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The Journal of North African Studies

ISSN: 1362-9387 (Print) 1743-9345 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/fnas20

Making Morocco: colonial intervention and the


politics of identity

Samuel Kigar

To cite this article: Samuel Kigar (2016) Making Morocco: colonial intervention and
the politics of identity, The Journal of North African Studies, 21:3, 521-524, DOI:
10.1080/13629387.2016.1161699

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13629387.2016.1161699

Published online: 18 Mar 2016.

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of narratives to tell a convincing story about the politicisation of religion, ethnicity,


territory, and monarchy in the protectorate period. As this list would indicate,
there is hardly a major topic in the burgeoning eld of Moroccan colonial
studies that Wyrtzen leaves untouched. To each he adds new material and
fresh analysis. He works in a historicalsociological mode, developing a method-
ology that is sensitive to the interaction between state and society. The concept of
the eld, developed from the work of Pierre Bourdieu and John Levi Martin,
allows him to carry this interactive sensibility through each of his themes. Thus
he avoids the trap of focusing exclusively on coloniser or colonised, French or
Spanish protectorate zones, rural or urban social geography, Arab or Imazighen
ethnic identity, Muslim or Jewish religious identity, or male or female gendered
identity. Instead, all of these pairs interact and mutually depend to cause the poli-
ticisation of Moroccan identity. Wyrtzen manages to do all this without writing an
exhaustive (or exhausting) history.
The reason for Wyrtzens success in crossing so much terrain in a relatively
short period is his strategic deployment of theory and method and their transpo-
sition onto the structure of the book. The eld, as Wyrtzen uses it, has three
dimensions: the spatial, the organisational, and the competitive. He applies the
spatial to the military conquest of the protonational Moroccan territory; the organ-
isational aspect refers to the array of forces or the symbolic and classicatory
logics that formed the rules of the game in that space; and the competitive
relies on the other two dimensions to become a battleeld of struggle in which
collective identities were transformed (12). The book proceeds roughly chrono-
logically. It moves through the three dimensions of the eld in sequence. The
rst two chapters describe the elds spatial and organisational aspects and the
remaining chapters render the eld as a battleeld in which forces competed
over aspects of Moroccan identity.
Chapter 1 develops a short comparison between the Moroccan pre-colonial
and colonial spatial elds. It moves briskly through Moroccos dynastic history,
showing how the makhzan uctuated in both its symbolic scope and its adminis-
trative reach down the ages. Colonial military campaigns between 1907 and 1934
caused a rupture in the eld wherein territory itself gained a political salience it
did not have before colonial intervention (46). Even though many scholars have
indicated the importance of the territorial categories blad al-makhzan (the land of
government) and blad al-siba (the land of dissidence) to the French colonial
project, Wyrtzens point about the alteration in the concept of territory itself
has not, until now, been adequately appreciated in the literature.
Chapter 2 relies on an important critique of the concept of seeing like a state,
developed in book of the same name by the anthropologist, James Scott. Wyrtzen
writes that not only did the protectorate state engage in a attening of social
difference and local variation that is typical of how states see, it also tried to
control how it was seen (23). Wyrtzen considers this latter function under the
heading legibility. He looks at the Moroccan Protectorate as it was represented
at the International Colonial Exposition in Paris in 1931. There, he shows how
the preservationist logics of the protectorate were made legible to onlookers,
including the Moroccan sultan himself. Moving back and forth between the
THE JOURNAL OF NORTH AFRICAN STUDIES 523

exposition and the Moroccan colonial eld, he examines how the colonial state
introduced and attempted to manage various social categories.
Where the second chapter extends and deepens a line of analysis of colonial
ethnography-cum-governance begun some time ago by Edmund Burke, the
next several chapters move to the Moroccan side of this story (93); and they
do so with freshness and verve. Chapters 3 and 4 cover resistance movements
in the Atlas and Rif mountains. For too long, the responses of rural Moroccans
to colonisation have been the subject of speculation, seen mostly through colonial
accounts. Ingeniously, Wyrtzen relies on Tamazight oral poetry, recorded by a
French soldier, to assess the internal dynamics of the Atlas tribes responses to
pacication. The poems bespeak an internal debate about whether the resistance
should be continued or abandoned (105). After the Tamazight-speaking region
had been incorporated into the Protectorate, the poetry expresses overlapping
allegiances to Morocco, to tribal identity, and to intertribal solidarity (115).
Chapter 4 applies a similar sharpness of insight to the creation of an anti-colonial
political eld, led by Abd al-Krim al-Khattabi in the Rif Mountains.
Chapter 5 turns to urban settings to examine the roots of nationalist anti-colo-
nialism. Wyrtzen frames the movement as one that challenged the classicatory
and symbolic logics of the colonial state by stressing unity over division within
the Moroccan eld. The chapter is a detailed account of the different roads
taken by the nationalist movement after its furious response to the famous
Berber Decree of 1930 through the post-World War II period.
Chapters 6 and 7 consider the importance of internal others to the debate
over the elds logics of legibility and legitimacy (178). Chapter 6, on Moroccos
Jewish question, moves through the different ways in which the French Protecto-
rate classied Jews to the relationship between Jews and the nationalist move-
ment and the role of Zionism. Chapter 7, Gender and the Politics of Identity, is
likewise strong for its inclusion of diverse voices, including those of men and
women, French and Moroccan, and country and city dwellers. Both of these chap-
ters put Wyrtzens analytical prowess on display when they consider how women
and Jews (and Jewish women) interacted with the Protectorates striated legal
systems. Despite its purported focus on gender, however, Chapter 7 contains
only one reference to masculinity (242). Thereby, it incidentally lets womanhood
stand as the gendered category.
The nal two chapters are centred on the gure of Sultan/King Mohamed V. They
ask how the monarchy managed to survive into the postcolonial period. Wyrtzen
convincingly argues that the Kings remarkable feat of survival was the result of a
conuence of exogenous and endogenous factors, including his role in the Protec-
torates logics of legitimacy, the way the nationalist movement subverted this legiti-
macy framework from within (271), his role in decolonization, and his skill in putting
down insurgencies. The conclusion offers a concise summary; and it looks ahead to
developments in the latter half of the twentieth century.
Most observant travellers in Morocco will notice the words Allah, al-Watan,
al-Malik (God, Country, King) written in large, white letters on hillsides around
the countrys cities and towns. Fortunately for us, Wyrtzen was among those
observant wayfarers (ix). Making Morocco goes very far in explaining why those

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