Inside the Revolution

by Joel C. Rosenberg

The king’s closest ally in the East has been the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan. As I noted earlier, His Majesty was holding a bilateral summit with Jordan’s King Abdullah II while I was in Rabat. Indeed, the two monarchs actually meet regularly and are considered good friends.

  And it makes sense; they share many similarities. Aside from being among the region’s leading Reformers, they are also close in age (Mohammed was born 1963, Abdullah in 1962) and thus have a similar generational outlook. They are both married with children (Mohammed has a son and a daughter; Abdullah has two of each). They both love adventure and high speeds (Mohammed loves racing his Mercedes and his Jet Ski, earning him the nickname “His Majetski”; Abdullah loves racing his Harley and skydiving). Their fathers—King Hassan II and King Hussein, respectively—were friends and allies and were both sympathetic to the West and to Israel. Their fathers also passed away within months of each other, turning power over to their sons with little notice (Mohammed’s father passed away on July 23, 1999; Abdullah’s father passed away on February 7, 1999).

  Most important, they both face the same enormous challenge—trying to move their monarchies in the direction of representative democracies, knowing all the while that al Qaeda is gunning for them and that the Radicals would love to overthrow them or use the electoral process to seize control. Both kings are walking a tightrope without a net, and neither can afford to slip.

  Step 4: Embrace the West

  Continuing his belief in not going it alone in the world, King Mohammed VI has clearly chosen to strengthen strategic alliances with Europe and the U.S.

  Morocco has even expressed a desire to join the European Union after Turkey is accepted—if Turkey is ever accepted.545 Given that Ankara’s bid appears to be a long shot at this point, the king has agreed to join the new “Mediterranean Union” made up of twenty-seven E.U. states and twelve other nations bordering the Mediterranean Sea, an initiative launched by French president Nicolas Sarkozy at a July 2008 summit in Paris.546

  His Majesty has cooperated with Washington on a wide range of security, economic, and cultural issues. He made his first state visit to the U.S. in the summer of 2000 and returned in the summer of 2004 when the Bush administration gave Morocco the designation of “major non-NATO ally.”

  The king also regularly welcomes high-level delegations to Rabat, including Secretaries of State Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice, and his government signed a historic free trade agreement with the U.S. in 2005, the second such agreement the U.S. signed with an Arab country (Jordan was first), and the first in North Africa. The agreement eliminated 95 percent of all tariffs on goods flowing between the two countries and made arrangements to phase out the remaining 5 percent over the next decade.

  Moreover, Morocco agreed in 2002 to allow the U.S. government to build a $225 million transmitter in its country for Radio Sawa, which broadcasts news, information, music, and some entertainment programming in Arabic to young people throughout North Africa and the Middle East who have few other sources of accurate news reporting from around the world and few other sources of pro-American commentary and analysis.

  Step 5: Teach the Theology of the Reformers

  This is one of Dr. Abaddi’s main assignments from the king, and it is one he takes very seriously. The strategy has two key components.

  First, Morocco believes it must train a new generation of moderate Islamic preachers.

  After the 2003 bombings, the king ordered the Ministry of Islamic Affairs to launch a theological training program for new imams to teach them how to promote moderation within Islam, to educate them about Western history and the importance of Christianity and Judaism to Western social and political development, and to help them identify and oppose extremist forces and trends within Islam. Participants take thirty-two hours of instruction each week for a full year. The first class graduated 210 new clerics, including fifty-five women, in 2006.

  Abaddi and his team also helped organize the “World Congress of Rabbis and Imams for Peace” in Brussels (January 2005) and Seville (March 2006), where some 150 Muslim and Jewish leaders “sit beard to beard” to explore common ground, denounce extremists, and “write declarations of peace.” They are publishing books and producing Web sites, tapes, and DVDs to drive moderate theology deep into the culture.

  Abaddi has also placed under the supervision of the Ministry of Islamic Affairs some nine thousand mosques that had not previously been subject to government oversight, raising the total number from thirty-three thousand to forty-two thousand.

  Second, Morocco believes it must train a new generation of moderate Islamic scholars.

  The king is not concerned just about those who teach the Qur’an day by day. He is also concerned about those who would shape Islamic theology for the next century to come. To help me understand the king’s long-term approach, Abaddi sent my colleagues and me across town to meet a man named Dr. Ahmed Khamlichi (pronounced “Hahm-lee-shee”), director of Dar Al Hadith Al Hassania, the most famous religious institute in Morocco.

  Now in his seventies, Dr. Khamlichi has trained scores of imams, professors, and judges since founding the institute in 1965. But at the king’s insistence, he oversaw a dramatic transformation of his entire operation after the Casablanca bombings of 2003. Neither he nor his staff had been teaching anything close to Radicalism before the bombings. But neither had they been intentionally and proactively developing future leaders who would be ready to combat extremism and make a clear, principled, well-researched, and theologically persuasive case of Islamic moderation throughout Morocco, much less to the rest of the Arab world. Now, using a completely revamped curriculum, this is precisely their mission.

  Sitting in Khamlichi’s ornate Rabat office, covered with exquisite, hand-painted tiles and handsome wooden shelves holding hundreds of tomes by Islamic scholars across the ages, we sipped sweet mint tea as he explained what he is doing and why.

  “The situation is urgent,” he told us in no uncertain terms. Morocco, he said, cannot rely on the police rounding up all the Radicals and putting them in prison. Nor should it even think of executing Radicals en masse, as other Arab states have done in recent decades. He pointed to the executions of thousands of Radicals, including Sayyid Qutb, in Egypt. “Did it work?” he asked. “Were the Radical movements”—such as the Muslim Brotherhood and Egyptian Islamic Jihad—“stopped?” To the contrary, he noted, “human rights violations have been deplorable in this region. This gives rise to revolutions, not peace.” The only way to win the battle for the soul of Islam and thus establish lasting peace and prosperity in the region, he insisted, is to fight and win a battle of ideas. “Extremism is gaining new ground,” he warned us. “It is urgent to develop a new generation of scholars to counteract these Radical ideas.”547

  His approach: recruit the best and the brightest Muslim students—true up-and-coming leaders—and turn them into scholars who are fully devoted to teaching the theology of the Reformers and applying their moderate theology at every level of Moroccan society.

  Today, some 160 students a year take classes from Khamlichi’s handpicked staff, studying Islamic history, society, and jurisprudence, but also studying comparative religion, including the merits of Christianity and Judaism. The students also take English and even Hebrew.

  After spending most of a day talking with the director and his staff, touring the urban campus, sitting in on a few classes—including a Hebrew class in progress—and chatting with several students, I must say I came away impressed. Obviously, we do not share the same theology. But like Khamlichi, I would much rather see a young Muslim become a Reformer than a Radical, and thus I am grateful for what he and his team are doing. They are not playing games. They are true Reformers. They have a sense of mission. They understand the stakes could not be higher. And they are not afraid of Christianity and Judaism. Indeed, they believe now is the time for Muslims to understand both faiths better than ever before.

  My only disappointment when the day was done w
as that there was only one Arabic copy of the Bible in the library for the students to use in their comparative religion classes. I asked the librarian if she thought they needed more.

  “Oh, absolutely,” she replied. “We just don’t have the funds in the budget.”

  When I asked whether the Joshua Fund could supply a case of Arabic Bibles to help the students study it in their own heart language, her eyes lit up. “Well, that is very kind,” she said, and in a small but telling sign of the true openness of the institute’s leaders, she quickly got approval. By the time we left the country, the Bibles had been ordered and were soon delivered.

  When Abaddi told me that “Dr. Khamlichi is one of the most prominent men in Morocco,” I had no difficulty understanding why. Nor was it a stretch to believe that “his is a very sensitive office” in Morocco’s overall strategy because, as Abaddi put it, Khamlichi “is training the gatekeepers of tomorrow.”

  Step 6: Expand Democracy

  In a rare interview with Time magazine in the summer of 2000, King Mohammed VI agreed that “Morocco has a lot to do in terms of democracy.” He went on to say that “the daily practice of democracy evolves in time—trying to apply a Western democratic system to a country of the Maghreb [North African countries], the Middle East, or the Gulf would be a mistake. We are not Germany, Sweden, or Spain. I have a lot of respect for countries where the practice of democracy is highly developed. I think, however, that each country has to have its own specific features of democracy.”548

  “People speculate that the Moroccan monarchy will evolve like the Spanish one,” noted Time’s Cairo bureau chief Scott MacLeod. He was referring to the fact that after the 1975 death of General Francisco Franco, Spain’s longtime Socialist dictator, Franco’s handpicked and personally educated and groomed successor, King Juan Carlos, came to power. No one expected the young monarch—then only thirty-seven—to buck the system Franco had created. But to everyone’s shock, that is precisely what he did. Beginning in 1976, the king slowly but surely began helping the country make the transition to a full-blown and robust constitutional democracy without violence or massive social upheaval. He legalized political parties. He authorized the creation of a constitution. And then he actually relinquished absolute power, putting control of the country in the hands of the people and their elected representatives, while still serving as the head of state.

  It was a perceptive point, and the king’s reply was interesting.

  “I have a lot of respect for His Majesty Juan Carlos,” said the Moroccan monarch. “I call him ‘Uncle Juan’ because he is an extraordinary person whom I have known for a long time. He is a relative almost. We often speak on the phone, and I ask him for his guidance. But Moroccans are not Spaniards, and they will never be. Democracy in Spain was very good for Spain. There should be a Moroccan model specific to Morocco.”549

  That was nearly a decade ago. Today, I believe the Moroccan king knows precisely where he is headed. He knows precisely how he is going to get there. And he has a proven leader in King Juan Carlos to answer his questions and advise him along the journey. He may not have known exactly how to proceed back in 2000. But he does now. And personally I believe he is following the Spanish approach. Not so precisely. Not so quickly. He does not want to frighten the Rank-and-File. He does not want to alarm the rest of the Muslim world. He does not want to enrage the Radicals, if he can help it, or give them an opening to seize control of his country and turn back the clock on democracy and progress as Hamas has done in Gaza after the West unwisely pressured the Palestinian Authority to hold elections before building a truly free and civil society. But he knows where he is going, he is going in the right direction, and he is learning how to persuade people to follow him step-by-step.

  Today, Moroccans enjoy far more freedom to say what they want, write what they want, and organize their political parties, labor unions, human-rights organizations, and social reform groups than they did under the current king’s father—and far more than almost anywhere in the Islamic world. The country has a functioning bicameral legislature. It has held several successful, transparent, and relatively corruption-free elections for parliament—including as recently as 2007—in which thirty-four democratic political parties openly competed.

  Still, more must be done. Prodemocracy and human-rights organizations should not lessen their pressure for more change. Indeed, they should accelerate such pressure.

  Step 7: Empower Women

  According to Ms. Fatiha Layadi, among the king’s most impressive moves has been his commitment to improving conditions for women and children and expanding democratic opportunities for women to run for political office and serve in positions of power and authority. Layadi was a well-known newscaster in Morocco before being elected to Parliament in 2007, where she has quickly emerged as one of the most influential women in the country. I interviewed her in the gardens of the Rabat Hilton and was immediately impressed.

  “How many other women are in the Moroccan parliament?” I asked.

  “Thirty-four,” she said.

  “Out of how many seats?”

  “Out of 325,” she replied—more than 10 percent, one of the highest percentages in the Islamic world. “Four women were elected in direct election, and thirty were elected under what we call here in Morocco the ‘National List,’ which is a list for women that was agreed on six years ago, to make access to Parliament easier for women, so that 20 percent of the House of Representatives should be made of women.”550

  But even that is not enough for Layadi. Now she and her colleagues are pressing for legislation that would make a full third of the representatives women.

  “Had there ever been a woman elected in Morocco prior to the changes encouraged by the king in 2002?” I asked.

  “Yes, four of them,” she said.

  “Four total, in all of history?”

  “Oh yes. Women have been running for election since the very first elections in Morocco in the ’60s. But the very first ones to be elected—there were two of them—were in 1992.”

  “So this is real progress,” I noted, even more impressed after learning that a Moroccan Jewish woman ran for a seat in Parliament in 2007, making news all throughout the Islamic world.551

  “Yes, it’s a historical trend in Morocco. We have to keep in mind that in his very first address to the nation, the new king said that the country could not move forward on only one leg, since women did not have their whole rights, political and also civil rights. Since the king came to power in 1999, there have been major reforms that have been conducted. The first and most important one for me is the ‘Family Law.’”

  On October 10, 2003, the king delivered a major address laying out eleven reforms he wanted the legislature to pass. Known as the “Family Code” or “Family Law,” they included giving men and women equal rights before the law, giving wives living in abusive and destructive marriages the right to divorce their husbands, giving wives equal rights to the couples’ financial property, and making polygamy—hotly debated by Islamic scholars but still very common in the Muslim world552—nearly impossible by requiring the husband to obtain not only his first wife’s written permission but also a judge’s assent that “the husband will treat his second wife and her children on an equal footing with the first [and] provide the same living conditions for all” before being legally permitted to marry another woman.553

  The landmark legislation passed on January 25, 2004, and was a shot heard around the Muslim world. Layadi readily conceded it made the Radicals unhappy, but she did not care. She was convinced that the kind of social and political reforms the king has been pursuing are absolutely essential to helping Morocco become a model of Muslim moderation in an age of Muslim radicalism.

  “May 16, 2003, was a terrible day for me as a journalist and for me as a Moroccan,” she told me. “I could never imagine that Moroccans would kill Moroccans. I could not imagine that young Moroccans—sixteen of them—could just go all over Casablanc
a and explode themselves, blow themselves up, and kill forty-four people with them. It was a shock. And 9/11 was a shock to me too. I remember staying all day stuck to my TV, trying to understand, trying to feel what these people in the Twin Towers felt when they saw the planes coming to strike the towers. Terrorism is something crazy. Terrorism is something—I don’t know how to say it in English—I’m shocked. . . . It’s something incredible.”

  “But it is driven by those who say they are fighting in the name of Islam,” I noted.

  “Osama bin Laden is not a Muslim for me,” she shot back.

  “What is he?” I asked. “How would you define bin Laden?”

  “I don’t know, a sort of monster,” Layadi replied. “All these people are sort of monsters, creatures coming from out of nowhere. The people who killed Benazir Bhutto—why? The lady came to speak about democracy. The lady was coming to speak about reform in her country. And they came and blew themselves up. What does it mean? They are creatures of chaos. . . . I just cannot understand where they are coming from and where they want us to go. We have nothing in common as Muslims. They say they are Muslims, but I am a Muslim and I have nothing in common with them.

  “My parents used to have Jewish friends. I used to play with Jewish friends of mine. I had no problems going to Jewish houses, no problem going to Christian houses. I think most Moroccans are like me. Islam in Morocco has always been different. I think Morocco and Jordan are trying to show themselves—the two young monarchs are trying to show themselves—as models for the other Arab countries. I’m cautious because I think both countries have to consolidate their own affairs before trying to turn the others. There are reforms here in Morocco and there in Jordan that have been under way less than ten years, don’t forget. We have to consolidate all this . . . but I hope we can make a true difference.”

  Step 8: Combat Poverty

  In 2000, Time magazine asked the new monarch what Morocco’s most important problems were.