Browsing by Subject "Morocco"

How do political leaders strategically manage fiscal policy formation to enhance their political survival? What are the implications of the fiscal mechanics of survival for theories of redistribution and democratic transition? This dissertation examines the complex relationship between political regime types and fiscal information asymmetries. I focus on budgetary policies (taxation and public spending) as major strategic tools available to the executive for co-optation and punishment of opponents. I argue that allowing some degree of contestation and transparency on the fiscal contract in electoral authoritarian regimes helps the executive identify distributive claims and co-opt the opposition. Paradoxically, in new democracies, political survival depends more on lower levels of budget transparency than existent theories would have us expect. Chapters 1 and 2 present a general formal model from which I derive the major hypotheses of the study. Second, Chapters 3, 4 and 5 use new cross-national measures of fiscal transparency and test empirically the theoretical implications. The statistical models confirm the main theoretical intuitions. Finally, Chapter 6 compares in greater detail the evolution of fiscal transparency in Morocco, Turkey and Romania between 1950 and 2000. I argue that fiscal taboos closely followed the shifting political alliance and their distributional consequences for leader's survival.

This dissertation asks how Moroccan scholars understood Islam's relationship to national territory in the twentieth century. It demonstrates how a genealogy of scholars adapted expansive theories of premodern Muslim imperial realms to the circumscribed Moroccan national territory that emerged in the early twentieth century. In the colonial period, Islamic law became a tool through which Muslim scholars argued for independent Moroccan sovereignty. It traces these discourses as they evolved into Morocco's postcolonial effort to incorporate neighboring territories, including Mauritania and the Western Sahara. It argues that this modern irredentism was part of a wider effort to frame the Moroccan nation-state by repurposing the Islamic political norms through which premodern Muslim empires governed in the region. This dissertation concludes by examining the decade after Morocco's 1975 occupation of the Western Sahara. This period saw the unfolding of a series of debates about the Moroccan king's gender and divinity. It shows that the king's body had become a metonymy for territory; and these debates were attempts to reconfigure the relationship between religion, land, and power in Morocco.

The politics of Muslim sainthood has been a joint enterprise between anthropology and history. Scholarship specifically investigating the political stakes of Sufism has manifested itself in theoretical models of the politically-activist Sufi developed in anthropology, which are often taken up in history. In history, this has given rise in particular to a rich body of scholarship across several geographical contexts, offering substantive work on the role of particular Sufi orders, institutional arrangements, personalities, and doctrinal dispositions to motivate political activism. Geographically, historical scholarship on Sufism and politics in the modern period has primarily drawn from colonial case studies, offering rich insights from Muslim South Asia in the British colonial context, and from the Islamic Maghrib and West Africa in the French colonial context. Yet this body of literature is largely synchronic in its scope; while it offers major contributions to the study of Sufism in a narrow geographical context and time period, it rarely offers connections between geographies or historical periods.

My dissertation instead offers a diachronic study of the politics of Sufism, using the contemporary period (modern Syria) to offer deeper interventions into the history of Sufism beyond Syrian borders. Using the tools of ethnographic history, I ultimately argue that the historiographies of two otherwise distinct regions (Syria and the Maghrib) should be viewed as deeply interconnected. Through ethnographic fieldwork with Syrian Sufi scholars in exile, across three field sites (Morocco, Jordan, and Turkey), I investigate the involvement of a particular tradition of Syrian Sufism, the Shadhili-Fasi tradition, in the 2011 Syrian Revolution. In particular, I focus on the movement of the Damascene Shadhili master Shaykh Muhammad Abu ʼl Huda al-Yaqoubi, the first of the Syrian religious scholars to support the Revolution in 2011. Then, combining ethnography with archival research using an array of materials collected from these scholars’ private libraries – including biographical sources, unpublished litanies, and poetry – I trace the historical trajectory of this tradition from its roots in colonial Algeria and Morocco. I employ mobility as a theoretical architecture to explore how this tradition, despite having been properly indigenized in Syria since the late 19th-century, continues to invoke distinctly North African spiritual tropes to inspire political activism. More specifically, I argue that Syrian Sufis mobilize geographical proximity to the Prophet Muhammad, an otherwise North African spiritual trope, as a basis of spiritual and political authority. While otherwise committed to restraint and incrementalism, Syrian Sufi currents turn to revolutionary thought from their Maghribi ancestors in moments of crisis.