Islamic Land: Muslim Genealogies of Territorial Sovereignty in Modern Morocco, C
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Islamic Land: Muslim Genealogies of Territorial Sovereignty in Modern Morocco, c. 1900-1990 by Samuel Benjamin Kigar Graduate Program in Religion Duke University Date:_______________________ Approved: ___________________________ Ebrahim Moosa, Co-Supervisor ___________________________ David Morgan, Co-Supervisor ___________________________ Mona Hassan ___________________________ Cemil Aydin ___________________________ Winnifred Fallers Sullivan Dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate Program in Religion in the Graduate School of Duke University 2018 ABSTRACT Islamic Land: Muslim Genealogies of Territorial Sovereignty in Modern Morocco, c. 1900-1990 by Samuel Benjamin Kigar Graduate Program in Religion Duke University Date:_______________________ Approved: ___________________________ Ebrahim Moosa, Co-Supervisor ___________________________ David Morgan, Co-Supervisor ___________________________ Mona Hassan ___________________________ Cemil Aydin ___________________________ Winnifred Fallers Sullivan An abstract of a dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate Program in Religion in the Graduate School of Duke University 2018 Copyright by Samuel Benjamin Kigar 2018 Abstract 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. iv For Lila v Table of Contents Abstract ......................................................................................................................... iv Acknowledgements .................................................................................................... viii Introduction .................................................................................................................... 1 The Concept of Territory ........................................................................................... 3 Territory as a Subject of Religious Studies............................................................ 8 Religion and Space .............................................................................................. 10 Geopolitical Theologies ....................................................................................... 12 Territory as a Subject of Islamic Studies ................................................................. 16 Law, Politics, and Religion in Morocco .................................................................. 28 Chapter Breakdown and Methodology .................................................................... 33 Conclusion ............................................................................................................... 37 Chapter One ................................................................................................................. 39 Introduction .............................................................................................................. 39 History, Sovereignty, and the Idea of Morocco ....................................................... 42 The Far Maghreb Bordered .................................................................................. 42 Borders Within: Administrating the Far Maghreb ............................................... 51 The Space of Law: Fiqh as a Chronotope of Morocco ............................................ 58 A Fatwa on the Eve of the Colony: Wazzānī ....................................................... 61 The Maghreb as an Ideal Muslim Land: Wansharīsī ........................................... 63 How far is the Maghreb?: Ibn Rushd al-Jadd ...................................................... 70 Abū Bakr ibn al-‘Arabī: Itineracy and Borders in the Premodern Maghreb and Andalusia ............................................................................................................. 74 Deterritorializing Religion: Wazzānī and Islam in the Colony ........................... 81 Conclusion ............................................................................................................... 83 Chapter Two................................................................................................................. 85 Kattānī: Virtual Muslim Unity Against the Nation.................................................. 88 Ḥajwī: The Actualization of a Protected Nation ...................................................... 96 Sūsī’s Regional Islamic Knowledge ...................................................................... 108 Muḥammad ‘Allāl al-Fāsī: Empire within Nation ................................................. 117 vi Conclusion ............................................................................................................. 124 Chapter Three............................................................................................................. 126 The Law of the Land .............................................................................................. 130 Greater Morocco .................................................................................................... 144 Allegiance to the Throne - Constitutional Sovereignty ......................................... 156 Conclusion ............................................................................................................. 160 Chapter Four .............................................................................................................. 163 Chapter Plan ........................................................................................................... 166 Morocco’s Case for the Western Sahara ................................................................ 167 Dār al-Islām and the Organization of Islamic Conference. ............................... 167 International Court of Justice and the Western Sahara ...................................... 171 “My Dear People,” or Hassan II on the Sahara ................................................. 184 Conclusion ............................................................................................................. 189 Chapter Five ............................................................................................................... 194 God’s Shadow on Earth ......................................................................................... 197 The Spirit of the Law ............................................................................................. 213 Conclusion ................................................................................................................. 234 Society, State, and Religion ................................................................................... 237 Islam Territorialized and Deterritorialized ............................................................ 242 Islamic All the Same .............................................................................................. 244 Albeit Differently So.............................................................................................. 247 Territory’s End ....................................................................................................... 250 Bibiliography ............................................................................................................. 253 Biography ................................................................................................................... 265 vii Acknowledgements This dissertation could not have been completed without the care, concern, and support of my Director of Graduate Studies, Dr. Stephen Chapman, and his assistant, Carol Rush. They provided me with the resources to get it done. I am also thankful for the support of the American Institute for Maghrib Studies, which supported my final research trips, and the Social Science Research Council’s Dissertation Proposal Development Fellowship, which helped me to incubate the ideas in this dissertation. Thank you to my teachers and my mentors. Professors Mona Hassan, Cemil Aydin, and Engseng Ho helped me to think translocally and across great sweeps of time. Mohammad Habib, miriam cooke, Ebrahim Moosa, and Abdullatif Camera were patient as I learned Arabic. Elizabeth Grosz and Ranjana Khanna taught me about the body, its affects, and its ways of making territory. Leela Prasad helped me think through the meanings of modernity. She was