Channeling Moroccanness. Becky L. Schulthies

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       A Fassi Linguascape

      In 2008, Fez celebrated its founding over 1,200 years ago by Moulay Idriss II, a descendant of the prophet Muhammed whose father, Moulay Idriss I, laid the foundations of the Moroccan state. Arabic of some kind has been a key index of Fez and Morocco since the Idrissi origin story, despite the widespread presence of Amazigh languages. Movement of populations and people, with their language varieties and identities, has been central to the history of Fez, especially its urban life. Moroccans recount and periodize their history as a series of foreign dominations: Phoenicians, Romans, Vandals, Byzantines, Arabs, French, Spanish (F. Laroui 1977). An oft-cited wave of Arab tribal groups in the eleventh century significantly impacted the rural/urban language varieties in the area (Ennaji 2005, 59). In addition, the Maghrib connected West Africa, Europe, and the Arab East through the caravan trade routes (J. Miller 2001), with Arabic as a key lingua franca of those exchanges. Each of these framings has done important work in marking the essence of Moroccanness relationality in Fez.

      The city in particular has been oft-characterized as the core founding place of Islam, Arabization, intellectual life, urbanization, and trade in Morocco (Pennell 2003, 33–37). According to nationalist narratives, Fez accommodated refugees from Qairawan (Tunis) in the ninth century and Andalusians, Arabic-speaking Muslims and Jews fleeing the Spanish conquest, from the ninth through the fifteenth centuries. During the twentieth-century French colonial period, administrators attempted a divide-and-rule policy explicitly through educational, linguistic, and legal formulations. They created French schools in Amazigh communities (nominally because they didn’t speak Arabic) and developed a “Berber” legal system based on “customary practice” and not connected to the Moroccan Islamic legal codes (Hoffman 2006). The divisions were not just between Amazigh and Arabs, but among Arabs themselves. The French attempted to educate a corps of elite, modern, French-speaking, civilized Arabs to administer the protectorate without reference to dangerous Pan-Arab and Pan-Islamist ideologies emerging from elites studying in the Arab East (Benmamoun 2001, 100). Fez was one of the places from which the French recruited sons of Moroccan elites to “civilize” through a simplified French-language education in an attempt to break the oppositional power of the Arabic-trained Muslim scholars coming out of the networks created by al-Qarawiyyiin University (S. Miller 2013, 122–23). Founded by a woman from Tunis in the ninth century (in the third century of the Muslim calendar), al-Qarawiyyiin had been granting scholarly degrees and training judges, teachers, and local administrators through its network of Qur’anic schools (Eickelman 1985). In addition to the Qarawiyyiin educational network, Fassi scholars such as Shaykh Muhammad al-Kattani were also involved in mobilizing broad-spectrum opposition among elites, merchants, artisans, rural tribesman, and laborers through Sufi الزاوية (zāwīya). These worship gathering places, both the zāwīya and Qarawiyyiin schools, fostered learning through devotional practices and facilitated social interactions and the discussion of political and religious reform that alternated between supporting and criticizing the sultan (Bazzaz 2010, 4, 9)—all via a mix of orally recited Qur’anic-influenced Arabic and spoken darīja (see Chapter 5). While admittedly only a fraction of the Moroccan population received any degree of schooled literacy training before the mid-twentieth century, many of those trained through the Qarawiyyin system became the drivers of political reform. This included Muhammad ‘Allal al-Fasi, the force behind the independence political party Istiqlal, and Muhammed al-Fassi, the first minister of education in independent Morocco. Fassis claim the colonial francophone policy was successful enough that the post-independence educational policy designed by French-educated Hassan II included French and fuṣḥā Arabic curriculum, despite the protests of Fassi Moroccan nationalists who sought a pan-Arab identity through standard Arabic. In a widely circulated anecdote, one related to me by one of my Fassi colleagues, a member of the committee designated to draft the new curriculum expressed surprise at the changes made to the original draft by Hassan II, especially in regard to the number of Arabic courses replaced by French. When he questioned the king, the response was, “I am bilingual, and I desire all Moroccans to be bilingual like me.”

      Since independence, the contribution of Fez to the national imaginary continued, but its economic and intellectual life has withered in comparison to other cities, such as Casablanca, Tangier, Marrakesh, and the capital, Rabat. In the last four decades, urban flows have moved old Fassi elites out of their ancestral, “traditional” ornately tiled courtyard homes in the medina to Rabat, Casablanca, and high-rise apartments and villas of the Fez ville nouvelle (Hachimi 2005; Newcomb 2009). Fassis who moved out of the medina have lamented that the sounds of the street and neighbors’ intimate conversations enter through apartment windows in ways unknown to the quiet interior-facing medina dwellings. They have also decried the rural Arabic and Tarifit (Amazigh language of the Rif mountains) speakers changing interactional space (Porter 2003). Fassis argued that rural folk didn’t understand how to dress, move respectfully, or talk appropriately and had corrupted social relations throughout the city (see El Ouardani 2014 for a rural response to this Fassi urban critique). In addition, the soundscape included Amazigh merchants and entrepreneurs from the Rif, Atlas, and Anti-Atlas Mountains as well as Arab and African migrants fleeing conflict and economic challenges in Syria, Senegal, and Mali. Migration to Europe extended Moroccan exposure to German, Spanish, Dutch, and Belgian language varieties (McMurray 2001), as had the tourist economy. French- and English-speaking foreigners had also taken up residence in the Fez medina, not to mention the hundreds of tourists moving through the city and adding to the sonic features. The sounds of apartment construction, the call to prayer, the rumble of trucks/taxis/cars/motorbikes, pressure cookers slowly preparing dinner, children playing street soccer, men socializing in street cafes, and myriad other sounds indexing various kinds of sociality added to the rich complexity of Fassi soundscapes.

      As I have written about elsewhere (Schulthies 2015), self-identifying Arabs have historically marked social distinctions through a variety of classification paradigms, or axes of differentiation, that include nation, state, regional, and social registers:

      (1) Arab nation ([al-’umma al-ʿarabīyya]) versus some Other (Turks, Europeans, Berbers, Armenians, Persians) and that does not equate to the Muslim nation ([al-ʿumma al-’islāmīyya]), since it includes Christian, Jewish, and non-Sunni Muslim Arabic speakers as well (Suleiman 2003, 6–15);

      (2) Supraregional forms: Maghreb as Arab West (primarily Algeria, Tunisia, and Morocco), Mashreq as Arab East (Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Palestine), at times including or excluding Egypt, and Khalij as the Arab Gulf, which also either includes or distinguishes Iraq (Hachimi 2013, 270; Holes 2004, 47; and Theodoropoulou and Tyler 2014, 33–35);

      (3) Urban-rural divides: badawī Arabic glossed by some as rural or tribal and subdivided into nomadic vs. village agriculturalists, and urban hadārī Arabic,