Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
Empire and Education
What I dream of, what many of you dream of along with me, is that among all these disorders that are shaking the world to the point that one asks when and how it will ever regain its equilibrium, in Morocco a solid edifice will be built, orderly and harmonious; that it will offer the sight of a group of humanity where men of such diverse origins, habits, professions and races, pursue, without abdicating any of their individual conceptions, a search for a common ideal and a common rationale of life. Yes, I have dreamed that Morocco would appear one of the most solid bastions of order against the sea of anarchy. | Resident-General Louis-Hubert Lyautey, 1921
Situated at the northwest corner of Africa, Morocco has long been a crossroads, a place of interaction where merchants, soldiers, preachers, and teachers from Europe, Africa, and Arabia practiced their trades and worked out strategies of survival, domination, and resistance. Phoenicians from the Levant, Romans and Vandals from the north, Arabs from the east, and the local Berber-speaking populations all found in Morocco a site of contestation. The powerful among them sought, through various means, to dominate the culture and discourses of the areas they controlled, in order to maximize their own political and social influence. Meanwhile, the weak pursued strategies of survival and self-advancement, while "deflecting, appropriating, or re-interpreting the teachings and preachings thrust upon them." In the early twentieth century it was the French who invaded; they would rule Morocco, under the guise of a "protectorate," from 1912 until 1956.
Geographically, Morocco bears a general resemblance to California. Steep cliffs abut a palm-lined western oceanfront; coastal plains yield to foothills, then to mountains. In the south, and to the east of the mountains, lie stony deserts. The human geography of Morocco is likewise diverse. In the colonial period, Arabic dialects were spoken mainly in the cities and parts of the coastal plain, both by the Muslim majority and the Jewish minority. Elsewhere, the tribal people spoke dialects of Berber: Tarifat in the Rif Mountains of the north, Tashlehait in the arid south, and Tamazight in the Atlas Mountains. In these Berber-speaking areas, classical Arabic, the sacred language of the Quran, was used by Muslims for religious purposes, but most had little comprehension of the language.
The pages that follow explore, within the context of French colonialism, the development of certain ideas about "the Moroccan" and the "Moroccan soul," and the effect of these ideas on pedagogy, policy making, and politics. The historical analysis is constructed around three intertwined narratives. The first is the institutional and intellectual history of the French colonial educational system in Morocco, from the founding of the protectorate through independence and the creation of a Moroccan national education system. The second narrative follows the career and ideas of colonial administrator Georges Hardy, from French West Africa, where he served as director of education from 1912 to 1919, to Morocco, where he was director of Public Instruction from 1920 to 1926, and finally to his later career in Algeria and France. The third narrative traces the changing strategies of resistance and contestation employed by both elite and non-elite Moroccan Muslims, culminating in the rise of the Moroccan nationalist movement. The colonial school system is thus examined as a site of interaction among colonial authorities and Moroccan Muslims, exploring how the responses of the colonized shaped the ideas and policies of French colonial education, and how French ideas and policies shaped Moroccan strategies and discourses of accommodation and resistance.
Long before the French conquest, education played an important role in Moroccan society as a means of cultural reproduction and as a form of cultural capital that defined a person's social position. Traditional Moroccan education was primarily religious and legal in character. Most Muslim communities supported a local msid, where a fqih (religious teacher) taught young boys to memorize the Quran. At this level, education was primarily oral-aural and mnemonic. Even for native speakers of Arabic dialects, Quranic Arabic was quite foreign, but there was little explicit explanation of the texts, and no discussion. The intellectual discipline fostered by such an education was seen as a fundamental part of a proper Muslim upbringing; it facilitated the development of reason, "conceived as man's ability to discipline his nature in order to act in accord with the arbitrary code of conduct laid down by God and epitomized by such acts of communal obedience as the fast of Ramadan." A similar approach to education characterized traditional Jewish schools. A few Moroccan Muslims received a more extensive education through private tutoring in reading and writing and by continuing their education at urban madaris and, in rural areas, at the zawaya of Sufi brotherhoods. At the top level of Moroccan Islamic education were two mosque-universities — the Qarawiyyin in Fez and the Yusufiyya in Marrakesh — where Islamic scholars, teachers, and judges were trained in Islamic law and theology.
European-style schooling in Morocco predated the protectorate by more than half a century, but on a tiny scale. In the mid-nineteenth century, anxieties about growing European power had led Sultan Moulay Abderrahmane (r. 1822–59) to create an engineering school in Fez and a school of "language, mathematics, and military science" in Tangiers. His successors Sidi Mohammed (1859–73) and Moulay Hassan (1873–94) began sending students to Egypt, Britain, France, Italy, and Spain, where they studied military science, architecture,chemistry, and law. The effect of this educational outreach was minimal, however. In sharp contrast to their counterparts in the Ottoman Empire, the Moroccan students who studied in Europe returned to find their skills underutilized, and men with traditional Islamic training continued to dominate the Moroccan state.
Meanwhile, European teachers began to arrive in Morocco in pursuit of their own agendas. The first European-run schools were established in Morocco by the Paris-based Alliance israélite universelle (AIU), which was founded in Paris in 1860 by a group of Jewish Frenchmen including the politician Adolphe Crémieux. Although the AIU initially focused on the emancipation and gallicization of European Jews, most notably in Serbia and Romania, the AIU opened a school in Tetuan in 1862 and soon administered a network of French-style schools throughout North Africa and in the Ottoman Middle East. In Morocco the AIU gradually gained the support of local Jewish communities, although some traditionalists viewed the AIU teachers as dangerous atheists. By 1912 the AIU schools in Morocco had enrolled more than thirty-two hundred boys (including a few Muslims) and eighteen hundred girls.
The Alliance israélite was soon followed by Spanish Franciscans and English and American Protestant groups, who opened small missionary schools that sought to convert the local Muslims and Jews. French Catholic missions were established in the port towns, although they ministered largely to Europeans. Meanwhile, the secular French state also began to take an interest in education in Morocco. In 1894 the private Alliance française, funded by the colonial administration in Algeria, began to offer classes in Tangiers. French consulates supported the opening of schools for Europeans and for the children of Moroccan consular employees and others with protégé status.
The development of European schooling in the decades preceding the French conquest was accompanied by growing European economic and political influence in Morocco, influence that progressively disrupted the power of the Moroccan sultan's state, or makhzan. In 1856 the British had negotiated a trade agreement that opened Morocco to European imports, while limiting the customs duties that the sultan could collect. European imports meant disaster for many of Morocco's urban crafts, especially textiles, shoemaking, soap, and pottery. The restrictions on revenue collection, combined with a Spanish invasion of the north in 1859, also brought fiscal disaster to the Moroccan state. Spanish forces withdrew in exchange for territorial concessions, but the makhzan was required to pay war reparations. This soon set in motion a process of makhzan decline that paralleled developments in the Ottoman Empire, Egypt, and China. The makhzan's inability to pay its indemnity to Spain forced the Moroccan government to allow its customs services to submit to supervision by European officials. In hopes of alleviating Morocco's weakness relative to Europe, the sultan initiated reforms of the state and the army, but such reforms, especially the upgrading of military technology, increased the makhzan's reliance on foreign loans. In exchange, Morocco was forced to accept still more European influence. After the 1904 Anglo-French Entente Cordiale, this influence was increasingly French. The French government took over the supervision of makhzan finances, French individuals bought up land, and French companies expanded their share of the Moroccan economy.
French influence undermined the legitimacy of the reigning sultan, Moulay Abdelaziz (1894–1908), and precipitated the collapse of the Moroccan state. Public hostility to the foreigners created opportunities for Abdelaziz's Moroccan rivals, who denounced the sultan as an agent of the infidels. The more unstable the sultan's position became, the more dependent he became on French support, and the more susceptible to accusations of incompetence and collaboration. In 1907, riots and attacks on Europeans prompted the French to occupy Oujda in the northeast and then to bombard and occupy Casablanca. When Abdelaziz was unable to respond, a coalition of tribes and regional strongmen rebelled. By the end of the year, Abdelaziz's brother, Abdelhafid, was proclaimed sultan by the ulema (Islamic scholars) of Fez, on the condition that he eradicate foreign influence from Morocco. This, however, proved impossible. When Abdelhafid turned to the foreign powers for the loans he needed to establish a functioning state, he was forced to accept new concessions, and the tribes around Fez and Meknes rebelled against him in 1911. When the rebels attacked, the French intervened, occupying Meknes and Fez. Abdelhafid was saved, but he became dependent on the French, who began the military and political takeover of the country. This alarmed the Spanish and the Germans, but Madrid's interests were soon satisfied by French agreement to a separate Spanish protectorate in northern Morocco, and Berlin was consoled by a French cession of Congo River territory to Germany.
The 1912 Treaty of Fez established the structure of the French protectorate in Morocco. The Moroccan state would continue to exist, headed by the sultan and his grand vizier, under the supervision of a parallel French administration headed by a resident-general in Rabat. In theory, the French "Residency" would assist the sultan's makhzan in the creation of European-style administrative and legal structures that would exert central control over the lives of Moroccans in a way that the previous regime had not. In practice, however, the authority of the makhzan was progressively eroded, as the French state took over crucial government functions. In the initial chaos of 1912 the French resorted to playing kingmaker, forcing the uncooperative Sultan Abdelhafid to abdicate the throne in favor of his brother, Moulay Youssef. Between 1912 and 1914 the makhzan dissolved its ministries of Foreign Affairs, War, Finance, and Administrative Appeals. The makhzan retained authority over traditional legal and religious functions under the grand vizier and through the new ministries of Justice and Hubus (charitable religious foundations).
This arrangement proved very useful for the new colonial regime. The illusion of Moroccan sovereignty facilitated governance of the Moroccan population and sheltered the colonial regime from the meddling of the metropolitan Republic. The protectorate arrangement also allowed France to establish control over Morocco's economic resources despite the treaties of Madrid and Algeciras, which guaranteed equal access to the various European powers. Legally speaking, it was the Moroccan makhzan, not France, that took control of Morocco's mineral resources, water supplies, and arable land, but it was the French who benefited. However, the great benefits of this arrangement for France gave the makhzan some leverage; the will of the sultan and his viziers could not be disregarded altogether, lest the illusion of the protectorate become inconveniently conspicuous.
Education, Assimilation, and Association
Although the makhzan retained its authority over traditional Islamic education, the French soon established a separate colonial school system. Colonial educational systems are particularly interesting subjects for historians because they were sites of close interactions between colonizing and colonized populations, loci of cultural contact that illustrate "the dynamics and inner conflicts of colonial societies; the social spaces that served as zones of both contact and separation between colonial and colonized societies; the borders between groups and the question of how those borders are constructed." The reproduction of cultures, the definition of social roles, the categorization of individuals, and the transmission of ideas are central functions of all modern schools. In colonial situations, however, these functions demanded extra attention. As Frederick Cooper has argued, a central problem of empire building was that "colonial rulers needed to co-opt old elites and generate new collaborators, but such ties might soften the colonizer-colonized distinction." Colonial schools aimed to produce willing collaborators among the colonized, but schools also created intimate contact between colonizing and colonized populations, producing the possibility that boundaries between colonizer and colonized might blur. Consequently, colonial states devoted much energy to the policing and definition of these boundaries within the schools, and school systems became places where the relationship between colonizer and colonized produced explicitly articulated theorizations about the nature of colonialism, of the colonizer, and of the colonized.
In Morocco, French-run schools were supposed to reinforce French hegemony by convincing the locals that it was in their best interest to comply with the French colonial agenda. As described by Antonio Gramsci, hegemony consists of "the 'spontaneous' consent given by the great masses of the population to the general direction imposed on social life by the dominant fundamental group; this consent is 'historically' caused by the prestige (and consequent confidence) which the dominant group enjoys because of its position and function in the world of production." In the early decades of French rule in Morocco, however, the prestige of the colonizers had only the shallowest of roots. Yet the protectorate's leaders needed to minimize the overt use of coercion, if only because coercive power and resources were in fact limited. This made educators all the more important as the salesmen of empire. Schooling was intended to minimize conflict by promoting the consent of the colonized.
This proved difficult, of course. There were conflicting interests and agendas among the colonizers and the colonized, and such conflicts could not be resolved through pedagogy. The political and economic inequities of colonialism produced resistance throughout the European empires, and Morocco's French schools for Muslims, rather than functioning as centers of cultural hegemony and political collaboration, became focal points of contestation. The prominent and disproportionate role that graduates of the colonial schools played in anticolonial political movements highlights the frictions produced by colonial schools, but organized political movements represent only one strategy of struggle employed by students, former students, and their families. Moreover, colonial contestation was not limited to a Manichaean struggle between a monolithic imperial project and a unified colonized victim; various groups and individuals in Moroccan society had differing goals, ideals, and strategies.
There was considerable friction among European approaches to colonial theory and policy. Temporally, the Moroccan protectorate was formed late in the trajectory of European colonialism; it was thus a site of dissonance between French colonial discourses of "assimilationism" and the discourses of a supposedly new, better, and modern colonialism based on "association." Assimilationism reflected the habits of French Jacobin republicanism: a pronounced faith in the ability of reason to prescribe a universal civilized way of life, and a commitment to universal equality, even if this latter ideal was never quite realized in the colonies. Associationalism, in contrast, affirmed the differences between colonizer and colonized and advocated that the French dominate colonized societies in "association" with native strongmen, without illusions about the applicability of French rights among the non-French. As analytic categories, assimilationism and associationism must be used with caution, however, for there was much overlap and ambiguity among the theories and policies associated with each. Policies of association often produced assimilating effects, while assimilationist theories were carefully circumscribed in practice.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "The Moroccan Soul"
by .
Copyright © 2009 Board of Regents of the University of Nebraska.
Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF NEBRASKA PRESS.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
