Discourses of failure: Arabisation and nation-building in Morocco

Thesis

This thesis studies the disavowal by Morocco of Arabisation, one of the main nation-building policies it adopted after independence in 1956. Replacing French with Standard Arabic in the public space, Arabisation was a largely consensual—or at least not contested—policy associated with decolonisation and endogenous modernity. It has nevertheless grown increasingly controversial as claims of its ‘failure’ issued from across the political spectrum, culminating in the Ministry of Education’s renouncing it in 2019 and reverting to French in the teaching of scientific subjects. The repudiation of Arabisation runs counter to the predominant understanding of the policy as an instrument legitimating the state and the monarchy. The thesis constitutes a political history of the discourse on the ‘failure’ of Arabisation, tracing its trajectory from a marginal to a dominant position in the Moroccan public sphere and exploring the implications thereof for nation-building. Relying on extensive archival research and interviews, it investigates discourses on language from the late nineteenth century until 2019 in four fields of the Moroccan public sphere—political, social/cultural, expert/academic, and artistic. It shows that nationalists conceived of Arabisation as a renaissance and modernity project by concomitantly rejecting the substance of the colonial paradigm of language and reproducing its structural basis, thereby framing early Moroccan nation-building in civilisational terms. In the 1960s, the Ministry of Education and the monarchy voiced early doubts over the state’s capacity to implement Arabisation under the financial and technical constraints of post-independence. The thesis contends that the association of Arabisation with Islamisation, carried out in the 1970s and 1980s under the leadership of King Hassan II, not only transformed the content of the policy but also its support base. Islamists became the main defenders of the policy while the political left progressively dismissed it. In the 1990s and 2000s, new discourses on Moroccan national culture and identity emerged among challengers to Arabisation—Amazigh (Berber) and Darija (Moroccan Arabic vernacular) advocates. They placed diversity at the centre of ‘Moroccanness’ and advanced the notion of a multicultural ‘Moroccan civilisation,’ thus challenging previously predominant discourses on Arabness. The thesis argues that the regime seized on this emerging nation-building language in the context of the 2011 Uprisings, promoting the discourse on the ‘failure’ of Arabisation so as to counter the electoral success of Islamists and nurture the idea of a multicultural ‘Moroccan exception’ that set Morocco apart from the ‘Arab’ Spring countries.

Authors: Ghilani, K

• DOI: 10.5287/ora-yx8a1ae1a
• Type of award: DPhil
• Level of award: Doctoral
• Awarding institution: University of Oxford
• Language: English
• Keywords: failure; nation-building; discourse; Arabisation; language politics; Morocco