Islamic Modernities: Politics, Society, Culture, and the War of Ideology in Morocco

Jaafar Aksikas

Advisor: Daniel E Houser, PhD, Department of Economics

Johnson Center, B
April 28, 2005, 08:00 PM to 07:00 PM

Abstract:

The present dissertation is fundamentally a critique of some of the prevalent ideologies of modernity, modernization, and globalization in the post-colonial Arab world, with a specific focus on the case of Morocco. More specifically, it provides a critical analysis of the work of major Moroccan intellectuals-activists, namely Abdullah Laroui, Mohamed Abed Al-Jabri, and Abdessalam Yassine, thus combining what have hitherto been considered competing and even incompatible ideologies in the Arab world: liberalism, nationalism, and Islamism. Although these ideologies?which are products of a specific historical situation--have enjoyed some currency in current debates on modernity and globalization throughout the Arab world, they achieve only a partial understanding of the processes of social change?cultural, economic, and political. In an attempt to provide a theoretical foundation upon which an alternative emancipatory project of radical-socialist modernity can be developed, I revisit the work of Karl Marx (and others in the Marxist tradition), develop, and refine some of its key conceptual tools and analytical aspects within the context of post-colonial Morocco, and the post-colonial Arab world in general.