It seems the Amazigh language has become, for Driss El Ganbouri (a doctor, alas!), far more than a mere subject of criticism. In his discourse, it has turned into a permanent fixation: every time it appears in the public space, or a demand tied to activating its official status makes itself heard, he rushes to hem it in with sarcasm, dismissal, and caricature. As though his great intellectual battle were not with society’s dysfunctions, nor with its crises, nor with its genuine questions, but with an official language called Amazigh, and an alphabet called Tifinagh.
It must be said plainly: disagreeing with the Amazigh cause is a right, criticizing state policy in managing it is a right too, and so is debating the merits of Tifinagh. But turning the Amazigh cause into a permanent object of mockery is not criticism. Describing its defenders as sick, obsessive, or backward is not an argument. Linking their demands to funerals, the angel of death, or sardine cans is not critical thinking — it is verbal buffoonery dressed up to pass for reasoning.
The problem is that the author of this discourse never engages with the demand as it is actually framed: he manufactures a caricature of it, then mocks that caricature. This is the easiest and weakest rhetorical trick there is — inventing a straw man, then boasting about knocking it down.
Is calling for Tifinagh on license plates an intellectual crime? A threat to national unity? A contradiction of the Constitution? Technically impossible to implement? A cost the state cannot bear? Or is the real problem that the mere sight of Tifinagh in public space has become, for some, a provocation in itself — regardless of the legal or technical arguments put forward?
The Amazigh cause is not “merchandise” for anyone to trade in, nor an imported ideological fad, nor the whim of a handful of activists. It is an official language of the Moroccan state, written into the Constitution in black and white. And the Tifinagh alphabet was not imposed on the state by some activist working behind the scenes: the Moroccan state itself adopted it, through royal arbitration, after a well-documented institutional and scientific process. It is now part of education, cultural production, research, digitization, administration, and public life.
Mocking Tifinagh, then, does nothing to undermine its legitimacy — any more than mocking Arabic erases its standing. Whoever holds an argument should present it. Whoever has a study should share its findings. Whoever believes an institutional choice was wrong should explain why, how, and what the alternative would be.
But reducing the debate to lines like “the angel of death will speak Amazigh,” “the Quran will be read in Amazigh,” or “sardine cans will be labeled in Tifinagh” is not a critique of the demand — it is an evasion of it. Because someone with a real argument doesn’t need to turn it into a joke. (Incidentally, Mr. El Ganbouri has himself delivered Friday sermons in the Amazigh language in Amazigh-speaking regions, just as we invoke mercy for our dead in the Amazigh language as well.)
Even more puzzling is a question that keeps resurfacing as though it were some great discovery: why don’t defenders of the Amazigh cause speak it at every gathering they attend?
What kind of logic is that?
Does defending a language require using it at every moment of one’s life? Is an Arabic speaker who defends Arabic barred from speaking French? Is a French speaker who defends French required to use it with the taxi driver, the café waiter, and at home? Can the legitimacy of defending a language be judged by how many sentences its defender utters in it each day?
Language is a tool of communication, not a test of faith.
A person can be Amazigh-speaking at home, Arabic-speaking in an institution, French-speaking at work, and use English in another sphere, without any contradiction. Multilingualism itself is a Moroccan reality that no satirical column can erase.
The Amazigh cause does not need “believers” proclaiming their allegiance on every occasion. It needs no rituals, no linguistic inquisitions. What it needs, simply, is for the state to respect its own Constitution, and for official status to move from a written text to concrete practice in administration, education, media, justice, and public life.
This is precisely where the question arises that certain discourses seem to constantly dodge: if Amazigh is official, why all this discomfort at its presence and visibility in public space?
Why does the mere visual presence of an official language become an occasion for alarmist, mocking rhetoric?
Why don’t those who object debate the matter on legal, technical, and administrative grounds instead of turning it into a subject for ridicule?
As for those who claim that defenders of the Amazigh cause “profit from it,” they owe it — morally and scientifically — to provide evidence, not just level accusations. Working in language, culture, research, or teaching is not a crime, and defending a constitutional right is not a business.
If there is corruption, exploitation, or opportunism in this field, then names, facts, and documents should be presented. Painting everyone who works on or defends the Amazigh cause with the same brush is not courage — it is an emotional judgment lacking the most basic standards of responsibility.
And the essential question remains: where is the real scientific critique, Doctor? Where are the studies that refute the findings of Amazigh linguistics researchers? Where is the scientific analysis of the experience of teaching Amazigh? Where is the critique of standardization and codification policies? Where are the alternative proposals? Where is the comparison with the experiences of other countries that have recognized their national or indigenous languages? Where is the research on the presence of the Amazigh language in digital technology and artificial intelligence?
These are the questions that deserve a researcher’s pen.
Chasing Tifinagh from sign to sign, from plate to plate, and turning every linguistic demand into a joke produces no thought, no knowledge, and no contribution to public debate.
What is stranger still is that those who wave the banner of rationality fall into the most irrational habits of all: generalization, belittlement, fearmongering, and building absurd conclusions on demands their own proponents never made.
No one is demanding that the angel of death speak Amazigh, no one has made Tifinagh a religious dogma, no one has said Arabic must disappear. These are all rhetorical inventions serving a single purpose: shifting the debate away from constitutional rights and toward mocking those who defend them. That is not intellectual courage. True intellectual courage means confronting an idea in its strongest form, not distorting it in order to mock it.
Courage means saying: “I disagree with this choice, here are my reasons, here is my evidence, and here is the alternative I propose.”
But repeating mockery of the Amazigh cause until the mockery itself becomes the entire content of one’s discourse simply means the speaker is no longer debating an issue — he is replaying a position already settled in advance.
In short: the Amazigh cause will not fall to mockery, Tifinagh will not vanish under jokes, and constitutional official status does not become any less real because a “bitter writer” chose to call those demanding its implementation obsessive and backward.
The problem is not that there are defenders of the Amazigh cause.
The problem is that some people can only engage with that defense through mockery.
And when mockery becomes a discourse’s strongest weapon, that is not a victory over the idea — it is a tacit admission of the inability to confront it.
By Mustapha Oumouch: researcher in Amazigh linguistics and educational activist
Arabic version | French version
