Notwithstanding its promotion as a vehicle for the decolonization and modernization of knowledge in Morocco, the policy of Arabization has been caught in an ongoing competition with the pedagogical visions of the French Protectorate-visions that have been recycled by nationalist and international development agendas. This competition has subtly classified the sciences and the humanities into Francophone and Arabophone disciplines, respectively, at a moment when national development is understood as technological advancement. School participants endure this linguistic, disciplinary, and, effectively, social hierarchy and put their awareness of the system at the service of its circumvention. The anxiety of teachers over the future of state-educated youth indicates that the legitimacy of the school itself has become highly doubted. This article approaches both the public school and its relationship to knowledge through a historically informed ethnographic lens, arguing that centralized theories of pedagogy, the sociological category of class, and the assumed dichotomy between state agendas and international patronage are unsatisfactory frames for the interpretation of the phenomena in question.
This article investigates how Moroccan public high-school students experience religious pedagogy. Probing the linguistic ideology that underpins their religious training, the article exposes the ambiguities inherent in educational Arabization, a project set on safeguarding the state's sacredness while mediating an agenda of indigenous modernization. Student skepticism toward the state's moral authority indicates that religious pedagogy must be explored through the lenses of process and approximation with an attention to paradoxes, ironies, and unanticipated outcomes. [religious pedagogy, language ideology, state, Islam]
Social Currents in North Africa offers multidisciplinary analyses of social phenomena unfolding in the Maghreb today. The contributors analyze the genealogies of contemporary North African behavioral and ideological norms, and offer insights into post-Arab Spring governance and today's social and political trends. The book situates regional developments within broader international currents, without forgoing the distinct features of each socio-historical context. With its common historical, cultural, and socioeconomic foundations, the Maghreb is a cohesive area of study that allows for greater understanding of domestic developments from both single-country and comparative perspectives. This volume refines the geo-historical unity of the Maghreb by accounting for social connections, both within the nation-state and across political boundaries and historical eras. It illustrates that non-institutional phenomena are equally formative to the ongoing project of postcolonial sovereignty, to social construction and deployments of state power, and to local outlooks on social equity, economic prospects, and cultural identity. Scholars in the field of North African and Maghrebi studies were invited to working group meeting held by the Center for International and Regional Studies (CIRS), Georgetown University in Qatar, to reflect on their specialized disciplinary or methodological approaches to the region, and to comment on the overall validity of North Africa as a cohesive geo-historical unit for social scientific analysis.
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