In Morocco violent jihadist organisations have emerged over the past few years in shanty towns on the edges of cities, inhabited by the despised and forgotten migrants from the countryside. They are creating the conditions for a rebellion born of despair.
It seems to have started getting this bad starting in 1999... the time when everything seemed great. Also, Morocco had just gotten a new young king. (1999 was also the year I visited Morocco. Were there signs then?)
Snipping more than I should... the whole article is worth reading, and very very scary.
The Takfirists are part of a new generation of Islamic fundamentalists from Morocco’s urban slums (7). Their strongholds are what locals call al-karyan, the disused quarries in industrial zones left to decay after independence in 1956. The shanty towns that have mushroomed there in the past 20-30 years are home to uprooted landless peasants, victims of a rural exodus. Most Takfirists, like the suicide bombers of 16 May, are karyanis, from a class of social outcasts living in the shanty towns.
In the greater Casablanca area, Douar Sekouila and the shanty towns of Thomas and Lahraouyine, home to 16 May bombers, were constructed illegally. Hovels of planks and cardboard boxes found in the streets are heaped in anonymous blocks without formal roads that congregate into districts with no official identity. Inhabitants survive on petty theft and trafficking. These miserable slums, less than half an hour from the centre of Casablanca, have no running water, sewers or electricity. Foul water stagnates in alleyways of packed earth that attract clouds of mosquitoes carrying diseases. The inhabitants call the districts Chechnyas, which says much about the extent of urban, social and cultural disintegration.
These extraterritorial zones breed Takfirists as well as mosquitoes. The difference between Takfirists and other Islamists, who have either converted to legal political activity, like the Justice and Development Party (PJD), or to social activism, like Sheikh Yassine’s organisation Al-Adl wal-Ihsan (Justice and Charity), is not just a matter of tactics. It is also sociological. Young Takfiri Salafists do not come from the poor quarters of the medina (Casablanca’s old town), or from the sprawling working-class housing estates abandoned by political parties and trade unions of the left and taken over by traditional Islamist activists in the past 20 years. Takfirists are outcasts, the alienated remnants of disintegrating social groups who have never known anything other than the sordid, brutal world of the slums. In the name of a sectarian idea of Islam, they are now turning the pitiless ferocity that ordinary Moroccans show towards them against the established order.
The breakdown of the culture of the derb, the traditional urban working-class district, is a major factor in the propagation of Takfiri Salafism in these areas. In the medina, the poorest can survive on petty trade and traditional solidarity. The situation is different in the shanty towns, where the absence of economic activity, the isolation of the inhabitants and their divorce from the rest of society encourage marginal behaviour. Food is bought from a few street peddlers; there is no market or small shops. Living conditions are terrible.
Social life in the old city centres traditionally revolves around the mosque, the baker and the hammam. In the shanty towns the absence of the communal life typical of the old working-class districts has prevented social bonding. Moroccan Salafism is a product of the disintegration of traditional Islam rather than its resurgence.
Compared with inner-city districts, full of little shops, Takfirist districts are frighteningly lonely, and the lack of public transport isolates their inhabitants even further from the bustle of the city and sources of employment. Most karyani fund-amentalists survive on next to nothing and have never been in a city centre. People ironically said the suicide bombers saw the centre of Casablanca for the first time on the day of the attack.
The police have not entered for some time the shanty town of Lahraouyine, reputed to be the main Takfirist stronghold in greater Casablanca. Since the bombings it has been designated the most dangerous place in Morocco. The state is absent: no schools, no dispensaries, no post office, no savings bank, no public transport. If you are lucky, the driver of a wooden cart drawn by a skinny mule will agree to take you up the road to it, but collective taxis refuse to enter it for fear of the local Salafists; the few willing to make the trip demand a risk bonus. It is fast becoming a no man’s land.
A stranger is struck by the hostility on the faces of its people, unused to outsiders entering their karyan. Its population, rejected by society, have barricaded themselves in a fortress of hatred. They have rejected everyone, including their neighbours a few kilometres away on the cheap estates of Ben M’Sik, a focus of popular unrest in the 1980s.
The old medinas could be brutal and rebellious, but remained tolerant. The inhabitants of the marginalised shanty towns, driven by hatred, have embraced an extremist ideology because they are at war with Moroccan society. Their acceptance of Takfiri Salafism is the outcome of chronic exclusion - they do not feel they belong to the nation. The clandestine inhabitants of these state-forsaken places have no official abode and no identity documents (8). The rest of the population sees them as non-Moroccans. A man living in social housing for muwadafin (minor government employees) told me: "There are Sahrawis and Shawia here from all over the place. I"m not like them, I’m Moroccan!"
The extreme violence of the Takfirists is rooted in the split between the socially disintegrated population on the outskirts of the cities and the rest of Moroccan society. The disappearance of social and cultural references, worsened by the clandestine lives of most inhabitants of the Takfirist districts, has destroyed the social bond among the excluded. With their enormous resentment of the rest of the world, they have found a congenial ideological framework in takfir.
In less than 10 years that ideology has mobilised the youth of the shanty towns, brought them out of their isolation and committed them to political violence against the country, including their own families. In Sekouila, a former delinquent who had become an "emir" executed his uncle for disobeying a militia "law" against drinking alcohol. There have been hundreds of violent attacks on locals in the karyans, including executions, and the police make no attempt to intervene.
