Ajdir speech as a historical event in the history of contemporary Morocco

The Amazigh movement should have demanded that October 17 be declared a national historic day. This would ensure it is celebrated across the entire country rather than being relegated to a secondary commemoration confined to the Royal Institute of Amazigh Culture.

In reality, the Ajdir speech does not concern the Amazigh movement alone. The movement has struggled since the 1960s to reach this historic milestone, which opened the doors of the state’s institutions to Amazigh identity. This progress is visible in the education system, despite the slow pace of implementation, in the Constitution, and through the official recognition of the Amazigh New Year. These achievements came despite political blockades imposed by various leftist, right-wing, and Islamist parties that opposed the constitutionalization of the Amazigh language. Groups such as the Istiqlal Party, the Socialist Union of Popular Forces, and the Justice and Development Party sought to limit it to the mere status of a “national language.” Furthermore, several nationalist intellectuals and writers supported these parties in an inglorious document they shamelessly titled the “Democratic Manifesto,” an act that tarnished their own reputations. The Ajdir speech remains a national event of major historical significance that concerns all Moroccans.

This event transmits the memory of two essential realities to future generations:

On one hand, it represents the struggle led by the Amazigh movement since the 1960s against external ideologies—whether nationalist or various forms of Islamist—which nearly destabilized the country. As a civil and cultural movement, it resisted every attempt at ideological engineering aimed at severing Moroccans from their Amazigh identity. Proponents of these ideologies sought to impose foreign political projects modeled after Nasserist, Baathist, Muslim Brotherhood, or Wahhabist structures. Through its cultural and civic struggle, the movement succeeded in re-rooting many Moroccans in their national identity, thereby achieving the greatest cultural and identity revolution in contemporary Morocco.

On the other hand, the Ajdir speech constitutes a turning point and a bridge between two distinct visions of Morocco:

1. A Morocco amnesiac of its cultural identity, where the national movement—through its right-wing, Salafist, and socialist currents—strained to tether the country to the Middle East and its fruitless conflicts while erasing the kingdom’s Amazigh identity. Consequently, Morocco exhausted its resources on tensions that were foreign to it, which only served to weaken the nation.

2. A new Morocco that renews its commitment to its Amazigh and African roots, drawing on its own culture and civilizational uniqueness. This Morocco distances itself from the ideological adventures and rhetoric prevalent in the Middle East, which have led to the ruin of most regimes in that region. It is a Morocco reconciled with its identity, analyzing challenges through the prism of its own national interests. It is therefore no surprise that most of Morocco’s current successes are built upon a Moroccan philosophy that is Amazigh at its core. This same school of thought has shaped great minds throughout the country’s history, from the era preceding Bocchus I to Juba II, Yusuf ibn Tashfin, Augustine of Hippo, Ibn Khaldun, Averroes, and Ali Ouzal, and it continues to provide the kingdom with its strength.

This Moroccan singularity never received a convincing explanation from the Moroccan thinker Mohamed Abed Al-Jabri. In the third volume of his major work, Critique of Arab Reason, he concluded that Maghreb-Andalusian thought was based on rationalism, while Middle Eastern thought was founded on rhetoric and mysticism. However, his ideological framework prevented him from grasping the root cause: the prevalence of rationalist thought in Morocco, based on reasoning and demonstration, stems directly from its pre-Islamic and pre-Christian Amazigh heritage, which had already influenced Roman civilization.

Therefore, let us make October 17 an emblematic national day in the contemporary history of Morocco. It should be a day dedicated to celebrating Moroccan identity, of which its Amazigh character is the fundamental distinguishing feature—one that has allowed, and continues to allow, the country to occupy its rightful place on the African and international stage, yesterday, today, and tomorrow.

By Lahcen Zohour

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