Morocco's joining the path of normalization with Israel has sparked widespread criticism.
For several considerations:
The first is:
The Moroccan government is an Islamic government. It is true that foreign relations are a sovereign matter subject to the monarchy, but the Islamists ’position on this royal policy was supportive;
Because they could not exercise power and opposition together;
Their presence in power narrowed the options before them, and therefore their visions and budgets were formulated as part of the authority, and they seek to preserve it.
Secondly:
Comparing the reactions of the Islamists to the Emirati normalization decision was more vocal and radical than its responses to the Moroccan decision, so it is sufficient to compare the Tunisian Ennahda movement's comment on the Emirati normalization decision, and its silence towards the Moroccan normalization decision.
The government of Morocco, led by Saad Eddin El Othmani, tried to hold the stick in the middle by rejecting the idea of normalization and praising the king's efforts in serving the two causes: Palestine and the Sahara in the same statement;
But this dissonance, which lacked the coherence of content, clearly reflects the movement’s turmoil and the dilemma it faces. If the normalization decision serves the Sahara issue in terms of obtaining American recognition of its Moroccanness, it is unclear how it can serve the Palestinian cause itself!
The third considerations: and it
is the most criticizing - is the attempt of some Moroccan Islamists to create a legitimate document for Moroccan normalization alone.
Under the pretext that it is a necessity to which Morocco has resorted to without repugnance or aggression against the Palestinian cause, and their attempt is similar to the attempts of the sheikhs of the Authority so that the difference between the Sheikh of the Authority in the Emirates and the Sheikh of the Authority in Morocco is blurred
Because both of them are striving to patch up a political decision that was taken in isolation from any effort to legitimately establish it before it was taken.
These considerations refer us to a new angle on the issue of the Islamic management of political affairs, which I dealt with in a previous article, and it is assumed that the management of the Islamic politician is paradoxes for the management of the non-Islamic political, and this difference and distinction is not imposed by us on the Islamic.
It is he who bases his legitimacy on it;
Because he is asking for authority in order to reformulate it in accordance with his ideology that is supposed to lead to the establishment of an Islamic state.
Especially since he claims that his disagreement with the existing systems of government is a disagreement for the non-Islamic content.
Normalization with Israel can constitute a model issue and an entry point for the accountability of the political arrangement for the Islamists;
Because Palestine is a central issue in their discourse, and political Islam has made it its major issue for religious and ideological considerations, on the one hand religion Jerusalem is the first of the two qiblahs, and from the ideology side, movements seeking to establish an Islamic state cannot acknowledge the legitimacy of a Zionist state on the Arab and Islamic land of Palestine.
We can distinguish here between two phases: the Islamist opposition phase and the Islamist Islamist phase.
Opposition Islamists have always led protest movements against Israeli aggression and attempts by Arab regimes to normalize with Israel.
However, the Islamists of the Authority have undergone several changes related to their same ideology, the priority of implementing Sharia has declined, and the relationship with Israel has witnessed some flexibility, especially in the cases of Tunisia and Morocco.
Indeed, the Hamas Authority reformulated its vision in the 2017 document, in contradiction to its 1988 charter, as its document included the acceptance of a state within the 1967 borders, which is what Hamas before the Authority did not accept.
These changes may be attributed to the development and maturity of the experience if these changes were accompanied by Islamists' theorizing on the level of intellectual discourse.
But these transformations are closer to political pragmatism that brings them closer to non-Islamist politicians in their management of political affairs, so that the essential differences between an Islamic and a non-Islamic politician fade away so that the political measure remains the political measure.
For decades, Islamists centered around the idea of gaining power to establish the state that implements Sharia.
In order for a person's faith to be complete in their belief, Sheikh Rashid Ghannouchi once told me that he who does not believe that Islam is a religion and the state of his faith is imperfect.
If he brings the pillars of faith and Islam in full.
I have already made clear in some of my writings that the state's enlargement and encroachment in our world has given it a superpower capable of swallowing and absorbing all those affected within its apparatus and submitting them to its logic.
So that the differences between them diminish, and there is no longer any consideration of their different references and backgrounds, and thus the rivalry between Islamists and the existing regimes - in the end - becomes a struggle over (who) exercises power, not over the (content) of power and how to exercise it.
This is because power - in fact - is not exercised by a free individual will and in isolation from the state apparatus and institutions, nor in isolation from the major powers and geopolitics.
Therefore, the margin of movement and maneuver becomes pressure and imposes settlements, concessions and accommodations that may sacrifice the ideology prior to the exercise of power, and then become subject to discoloration, change and contradictions as well, and this is the matter of political action.
Because it separates intellectual and ideological work in terms of mechanisms, and in terms of the logic that governs it.
Ideology requires theoretical foundation, intellectual argument, and theoretical consistency, as for politics, it is open to balances and settlements according to the balance of power on the one hand, and according to stressful, possible and available circumstances on the other hand, and based on the competence of political actors on the third side.
For decades, Islamists centered around the idea of gaining power to establish the state that implements Sharia.
In order for a person's faith to be complete in their belief, Sheikh Rashid Ghannouchi once told me that he who does not believe that Islam is a religion and the state of his faith is imperfect.
If he brings the pillars of faith and Islam in full.
However, the purpose of gaining power did not mean - necessarily - the ability or competence in managing public affairs, or the ability to balance the perceptions of the opposition phase with the requirements of the power phase (the dichotomy of duty and reality), and for this they collided with the complexities surrounding the reality of the legitimacy of power in today's world.
Power in today's world is not formed according to ideology and beliefs.
But according to the balance of power controlling the international and regional scene, but also the internal one, especially through the military, opposition, non-governmental organizations and others.
That is, the state is not a simple matter represented in an internal struggle over how to reach it, nor in establishing a moderate discourse that is compatible with the values of the liberal West and satisfies the major powers, just as the state’s weight is not determined by ideology and the extent of the solidity or validity of its beliefs that it adopts, but rather by specific measures distributed between the two forces Soft and hard.
Based on this, any authority will not be able to live alone in isolation from the regional and international surroundings, and Gaza, after Hamas’s control over it, is a vivid example of that. The experience of the Brotherhood’s rule in Egypt is another cruel and painful example, and the imagination has blown away by a team of Hamas, so they assumed that they could They make Gaza the nucleus of the promised Islamic state, just as the imagination of the brothers in Egypt has opened, and they have deluded them that they can rule Egypt.
But these fantasies were soon shattered on the ground.
No authority today can gain legitimacy and settle for a decision without the availability of a regional supportive situation for it, without building political alliances that will lift it, and the presence of political intelligence capable of effectively seizing opportunities and exploiting them on the one hand, and neutralizing threats surrounding the state and transforming them into opportunities on the other hand;
Because the logic of the state is based - constantly - on facing dangers and challenges, managing crises, meeting needs, building plans and strategies necessary for the state’s survival and safeguarding its vital interests.
Dealing with Israel is one of those issues, which witnessed change and confusion among the Islamists of the authority. Signs of this confusion began in 2011 when Ghannouchi was a guest at the "Institute for Near East Policy", the stronghold of the neoconservatives and supporters of Israel in the United States of America, and what was reported about his contact with "AIPAC" (AIPAC) in support of Israel after it was prevented from entering the United States, as well as the statements made by him and the Moroccan Prime Minister at the time, Abd El-Ilah Benkirane, to the Radio Voice of Israel on the sidelines of the 2012 Davos Forum;
Let's reach the normalization decision, with the support of the Othmani government;
Although it refused normalization.
The relationship with Israel (whatever its form) was not perceived by the Islamists of the opposition.
However, the authority imposes its requirements, as Israel appears to be a price that must be paid in order to obtain any legitimacy, which cannot be ignored by those who want to achieve their objectives in preserving and continuing the authority, especially since normalization today seems the closest way to solving the outstanding problems, or so a number of leaders of our region believe Today.
One of the reasons for the changes that occurred to the Islamists of the Authority is their discovery that the priorities of the authority are not the priorities of the opposition, and that demonstrating moderation at the level of discourse (such as the position on human rights, freedoms, democracy, etc.) does not constitute an actual priority in the phase of power.
Because what governs the authority are other considerations related to what we mentioned previously, and not among them are the Western liberal values, which they spent time harmonizing with to convince the West of their moderation and their closeness to it.
Israel and the interests of Western countries that have nothing to do with human rights or democracy are the priority, and in the past ten years we have witnessed many facts confirming this idea.
Starting with the position on the Assad regime, reaching the rapprochement between Macron and Sisi, and passing by Ghannouchi's own statements regarding the relationship with France, and that the cartoon crisis is secondary and does not affect the relationship between the two countries, and I discussed this part in a previous article.
On the Moroccan side, the Justice and Development Party (PJD) found itself in a dilemma managing the relationship between it as an authority and the royal establishment, and between Islamic affairs (Palestine) and national affairs (the issue of the Sahara), and it seems that it has settled its issue in alignment, so the party’s statement placed the Palestinian issue “in the order of The Moroccan Sahara issue ";
That is, it equated the two issues and acted like a Moroccan party that gives priority to internal national considerations. It just wanted to raise the status of the Palestinian cause, according to its perspective, when it equated it with the national cause, so it fell into a problem due to its Islamic ideology.
The focus of these problems is the Islamists' converting power into a necessity, and ruling into part of the core of faith, and this is one of the manifestations of the idea of political (not legislative) governance established by Abu Al-A'la Al-Mawdudi and Sayyid Qutb, may God have mercy on them.
And the necessity of authority that is similar to the five imperatives of Sharia (preservation of religion, soul, reason, offspring, and money) has become the focus of budgets and the source of political and legal justifications for them, and for this they justify for themselves what they may not justify to others.
Such as normalization, for example, and this interest-based duality based on the necessity of the authority itself and its preservation, which makes the influential difference between their rule and the rule of others a difference in terms of who governs and not in terms of governing mechanisms and submission to necessities.
Otherwise, the necessity in principle will constitute a justification for any normalization process in which the same accounts and conditions are available to Moroccans, whose broad title is the national interest, and that the Islamic interest cannot come at the expense of the national interest, or to transfer the priority of the national interest over the Islamic interest at the slightest.
Under several arguments and justifications.
Likewise, the extent of naivety appears in some of the jurisprudential justifications that sought to legitimize the decision to normalize, whether it was Emirati or Moroccan, and whether it came from the entrance of the guardian’s powers or from the entrance to necessities.
Because these necessities and compulsions do not depart from the political act itself from a position of power, and the Islamic and others are equal in it, and these jurisprudential justifications delude that political action is governed by jurisprudential or principled standards, which is not the case and has no entrance in its construction at all
If we go and compare between the Emirati and Moroccan normalization, we will find that normalization is a complex issue with many aspects, some of which are political and some of them are cultural and social. Morocco has pursued political and cultural approaches. The Israel page has been published in Arabic that Morocco will study Jewish history and heritage in schools, and the Moroccan Foreign Minister stated to "France" 24 ″ (france24) that “the constitution of Morocco says that one of the tributaries of the Moroccan identity is the Hebrew tributary ... and Morocco has recognized Israel since the nineties.” He also said in an interview with the Yedioth Ahronoth newspaper, “We are not talking about normalization;
Because relationships were originally normal.
We are talking about a resumption of relations between the two countries as they were previously;
Because the relationship has always existed. ”It may be said that there is a difference between the Moroccan and Emirati normalization in that the Emirati moved from normalization to popular and propaganda promotion; but considering the" Hebrew tributary "as part of the Moroccan identity in this political context and teaching it in schools is a kind of Promoting cultural and social normalization as well, because the separation between the Andalusian Jewish heritage and the current Jewish political dimension is extremely difficult, and it must be taken care that the internal Moroccan political accounts differ from the internal Emirati accounts. There is a historical Moroccan popular rejection of normalization, while it is not possible to talk about a popular will Interior in an Emirati society that is a mixture of many nationalities in which the Emiratis are a minority.
The centrality of power and its own logic, to which I have referred, impose similarities between those in power, whether they are Islamist or non-Islamist, and those who support those in power, whether they are Islamist or non-Islamist.
For example, Sheikh Abdullah bin Bayyah, head of the Emirates Fatwa Council, resorted to justifying the Emirati normalization by saying that this is one of the prerogatives' prerogatives and specializations that were set for him by the Sharia, while the Moroccan Justice and Development Party’s statement was rife with flirting with the king and supporting his efforts in support of the Palestinian cause in a statement that was supposed He must clarify his position on normalization and the decision and its effects on the Palestinian issue, according to a specific and convincing political vision for his audience at least.
This is how the amount of naivety appears in some of the jurisprudential justifications that sought to legitimize the decision to normalize, whether it was Emirati or Moroccan, and whether it came from the entrance of the guardian’s powers or from the entrance to necessities.
Because these necessities and compulsions do not depart from the political action itself from a position of authority, and the Islamic and others are equal in it, and these jurisprudential justifications delude that political action is governed by jurisprudential or principled standards, which is not the case and has no entrance in its construction at all.
In addition, these justifications intersect with the sheikhs of power, and fall into the paradox of inconsistency.
Because it lies in what it criticizes against its opponents, and the necessity that governs this field is not the legitimate necessity;
Rather, it is the necessity of Islamic movements, and it is the seat of power that has become the necessary interest that must be preserved for these movements.
It may be said that this necessity is only temporary;
But they will live for a long time to discover again that it is permanent by virtue of familiarity and habit on the one hand, and by virtue of the complexities of the logic of authority and the state on the other hand.
Because the logic of authority continues to create challenges and constraints that the Islamic will not be able to overcome to establish what it thinks it is capable of.
Because with time it will change completely to adapt it to the authority.
Some Islamists will resort to saying that the one who has his hand in the fire is not like the one who has his hand in the water, for the one who is involved in the authority seems to him what does not seem to those who are far from it, and this argument is the same that the sheikhs of the authority constantly use to justify the policies of the existing regimes and the powers of the ruler, as well as who is In power he is the one who sought it and did not come to him willingly so that it is used as a justification to give an exceptional dimension to his actions and actions, in which he committed himself with the approval of his ideology that he built for decades, in addition to that as he gave himself the right to criticize the existing regimes, he must give others the right to criticize him while he is in power Either.
Today we have several models of political management affiliated with Islam, Iran, which is fighting a bone-breaking battle with the West, and Turkey, which differs radically from Arab political Islam for several sides (including the marginal application of Sharia, the Islamization of the state and building relationships and alliances), and Tunisia and Morocco which express the model of appeasement and accommodation. Egypt, where everyone knows the consequences of that experience and the fate of its owners between prisons and exiles, in addition to the fact that they caused hostility to the Emirates, which harnessed all its capabilities to adopt a foreign policy based on a major and central component, which is hostility to the Brotherhood and the endeavor to eradicate them and build a mosque that harms them everywhere: Arab And internationally;
Including lead the train of normalization itself, in which some Islamists were implicated.
Perhaps all these complications surrounding the management of political affairs bring us back to Taha Abd al-Rahman’s idea and his criticism of the Islamists ’perspective in this regard, as they overpowered politicization over socialization, giving priority to the state over society, and politics over morals, and then some of them were involved in re-reading all Islam from a central perspective Authority, which is an essentially Orientalist idea that tries to re-read the path of Islam from the perspective of power and hegemony, considering that power is the central actor and the main one with complete disregard for the historical differences between the pre-modern state and the modern state.
I have previously explained in my book “Permissible Violence” aspects of the modernity of these Islamic movements, whether peaceful or violent, the dilemmas of converting Sharia into law imposed by the state, and the claim that faith is not complete without gaining power.