Morocco

Moroccan religious authority is not held by a clerical body. It is held by the throne. The king carries the title Amir al Muminin, Commander of the Faithful, and the Alaouite dynasty claims sharifian descent from the Prophet through his grandson Hasan, which gives the monarchy a religious standing that no minister, mufti or scholar in the country can outrank. That arrangement is old. Idris I, the founder of the first Moroccan state at the end of the eighth century, was himself a refugee sharif, and the pattern of a religiously legitimated ruling house has held through several dynasties since.

The institutional depth is real. Al Qarawiyyin in Fes, founded in 859 by Fatima al Fihri as a mosque with a teaching function, is frequently described as the oldest continuously operating degree granting institution in the world, and its library holds manuscripts of the first order. The legal school is Maliki throughout, and the country has kept a strong attachment to the Ashari theological tradition alongside it.

Sufism is not marginal here. The Tijaniyya, whose founder is buried in Fes, sends pilgrims from across West Africa; the Boutchichiya has a large following including among the professional classes; and the moussem, the seasonal festival at a saint's tomb, remains an ordinary feature of the calendar.

Since the Casablanca bombings of 2003 the state has actively reorganised the religious field, unifying imam training, supervising sermons, promoting the combination of Maliki law, Ashari theology and Junaydi Sufism as the official Moroccan model, and training foreign imams for other countries at a dedicated institute in Rabat.

Morocco held the largest Jewish community in the Muslim world, several hundred thousand people at the middle of the twentieth century, living in the mellah quarters of the old cities and in Berber speaking villages of the Atlas where the community was very old indeed, predating Islam in the region. Almost all of it left between 1948 and the 1970s, for Israel, France and Canada. A few thousand remain, mostly in Casablanca.

What distinguishes Morocco is what the state has done with the absence. The preamble to the 2011 constitution lists the components of Moroccan identity and names the Hebraic among them, which is a rare thing for an Arab state to write into its basic law. Alongside that there has been a programme of physical restoration: hundreds of Jewish cemeteries rehabilitated, synagogues repaired, the Slat al Fassiyine synagogue in Fes reopened, and the Bayt Dakira heritage house established in Essaouira, a town where Jews were once a very large share of the population. Jewish history was introduced into the national school curriculum.

The living practice that continues is the hiloula, the pilgrimage to the tomb of a saintly rabbi on the anniversary of his death. Moroccan Jewish tzadikim have shrines across the country, and the hiloulot draw Moroccan Jews back from the diaspora each year, in some cases to villages with no Jewish residents at all. Some of these tombs were, and in places still are, visited by Muslim neighbours too.

Restoration is not restitution and nobody in Morocco presents it as such. The community is not returning. What is being maintained is the record, and the sites at which the record is physically located.