When I was “reactionary” and proud of my “reactionariness

In 1970s and 1980s Morocco, the label “reactionary” carried more weight than the general meaning it had held since the French Revolution—that of opposing radical change or resisting progress in favor of tradition and the status quo. Because the political and philosophical concepts popular in Morocco at the time (revolution, socialism, progress, democracy, reaction…) were not used in their original Western sense, they took on new meanings through a process of “Arabization” and “Orientalization.” These terms, imported from the Middle East before spreading through Morocco, underwent a semantic shift. Thus, being “reactionary” first and foremost meant failing to support Nasserist or Ba’athist currents, refusing to join the Arab nationalist project, not participating in the cult of the Palestinian cause, or declining to identify with an Arabist-aligned left. It also meant refusing to follow the figureheads of these Middle Eastern ideologies in Morocco, such as Mehdi Ben Barka, Abderrahmane Youssoufi, Abderrahim Bouabid, or Fqih Basri (may they rest in peace), and remaining outside their organizations, parties, and unions. Secondly, by extension, it described anyone who did not oppose the Makhzen regime with the intent of toppling Hassan II (peace be upon him)—by force if necessary—to establish an Arab nationalist renaissance and its socialist revolution. At the time, the “reactionary” tag was slapped on anyone who was not working to replace the monarchy with an Arab nationalist regime modeled on Ba’athist or Nasserist ideologies. As for those who dared to declare themselves Amazigh—and not merely defend Amazigh identity, a concept then unthinkable—they represented the very pinnacle of reaction. In doing so, they stood in total opposition to a “progressivism” whose prerequisite in Morocco was a complete identity mutation, a kind of ethnic transition. One had to adopt an Arab identity, in both thought and conviction, to symbolize an adherence to civilization and progress, thereby breaking with the world of backwardness and reaction that Amazigh identity then represented in the eyes of the proponents of Arab nationalism—the true opium of Moroccan politicians and intellectuals of the era.

Because I embodied all these traits, my acquaintances, friends, and colleagues viewed me as a reactionary—even the “doyen of reactionaries.” Indeed, I took great pride in my Amazigh identity and made no effort to hide it, unlike many other speakers of the language. At the time, such pride was synonymous with loudly declaring oneself a member of the reactionary camp. It is worth remembering that during that era, being called a “reactionary” was the ultimate insult in Morocco. Its derogatory weight was far heavier than terms like “makhzeni,” “ayachi,” “feudal,” or “opportunist,” which are common today. The word was almost synonymous with treason; in the 1970s and 1980s, a reactionary was someone who had betrayed the Arab people, the Arab nation, Arabism and Arab nationalism, the principles of the left and socialism, Palestine, and the working class. Such individuals were perceived as agents of Zionism and imperialism, faithful servants of the Makhzen, its feudal system, and its autocratic power.

Regarding the Makhzen, an essential clarification is needed: I used to explain to those who labeled me a “reactionary”—due to my stance on the Makhzen regime—that my rejection of the system was based on its very nature as an apparatus built on corruption and absolutism. Nevertheless, compared to the nationalist, Nasserist, or Ba’athist regimes, or the Arab socialisms of the Middle East that Moroccan “progressives” aspired to establish in Morocco after overthrowing the Makhzen, as they then dreamed of doing, I openly declared my preference for the latter. I readily admitted that the Makhzen’s dictatorship was preferable to that of those Eastern nationalist regimes, if only for its strictly local and Moroccan character, as opposed to an imported foreign ideology. It was precisely this position that my detractors viewed, during the reign of the late Hassan II, as an obstinate attachment to reaction and a rejection of the progressivism represented, in their eyes, by the Ba’athist and Nasserist models.

While this “progressivism”—understood in its Arabist and Middle Eastern sense, a blend of Ba’athist and Nasserist nationalism then in vogue among Moroccan intellectuals and political opponents—contributed to the loss of Morocco’s identity independence by reducing it to a cultural satellite of the Middle East, its ultimate aim was total political integration. Morocco’s “progressives” were merely waiting for the fall of Hassan II’s regime to adopt these regional models. However, the most disastrous and catastrophic consequence of this “progressive” ideology was undoubtedly the creation of the “Polisario” separatist movement. The kinship between this organization and Moroccan “progressives” is clear: under Algerian orders and tutelage, the movement launched a frontal war against the Moroccan state. At the time, this state was embodied by the regime of the late Hassan II, which progressives branded a “feudal system” that had to be dismantled.

The objective of this endeavor was to establish an Arab republic in the Moroccan Sahara. Because Morocco is a monarchy, and the Arab nationalist regimes—whether Ba’athist or Nasserist—were all republics that Moroccan “progressives” fought to replicate at home, establishing an “Arab republic” in the Sahara served as the first milestone in realizing their own republican project for the entire country.

In their so-called “struggle” against what they term Moroccan occupation, Polisario separatists seek to model their actions on the Palestinian fight against Israeli occupation. Since Moroccan “progressives” view support for the Palestinian cause as the ultimate litmus test for “progressiveness,” they saw their backing of the separatist “republic” as a natural, “progressive” extension of their commitment to Palestine. Despite the multifaceted financial, political, and diplomatic aid Morocco provides them, the Palestinians persist in supporting the separatist front. This is explained by the fact that they see the Polisario’s “struggle” as an exact replica of their own—just as the separatist movement’s flag is a carbon copy of the Palestinian one.

It was in this way that Moroccan “progressives” were responsible for the creation of the Polisario Front. This is neither surprising nor strange, given that their figurehead—whom they regard as a model—openly supported Algeria against Morocco during the 1963 Sand War. Indeed, it is well known that many of these “progressives,” who were opponents of Hassan II and had no connection to the Saharan provinces, participated from Algeria in the preparations to create the separatist front.

Yet, while it was these “progressives” who shaped the Polisario Front—a separatist movement they labeled “progressive” to combat those they deemed reactionaries subservient to the Makhzen regime—it turns out that those who protected the Moroccan Sahara against these separatist ambitions were the very people these “progressives” dismissed as reactionaries in service to the system.

What these “progressives” found incomprehensible—at total odds with my identity, political, and ideological choices, which they judged “reactionary”—was that I had a background in philosophy and was working as a secondary school philosophy teacher. At the time, the preeminent tool for philosophical analysis was Marxism and its dialectical materialism. Since Marxist theory was regarded as a philosophy of progress calling for revolution against “reaction,” my ideological opponents were baffled: how could a teacher of philosophy, and therefore a proponent of progressivism, adopt such reactionary thought in his political and ideological stances?

Clearly, the breaking point between the “reactionary” I was in their eyes and the “progressives” they prided themselves on being lay in our diverging conceptions of “progress” and “reaction.” To them, a “progressive” was someone who denied their Amazigh origins to invent an affiliation with a foreign Arab ethnicity, engaging in a sort of “sexual” deviance—in the nationalist and identity sense of the term—practiced with pride. This so-called progressivism did not stop at this identity aberration; it extended to everything linked to this borrowed Arabism: thought, language, culture, ideology, and political systems. This explains why these “progressives” lobbied for the importation of political regimes from the Mashriq—whether Ba’athist or Nasserist nationalists, then dominant—to graft them onto Morocco, replacing the local Makhzen system, which they viewed, as I mentioned, as reactionary and feudal. Their goal was by no means the establishment of democracy; had it been, they would have worked to import Western European models known for their democratic systems. Instead, their objective was Arabism, with its totalitarian nationalist regimes. Consequently, the question arises: who is the true “reactionary”? Is it the one who clings to their original and natural identity, takes pride in their national language, defends the causes of their people and homeland, protects the territorial integrity of their state, and fights for the evolution of their country’s political system toward democracy? Or is it the one who denies their own identity, despises their mother tongue, invents a false exogenous affiliation, defends foreign causes, works toward the partition of their country, and conspires with foreign powers to overthrow their nation’s regime only to replace it with something even worse? Common sense dictates that the former is the true progressive, the genuine activist, and the real patriot, while the latter is the actual reactionary, the coward, and the traitor, as they attack the linguistic, identity, and political foundations of their homeland by seeking to substitute the Moroccan model with a far more deleterious foreign regime.

We are witnessing a wholesale reversal of concepts, much like the shift observed in the notions of “reactionary” and “progressive.” This stems from an original inversion of identity—what I characterize as a mutation or a “sexual anomaly,” in the national and identity-based sense of the term. This national and identity-driven deviance spread collectively across Morocco starting in 1912, before being consolidated by the “National Movement” and the post-independence state. It has led Moroccan intellectuals and politicians to apply various concepts in an inverted manner, including belonging, language, progressivism, reaction, democracy, patriotism, and activism. Their usage is fundamentally distorted because they are themselves the victims of an identity and national anomaly.

This is why Morocco today needs to correct and “normalize” these concepts—in the sense of restoring their natural state—following their long-standing aberrant use. We must begin by addressing the root of the problem: the inverted use of the notion of collective belonging. When belonging signifies an attachment to Morocco’s Amazigh and African soil, rather than an Arab and Asian one, then the true progressive, the genuine activist, and the authentic patriot are those who take pride in their Amazigh African identity. The true patriot values the Amazigh language and Darija, working toward their development and their transformation into languages of instruction and writing, rather than scorning or disparaging them. The true patriot is the one who defends the recovery of Ceuta and Melilla over that of Palestine. It is the person who advocates for severing ties with the state occupying a portion of Moroccan territory, rather than rejecting links with Israel, which occupies no Moroccan land. Finally, it is the person who calls for the construction of an Amazigh state, in the territorial and national sense, instead of defending the creation of an Arab state on Amazigh and African land—as “progressive” Moroccan supporters of the “Polisario Front” once did.

While the state bears primary responsibility for this necessary rectification, the role of intellectuals is no less crucial. Why the intellectuals? Because they were the ones who propagated this identity-based and national perversion, spreading it on a massive scale through their ideas and writings. This was particularly true during the 1970s and 1980s, an era when the intellectual carried significant weight and exerted a major influence on society.

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