Can Government Purge Extremism From Islam?

The African nation of Morocco is fighting ISIS and the Houthis abroad while trying to brand a counterinsurgency plan at home.

A Moroccan special forces guard patrols a law enforcement building in Rabat, Morocco, on March 23. Moroccan security forces have broken up 12 extremist cells affiliated with the Islamic State group in the past year, one government official says.
Upon orders from the king, Morocco’s minister of justice and freedoms now must be driven around Rabat in what local news describes as an “impenetrable” turbocharged BMW V8, after Islamic extremist groups threatened his assassination and warned he must “repent if he wants to live.”
The need to heighten security for the senior official represents almost good news for the Moroccan government – a sign some new and deeply invasive policies to stop radicalization within the northwest African nation represent a true threat to the violent zealots vying for power. Government leaders there have implemented a new model for eliminating extremism at home, one they believe is so successful it can be packaged and sold elsewhere and contribute to the nation’s ambitions of ultimately becoming an international leader in fighting Islamic militants like the Islamic State group or the Houthis in Yemen.

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Its involvement in the business of what it calls “religious security” places the government directly into the day-to-day spiritual lives of Moroccan Muslims, attempting to identify those who might lash out violently in the name of Allah.
“We decided to restructure the religious sphere … to make it more scientific, much more organized,” says Mbarka Bouaida, Morocco’s deputy foreign minister, in an interview with U.S. News. “This idea of having a specific strategy within the religious sphere is really to preserve the Moroccan population from any extremism or terrorism messages, and it’s helped a lot. It’s helped to conserve our moderate Islam. It’s helped also to succeed somehow in the deradicalization process.”
“It’s helping us to understand this new phenomenon, and maybe to find long-term solutions.”
The government’s philosophy centers around four key tenets, built on the idea that religion for Morocco’s almost exclusively Sunni Muslim population is as much a civil service as it is a belief system. All imams are now screened and must pass a certification course before they are allowed to serve among the religious leaders that traditionally conduct Friday sermons. The government is attempting to restructure and rebuild all mosques, to ensure they meet certain security standards and are vetted as a public building. Religious education must also meet government-enforced standards, including the inclusion of women who can now become “mourchidas,” or auxiliary leaders within Muslim communities.
And, perhaps most importantly, all Friday sermons are monitored by government representatives.
“We go to the mosque and listen to different religious messages within the mosque,” says Bouaida. “We started also working on these messages to unify them, to analyze the message, to make sure there is no violent message given within the mosque.”
Islamic extremism has tested Morocco’s internal security in the last decade. Al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb, one of the terror network’s first offshoots, was responsible for the attempted takeover of nearby Mali in early 2013. French troops are still leading an African coalition there to regain stability throughout the sprawling, arid nation. Most recently, dozens of Moroccans have joined a growing international movement of young Muslims leaving their homelands to join the Islamic State group, as it attempts to establish a hard-line caliphate in Syria and Iraq and spread its ideals throughout the Muslim world.
Extremist cells aligned with the group – also known as ISIS, ISIL or the derogatory Arabic acronym Daish – are created every day, says Bouaida. Moroccan security forces have broken up 13 cells in the previous 12 months, she says, and roughly 130 in the last 10 years.
These statistics represent a troubling trend in Morocco, home to tens of thousands of Salafist Muslims. While this puritanical Sunni sect is not necessarily emblematic of terrorism or violence, its followers are much more likely to empathize with the hard-liner beliefs of extremist groups.

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Morocco’s attempts to reform religion at home have caught the attention of predominantly Muslim nations elsewhere that are as concerned about extremism taking root. France, Gabon, Guinea, Ivory Coast, Kenya, Libya, Maldives, Mali, Nigeria, Senegal, Tunisia and others have either sent delegations to learn more from Morocco’s training programs or have requested more information about them.
Less is known about another key element of Morocco’s anti-terrorism campaign, in the form of a deradicalization program.
“We worked on the reintegration of these people, and it did work,” says Bouaida. The government has jailed more than 3,000 Salafists for extremist activity, she says, and hundreds of them have successfully passed this program. There is a rate of recidivism, but “it’s under control,” she adds.
“It did help a lot to diminish, let’s say, or reduce the intensity of any threat or derapage of the terrorist groups and the terrorist ideology,” she said, without offering specific data on the number of people who have gone through the program or those who have passed but continued with terrorist activities.
The Moroccan government continues to volunteer assistance in world crises to prove its reliability to powerful hegemons – and to ensure the international support that comes with it. Most recently, it joined both a U.S.-led military coalition to fight the Islamic State group in Iraq and Syria, as well as a U.S.-supported campaign led by Saudi Arabia to beat back Houthi rebels rising up in Yemen.
Those who study Morocco and its anti-radicalization programs believe these latest moves, while successful, are not limited to increasing security, but rather they represent the ruling monarchy’s desire to preserve and maintain power over its country. Regulating mosques, for example, may also grant federal agents the right to shut down meetings of suspected extremists at unregulated sites.
“I am very skeptical about the idea that Morocco is a model for rooting out terrorist networks and extremism,” says Abdeslam Maghraoui, who left his native Morocco in 1975 but returns every year in his current capacity teaching political science at Duke University. “The evidence I see is rather the opposite: There have been a lot of Moroccans who go to fight in Syria today, and before they were going to Iraq.”
Maghraoui considers Morocco’s attempts to reform domestic religion against extremism as inherently flawed: Terrorists rarely operate openly in public mosques like those Morocco is trying to regulate, and recruiters are turning increasingly to the secretive and effective use of social media, not public forums like a Friday sermon.

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He also points to Morocco’s history of cracking down on public dissent under King Mohammed VI, including those advocating for gay rights. Human Rights Watch says the Moroccan government tolerates public demonstrations, but sometimes disperses them violently, then files “dubious charges against their leaders.”
Mohammed had instituted some democratic reforms through a public referendum in 2011, amid the widespread pro-democracy Arab Spring protests across North Africa and the Middle East. Ultimate authority remains with the king but the parliament and prime minister received new powers, on display that November when the Justice and Development Party, a moderate Islamic bloc, won a majority in the election and has maintained power since.
The results of these reforms could also be seen last week, in the latest of a string of annual bilateral meetings between delegations from Rabat and Washington, and where Secretary of State John Kerry formally thanked the Islamic kingdom for its unique counter-extremist efforts, in addition to its attempts to remedy its questionable human rights record.
“The general direction of the country does not jibe with the idea that Morocco is making an effort to root out extremist ideologies,” Maghraoui says. “Morocco is definitely getting more conservative, and the government doesn’t know how to handle it. Or worse, it could even be manipulated to this trend for its own political purposes.”
Others say that, politically motivated or not, those involved in the programs have virtuous motivations and truly believe in the ultimate goals.
“Even if there were political motives in the changes made to the actual content, the teachers who are implementing the curriculum are such good-intended, good-hearted people,” says Ann Wainscott, a professor at Saint Louis University, who specializes in North African politics and frequently visits Morocco to study reforms to its religious education. She recounts a conversation with a teacher who she believes summed up the importance of the program perfectly: “If we don’t tell them what Islam is, someone else will.”
These reforms proved particularly effective as the recent instability in Mali began to settle, she says, with as many as 500 imams traveling to Morocco to study in these moderate religious training programs. It remains, however, strictly under government control, with access limited to outside researchers or human rights observers by the omnipresent government representatives.
“In Morocco,” says Wainscott, “control of the religious sphere is an effort to control the political sphere.”