This book examines the factors behind the survival and persistence of monarchical authoritarianism in Morocco and argues that state rituals of power affect the opposition forces ability to challenge the monarchy.

In Morocco, Marvine Howe, a former correspondent for The New York Times, presents an incisive account of the Moroccan kingdom and its people, past and present. She provides a frank portrait of the late King Hassan, whom she credits with laying the foundations of a modern state, and she highlights the pressures his successor King Mohammed VI has come under to transform the monarchy into a modern democracy. Howe addresses emerging issues--equal rights for women, the correction of glaring economic disparities--and asks the question: can this ancient Muslim kingdom embrace democracy in an era of deepening divisions between Islam and the West?

The first edition of Morocco was published one year before the mass protests of the Arab Spring rocked the Moroccan state. Post-Arab Spring, the country has a new constitution and government, but the state remains uncompromising on any true reform of the monarchy’s claims to power. This new edition provides an introductory overview of the history, contemporary politics, economy, and international relations in Morocco and offers an examination of the challenges to tradition and modernity in the post-colonial state. It has been revised and updated to include analysis of the country’s evolving politics in the years following the Arab Spring, and the consequences this has had for the country’s traditional monarchy. It pays particular attention to the new constitution, the policies of the new Islamist-led government, and it includes an analysis of Morocco’s foreign policy in the post-Arab Spring regional context. Drawing on key academic texts, the author provides a detailed analysis of Morocco, focusing on issues such as: • Morocco’s role within the region • Trade policies with Europe • Migration • Morocco’s Western Sahara policy • Ways of dealing with Political Islam • The extent to which European influence has affected Moroccan society Easily accessible to non-specialists, practitioners, and upper level undergraduate students, the book will be essential reading for those working in the fields of North African studies, International Relations and Middle East studies.

The overthrow of the regime of President Ben Ali in Tunisia on 14 January 2011 took the world by surprise. The popular revolt in this small Arab country and the effect it had on the wider Arab world prompted questions as to why there had been so little awareness of it up until that point. It also revealed a more general lack of knowledge about the surrounding western part of the Arab world, or the Maghreb, which had long attracted a tiny fraction of the outside interest shown in the eastern Arab world of Egypt, the Levant and the Gulf. This book examines the politics of the three states of the central Maghreb--Algeria, Tunisia and Morocco--since their achievement of independence from European colonial rule in the 1950s and 1960s. It explains the political dynamics of the region by looking at the roles played by the military, political parties and Islamist movements and addresses factors such as Berber identity and economics, as well as how the states of the region interact with each other and with the wider world. -- Provided by publisher.

Although regarded as a single community of Islamists, Islamic political movements utilise vastly different means to pursue their goals. This book examines why some Islamic movements facing the same socio-political structures pursue different political paths, while their counterparts in diverse contexts make similar political choices. Based on qualitative fieldwork involving personal interviews with Islamic politicians, journalists, and ideologues - conducted both before and after the Arab Spring - author Esen KirdiAY draws close comparisons between six Islamic movements in Jordan, Morocco and Turkey. She analyses how some Islamic movements decide to form a political party to run in elections, while their counterparts in the same country reject doing so and instead engage in political activism as a social movement through informal channels. More broadly, the study demonstrates the role of internal factors, ideological priorities and organisational needs in explaining differentiation within Islamic political movements, and discusses its effects on democratisation.

How the competition for young recruits is creating rivalries among Islamists today Today, two-thirds of all Arab Muslims are under the age of thirty. Young Islam takes readers inside the evolving competition for their support—a competition not simply between Islamism and the secular world, but between different and often conflicting visions of Islam itself. Drawing on extensive ethnographic research among rank-and-file activists in Morocco, Avi Spiegel shows how Islamist movements are encountering opposition from an unexpected source—each other. In vivid and compelling detail, he describes the conflicts that arise as Islamist groups vie with one another for new recruits, and the unprecedented fragmentation that occurs as members wrangle over a shared urbanized base. Looking carefully at how political Islam is lived, expressed, and understood by young people, Spiegel moves beyond the top-down focus of current research. Instead, he makes the compelling case that Islamist actors are shaped more by their relationships to each other than by their relationships to the state or even to religious ideology. By focusing not only on the texts of aging elites but also on the voices of diverse and sophisticated Muslim youths, Spiegel exposes the shifting and contested nature of Islamist movements today—movements that are being reimagined from the bottom up by young Islam. The first book to shed light on this new and uncharted era of Islamist pluralism in the Middle East and North Africa, Young Islam uncovers the rivalries that are redefining the next generation of political Islam.