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Daniel Zisenwine. The Emergence of Nationalist Politics in Morocco: The Rise of the Independence Party and the Struggle Against Colonialism After World War II. New York: I.B. Tauris Publishers, 2010. 224 pp.
The self-immolation and subsequent death of Mohamed Bouazizi in Tunisia sparked the dry tinder of dissatisfaction across the Arab world.1 Arabs not only in Tunisia but across North Africa, Arabia, and the Levant rose up to protest the regimes that had long denied them any meaningful role in self-governance. The swell of popular protest rolled over and toppled the regime in Tunis, similar revolts in Egypt swept away the thirty-year Mubarak government, and uprisings pushed Muammar Gaddafi from power and ended in his death after forty years in Libya.
A question facing international relations students and policymakers across the globe is why this movement is playing out differently in various countries in the Arab world. While the Tunisian, Egyptian, and Libyan regimes fell, and others in Syria and Bahrain are seriously threatened, states such as Jordan, Kuwait, Oman, Lebanon, and Morocco are experiencing more moderate popular calls for reform. Answers to that question may be found in Daniel Zisenwine's work on the rise of the Moroccan struggle against French rule before, during, and after the Second World War. Zisenwine, a research fellow at the Moshe Dayan Center at Tel Aviv University, reviews the historical antecedents and subsequent birth of the Istiqlal (Independence) Party while Morocco was under French rule.
In establishing colonial power over Morocco, France effectively removed Morocco's ability to run its own affairs, with the Sultan ruling only in name. The French Residency (colonial government) controlled all substantial matters of governance save religion. That religious exception practically forced any Moroccan effort at independence or even reform to take on a religious, vice secular, flavor, since the mosques were the only place Moroccans could meet and discuss efforts to change their situation. Zisenwine notes that despite the Sultan's tendency to defer to French pressure, he remained a popular symbol throughout the reform and independence movements. While his popularity among both nationalists and the Residency waned in the latter days of French rule,...