Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 July 2009
The original attempt to interpret the post-independence tribal unrest was first published in the European Journal of Sociology in 1962 (1). Its evidence was drawn primarily from the first half decade of Moroccan independence. It sought to explain certain oddities of Moroccan political life of the period.
(1) Gellner, E., Patterns of Rural Rebellion in Morocco: tribes as minorities, Archiv. europ. sociol., III (1962), 297–311.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
(2) The holy lineage in the recesses of the Atlas mountains, which I investigated, provided local services of arbitration and mediation to the tribal groups. But at one period, at the turn of the XVIIth and XVIIIth centuries, it looked as if it might start a wider movement and become influential on a national scale. But these ambitions were scotched: « Un jour, on manda Sidi Youssef [leader of this movement] à la cour […] sous prétexte de lui rendre honneur; on s'empara de sa personne, et il fut mis à mort […] » Rinn, Louis, Marabouts et Khouan (Alger 1884), p. 391.Google Scholar
How different is this, in principle, from the Ben Barka affaire?
* My observations are heavily indebted to a number of social scientists and observers of Morocco, notably Patrice Blacque-Belair, Ken Brown, Terry Burke, Grigori Lazarev, Rémy Leveau, Clement Moore, Stuart Schaar, John Waterbury, William Zartman, and others. But, of course, none of them can be held responsible for my views and errors.
To send this article to your Kindle, first ensure no-reply@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about sending to your Kindle. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.
Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.
Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.
To save this article to your Dropbox account, please select one or more formats and confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you used this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your Dropbox account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.
To save this article to your Google Drive account, please select one or more formats and confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you used this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your Google Drive account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.