Henry Munson’s book Religion and Power in Morocco tries to explains in detail the complex relationship between religion and power in Morocco through analysis of political and religious events of the seventeenth century to late twentieth century. Through combination of history through folklores, passed down from generation to generation by Moroccans, and cultural anthropology, Munson while critic of Clifford Geertz previous work for too much generalization and for both inadequate and poor contextualization of evidence , tries to explain the events better and put them in context.
Munson starts by criticizing Geertz interpretation of an incident between al- Hassan al-Yusi- a Saint and Muslim scholar- and Sultan Mulay Ismail who ruled from 1672 to 1727. (2) Munson says that Geertz interpreted the stories without adequate attention to their symbolic and historical significance. He then goes ahead and explains Geertz interpretation of the incidents, and then proposes his own version of it, which he acquired through his ethnographic fieldwork in Morocco and information he acquired from old texts by Moroccan scholars. In the subsequent chapters, Munson delves deep into the religious and political history of Morocco to help readers understand the interactions of Saints, Sultans, Sufi Shaykhs, Caliphates, Ulamaa and the different dynasties that controlled Morocco’s religion and political realms over the centuries. Through these long and complex history, we get to understand how political and religious leaders related with each other- which usually involved the Sultans or Caliphs been powerful and the religious leaders and scholars at best trying to warn them whenever they felt they were failing to undertake their duties to treat their subjects fairly. Munson also explains several incidents when these men of God (the saints and Sharifs) rebuked the powerful leaders for their ill treatment of people and they ended up being killed or banished by the Sultans except for those like al-Yusi who used their baraka in which case the Sultans would leave them alone because they feared the saints could hurt them using their powers. Munson then explains the history of the fundamentalist opposition and other historical events that shaped power throughout Morocco in the 20th century.
While reading the book, I felt Munson spent a lot of time criticizing Geertz that he could have used to explain the religion and power interrelations in Morocco in a simpler way. I also felt some of his criticism didn’t really make sense, for example he says that Geertz uses “his twentieth- century folktale to interpret seventeenth-century history” yet he also uses folktales from Moroccan in explaining quite a number of the confrontations between religious and political leaders.(24).
Reading Religion and Power was quite exhausting as there’s so much history packed in the book and trying to grasp everything can be draining. I also felt that it would be better if one read Geertz’s Islam Observed first before reading Munson’s Religion and Power in Morocco to get a better understanding of both texts.
Also, since Munson tries to cover centuries of history in one book, like Geertz before him, he was just another anthropologist trying to make sense of things that happened centuries before the time he was doing the research and I believe it’s fair enough to say that he has done pretty good job of gathering a lot of evidence from the reliable and available sources in the twentieth century. It’s generally hard to put together a text that makes a perfect presentation of such old history since its subject to bias by different sources supporting different dynasties, factions and sultans, not forgetting the information lost either through misinterpretation or lost/forgotten as its passed down from century to century.
In general, I would say this a good book to read if you are interested in getting sense and an understanding of 1) the religious and political history of Morocco and a little bit about Islam from the time of prophet Muhammed’s death in 632 to late twentieth century and how power was passed down for centuries either through kinship or contractual, 2) the powers’ of Sultans as a result of their positions and those of religious scholars whether genealogical or miraculous and how these powers were used by both parties and how it shaped the political and religious history of Morocco.
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