general research interests.
Religion and Politics, the War on Terror, Islam, authoritarianism, Morocco, Iraq, the industry of knowledge production
Bureaucratizing Islam: Morocco and the war on terror
In the years since 9/11, governments in countries with large Muslim populations have explored a number of policy responses to Islamic extremism. The Arab Uprisings, which erupted in 2011 and 2012 across North Africa and the Middle East, further complicated government responses to terrorism. For at the very moment when populations were seeking more freedom, states felt pressure to take greater control over the religious spheres in their countries. While many states took advantage of the anxiety caused by terrorism to crack down on domestic political opposition, Morocco intensified its practice of incorporating religious institutions into the state bureaucracy. The state now controls a host of Islamic institutions for such varied purposes as training religious scholars and imams, producing Islamic education curricula for public schools, and facilitating religious collaboration with neighboring countries in North and West Africa. The Moroccan Ministry of Islamic Affairs defends this approach as a means of promoting a “moderate” and “tolerant” Islam, though the actual affect is that the state can now produce its own loyal religious elites.
This book analyzes Morocco’s unique counter-terrorism strategy, arguing that the approach not only gave the state more control over religious practice in the country, it also provided incentives for religious elites to become and remain loyal to the state's project. By building a religious bureaucracy, rather than targeting political dissidents, Morocco has achieved the same effect as other countries’ War on Terror policies, limiting opposition, but has done so through a form of institutional control that is likely to be more sustainable than other countries’ policies.
The book is based on 18 months experience of living and learning in the country with a rich variety of primary sources including government documents and curricula materials. I also include interviews with significant members of the religious and political bureaucracy and scholarship compiled by Moroccan think tanks and researchers.
journal articles.
Defending Islamic education: War on Terror discourse and the politics of public religious education in contemporary Morocco
This article in the Journal of North African Studies is one of the first scholarly publications to evaluate the effects of the War on Terror on a Muslim country. Specifically, it assesses how the popular belief that Islamic education causes violence shaped educational reforms in Morocco in 2004. After a major terrorist attack in Casablanca in 2003, educational reforms that were already underway became politicized. Some called for the removal or reform of Islamic education curricula in the public schools. Beyond demonstrating how this global discourse was localized in the Moroccan context, the article discusses the voices of those who defended the subject from criticism and eventually, reform.
Through interviews and archival research, this article reconstructs the defense of Islamic education marshaled by its supporters and assesses its impact on resulting curricula. I find that the Ministry of Education acted with deference to the Islamic education teachers' demands, accelerating reforms already underway, rather than rewriting curricula. Unexpectedly, the Ministry made more substantial changes to ‘secular’ school subjects. The Moroccan case suggests that War on Terror discourse influences educational policy in Muslim societies, though these processes are shaped by pre-existing reforms and the activities of local activists.
Download a free copy here.
Religious Regulation as Foreign Policy: Morocco’s Islamic Diplomacy in West Africa
Studies of religious regulation tend to examine how states manage the domestic religious market. This article extends this research program by analyzing a state that regulates the religious markets of foreign countries. The Moroccan case demonstrates the circumstances under which a religious bureaucracy designed to manage domestic religion can be turned outward, and employed to achieve foreign policy goals. Unlike other cases of foreign religious regulation, however, Morocco's efforts have been welcomed at the same time that the policy advanced Morocco's interests. What explains the success of Morocco's religious foreign policy? Building on interviews with religious elites from a recipient country, this article argues that Moroccan religious foreign policy has been successful because it was perceived as having historical and cultural legitimacy, it built on pre-existing institutions, and it was paired with renewed economic collaboration, three factors that have broader theoretical relevance to the study of religious foreign policies.
Available here.
Moroccan Efforts to Counter Violent Extremism in Children’s Literature
Co-authored with Sara Austin.
Morocco is often praised for its proactive and innovative CVE (countering violent extremism) programme. This article analyses a three-part Arabic-language book series, Maʿ Naṣir wa Basma [With Nasir and Basma], produced by an organ of the Moroccan religious bureaucracy, the Mohammedan League of Religious Scholars, that ostensibly seeks to discourage adolescents from being susceptible to recruitment to VE (violent extremist) organisations. Starring two young Moroccan children, these books portray jihadists as old, ridiculous, or inept and the main characters as in need of protection by a paternalistic state, leaving children, especially young men, underprepared for the recruiting efforts of such organisations. The books emphasise state intervention over child action, suggesting the books are directed more at Western investors in need of reassurance than at children, supporting the critique made by some observers that CVE is more about security theatre than preventing violence.
Available here.
book chapters.
“The Durus Hasaniya Lectures Series: Sixty Years of Moroccan Religious Softpower” in the Geopolitics of Religious Softpower, eds. Peter Mandaville and Shadi Hamid. Oxford University Press. Forthcoming.
“Islamic modernism, political reform and the Arabisation of education: The relationship between Moroccan nationalists and al-Azhar University” in Shaping Global Islamic Discourses: The Role of al-Azhar, al-Medina, and al-Mustafa. eds. Masooda Bano and Keiko Sakurai. Edinburgh University Press. 2015.
“State Autonomy and Societal Transformation: Twentieth Century Reforms to Islamic Education in Morocco” in Reforms in Islamic Education: International Perspectives. ed. Charlene Tan. Bloomsbury Academic. 2014
book reviews.
Ahmet Kuru. Islam, Authoritarianism, and Underdevelopment: A Global and Historical Comparison. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019. Politics and Religion, 13:4.
David Stenner . Globalizing Morocco: Transnational Activism and the Postcolonial State. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2019. H-Net.
Samuel Helfont. Compulsion in Religion: Saddam Hussein, Islam, and the Roots of Insurgencies in Iraq. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018. Perspectives on Politics 18:1.
Sarah Feuer. Regulating Islam: Religion and State in Contemporary Morocco and Tunisia. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018. The Middle East Journal (October).
Lisa Stampnitzky. 2015. Disciplining Terror: How Experts Invented “Terrorism”. New York: Cambridge University Press. in Terrorism and Political Violence.
Zakia Salime. 2011. Between Feminism and Islam: Human Rights and Sharia Law in Morocco. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. in Hypatia Reviews Online.
Mamadou Diouf. Ed. 2013. Tolerance, Democracy, and Sufis in Senegal. New York: Columbia University Press. in Islamic Africa.
current projects.
‘Followers’ of ‘Ali: Social Media and Religious Authority among the Iraqi Shia
“Benign Bureaucracies? Religion Ministries as Authoritarian Instruments of Repression, Co-optation and Legitimation,” article, co-authored with Ani Sarkissian
Comparative Politics: An Alternative Anthology, textbook