Gods Politics

ALL POLITICS ARE GODS POLITICS

Moroccan Islamism and the Sacralization of Democracy

AHMED KHANANI

RUTGERS UNIVERSITY PRESS

New Brunswick, Camden, and Newark, New Jersey, and London

The Moroccan regime regularly encounters conversations about dimuqriyya as threatening its legitimacy and longevity. As such, particularly given my work with an illegal group of islmiyn, I use first-name pseudonyms for all my interlocutorsincluding publicly elected officials. Protecting my interlocutors identities through the use of pseudonyms flattens differences (e.g., age- and profession-based honorifics and titles are elided) and necessarily relies on the category Moroccan names in uncomfortable, stereotyping fashion. Yet because pseudonyms are a strong step toward maintaining the safety and privacy of my interlocutors, these are relatively small prices to pay.

Our lessons of equality and justice are best learned from those marginalized, peripheralized peoples who have harvested the bitter fruits of liberalism in its project of colonization and slavery, rather than those imperial nations and sovereign states that claim to be the seed-beds of Democracy.

Homi Bhabha, Democracy De-realized

There are no models of dimuqriyya. There are only practices and experiences of dimuqriyya. There is no Islamic model, there are only Islamic practices and experiences.

Mahdi (authors interview, Rabat, 1/21/2011)

Does everyone who says they value democracy mean the same thing, or might words like democracy mean different things in different languages and to different peoples? In this book, I explore themes and patterns in the way a significant and regularly misunderstood group of contemporary Moroccans use the word dimuqriyya, examining how people in Morocco can be fully committed to dimuqriyya and yet engage in behaviors that, to Western analysts, seem outside democracys scope. Charting and analyzing how peoples in the Third World articulate words like democracy allows us, Western scholars and publics, to apprehend and account for diverse meanings of the word, to see that it is something other than a transhistorical category with self-evident meanings and universal scope. Attending in particular to the complex relationship between the Muslim tradition and words like democracy also reveals that the categories religion and politics, like democracy, are contingent and always have local meanings, in line with Gallies notion of an essentially contested concept (1956).

Because the word democracy increasingly informs conversations about politics the world over, this is particularly important work at this moment. Indeed, Amartya Sen identified the rise of democracy as the most important thing that had happened in the twentieth century (1999, 3). Exploring how Moroccan islmiyn use the word dimuqriyya allows me to put the word to work, transforming the notion of democracy from a nominally universally agreed upon value into a codex of sorts, one that operates more like a tool than a Platonic concept.

One useful example of how localized understandings of democracy can have many facets occurred during the Arab Uprisings of 2011. The Moroccan regime, known as the makhzen, responded quickly to protests led by activists in the Mouvement du 20 Fvrier: having witnessed the collapse of seemingly entrenched regimes in Tunisia and Egypt, King Mohammed VI delivered a rare, impromptu public speech that was broadcast on all public television and radio stations on March 9, 2011. Finally, the king underscores that the Moroccan nation unanimously supports principles dimuqriyy, thereby both acknowledging and further entrenching the importance of dimuqriyya to current articulations of Moroccan nationalism.

Recent survey research reveals that more and more people around the world, monarchs and revolutionaries alike, identify democracy as, in Sens words, generally right. Alongside citizens in the West, pluralities and majorities of citizens and subjects in Central Asia, China, Eastern and Central Europe, Latin America, South and Southeast Asia, and sub-Saharan Africa proclaim democracy a normative good. there is extensive support for democracy, arguably higher than in many longstanding democracies (Tessler, Jamal, and Robbins 2012, 90). In other words, it seems that democracy is nearly universally valued.

Yet as another example from the Arab Uprisings indicates, this universality obscures significant, practical variations in meaning. In Tunisia, both Ben Ali and committed opposition movements voiced support for democracy, but cited different precedents: whereas Ben Ali pointed to electoral democracy in Tunisia, opposition groups argued that the absence of civil liberties and the presence of broad corruption undermined the regimes claims about Tunisian democracy. It is certainly possible that people with diverse cultures, sociopolitical contexts, economic circumstances, religious traditions, and languages not only mean the same thing that Western-based surveyors mean (usually a specific political system) but also value that precise referent object. However, it seems more likely that people use the word democracy (or