The Moroccan Model

[From the French language press]:

Le 1er avril 2007, sous la présidence d’Amir Al-Mouminine, le Roi Mohammed VI, de nombreuses conventions ont été signées entre le ministère des Habous et des Affaires islamiques et plusieurs départements gouvernementaux. C’est une première dans l’histoire moderne du Maroc.

L'Economiste, Maroc - jeudi 12 avril, 2007 - par Hakim El Ghissassi*

On April 1, 2007, under the presidency of Amir Al-Mouminine, King Mohammed VI, many conventions were signed between the Ministry of Endowments and Islamic Affairs and several governmental departments. It is a first event in the modern history of Morocco.

Often, the religious question is looked at only through the prism of political sciences and the analyses about religious radicalism or political Islam. Thus the legal, administrative, sociological and intellectual aspects of the religious thought are overlooked.

On the religious question, there are today in Morocco three currents which feed the reflexion: the adoption of a pure secularity -which merges sometimes with a violent laicism which has nothing to do with the spirit of the French law of 1905 (which founded separation between the State and the Church); one vision which believes only in the introduction of a State known as “Islamic” and dreams of an original Islam whose contours are not defined, but whose nihilist speech rejects to take into account the existence of the other and the transformations of the modern world; a third current, more representative of Morocco, which consists in placing the religious experiment in its historicity, and it does not reject the plurality of the Moroccan religious tradition through the history of the country.

It is this third current the one promoted today by the State when it insists on the need for safeguarding the Moroccan identity, guaranteed by the institution of Imarat Al-Mouminine and centered on the unicity of the dogma and the Malékite legal school as well as on the sufi and spiritual Morrocan experience.

The return in strength of the State in the management of the religious field will put an end to a certain laxism: religion is a significant question and of too high importance and should not in the least be forsaken.

*Author of *Regard sur le Maroc de Mohammed VI*
Edition Michel Lafon
Paris, 2006 - Euro 16.63
http://tinyurl.com/2gb4rw