“The Real Morocco Itself: Jewish Saint Pilgrimage, Hybridity, and the Idea of the Moroccan Nation” by Oren Kosansky addresses an issue as of yet untouched by the Saints and Demons curriculum–nationalism. Kosansky claims that the discourses surrounding Jewish pilgrimages and the image of Judeo-Muslim hybridism aided first in creating Morocco as a “national object of French control” and then as an independent “liberal nation-state” (341). Previously in class, we have discussed categories such as Jews and Muslims, saints and jinn, living and dead, men and women; Kosansky’s piece contains our class’s first mention of nations as categories.
According to Kosansky, the Judeo-Muslim pilgrimage came to serve as a symbol of the nation of Morocco itself. Thus, being a Moroccan comes to outrank being a Jew or a Muslim. As such, when France colonized what is now Morocco in the early 1900s, one place that the colonizing nation exerted its control was at the shrines to which pilgrims traveled. The French administration supported the idea of Judeo-Muslim pilgrimages because they “displace[d] Islam as the foundation of Moroccanness” and suggested that the foundation lay elsewhere–in paganism and the Berbers (Kosansky 346). The French feared that excessive identification with Islam or Arabia could cause problems for them, so they supported this idea (Kosansky 345-46).
When Morocco became an independent nation, the Judeo-Muslim pilgrimage retained its air of nationalism, now becoming important and characteristic of the Moroccan state. Additionally, Berber activism gains intensity and challenges Morocco’s Arab identity (Kosansky 356). Once again, the identification as a Berber (the original people of Morocco) shows that many Moroccans see themselves as members of a nation, alongside–or even before–being members of a specific religious following.