Abdellah Hammoudi’s Master and Disciple is a sweeping analysis of Moroccan cultural structures that provides support for a paradigm of Moroccan authoritarians as the singular, supreme master in a political system filled with ostensible disciples. He asserts that in such a system, individuals subjugate their own wills, desires, and rationality to those of the Moroccan king in order to gain increasing proximity to him so that one day, they might be close enough to play a role in shaping his decisions. The king arbitrates between their interests, and his decisions are final; at the same time, he is expected to shower benefits on the disciples as a guarantee and recognition of their loyalty. Hammoudi’s theoretical description of such a paradigm is uncontroversial; however, his assertions that Morocco’s political system is defined by the model and, more importantly, that the model explains Morocco’s condition, are more debatable.

Hammoudi does a phenomenal job conveying the history of the Moroccan king and his political context, starting with a precolonial era that seems very feudalistic. The “state” is defined by the king and his network of loyal servants, kept in line by two-fold mutual obligations: temporal, with pecuniary and power-related benefits bestowed upon tribal chiefs, advisors, and wealthy urban elites that have been loyal, as well as increasing control and prestige associated with those who have dutifully and unflinchingly followed the sultan’s whims. The king is legitimized periodically by Islamic scholars’ declarations that he, as a descendant of the Prophet, is the elect of God and thus his arbitration is executed with supreme knowledge of God’s ways. Without him, the sultanate fails to exist. Meanwhile, servants, on their path to power, must endure often unfair punishments and bear harsh taxation, property confiscation, and the periodic stripping of their prestige because the sultan wills it. This experience mirrors the experience of disciples on the path to mastery in the Sufi orders so prevalent in Moroccan Islam.

The French colonizers upset the order by establishing a system of harsh oppression, not legitimized by any sort of religious supremacy, Sufi or otherwise. Their governance structure focused on extraction of resources using local collaborators, but the ultimate enforcement mechanism was a powerful state bureaucracy, not a set of feudal-type obligations. As groups like the nationalist party Istiqlal of individuals rose up to support the sultan, still considered the commander of the faithful, in his struggle against the protectorate, the sultan regained immense prestige but of a more centralized variety.

In the post-independence Morocco, the king has successfully disrupted parties and religious brotherhoods alike, ostensibly by pressuring groups like Istiqlal in the 1950s to split apart into multiple parties based on their different economic agendas. If they were able to pursue power independently, they might have united against the king, but the opportunity was precluded by the movement’s deferral to their “commander” and “master.”

While the paradigm of master-and-disciple is interesting, it also seems an underwhelming explanation for Moroccan authoritarianism. The dynamic contains broad explanatory power for the authoritarian situation in Morocco, masterfully comparing the path of the courtier to power described above to the struggles of the Sufi disciple. In Sufism, the master frequently demands his disciple forsake his old life, exemplified the Darqawi brotherhood’s extreme case in which al-Hijb Ali gave up the lucrative life of a traditional scholar to roam the country in tattered clothing, begging for food, for years, even in the midst of his parents’ home. The power dynamic not only matches the feudalistic system of pre-colonial days, but also for the modern Moroccan nation-state. The same scheme of relationships inhabits a new government structure: parliamentary factions fight each other for the king’s favor rather than against the king himself so that they might implement their policy agendas; in fact the king infrequently intends to allow any party to gain enough power to truly exercise it, a similar balancing act to that of pre-colonial sultans despite a different political landscape. Compared to other Arab and Islamic countries that have successfully evaded mainstream democratic urges, such as Saudi Arabia, Morocco’s evasion seems both more systemically-rooted and stable; it does not rely on shows of force and buying off the people to the same extent because of the master-and-disciple dynamic.

However, the paradigm of a master and disciple ultimately seems more like a rhetorical flourish that could in reality describe any highly personalized authoritarian regime (hence why these are named “sultanistic” regimes by political scientists). When this is accounted for, the whole book’s thesis seems more an extended historical dissection to support a broad theory of how “sultanistic” regimes succeed than it does explain Morocco’s specific scenario. While this may seem a success, seeing that Hammoudi’s objective was to find a pattern that could be extrapolated, it is a failure because in its rhetorical breadth the book fails to prove its truth in the specific case of Morocco. Hammoudi fails to show that Sufism’s paradigm is pervasive, nor how its power dynamics nearly certainly cause authoritarianism. Indeed, much of the book focuses on nationalistic and religious groups, often anti-Sufi, upholding the king’s status despite incongruities with his status as ruling according to revealed law or holy principles. The king himself repressed the Sufi orders for causing rebellion. Meanwhile, there is no comparative work to the other obvious historical case of divine right feudalism: Europe, which managed to avoid confinement to authoritarianism and progressed into bureaucratic nation-state democracy.

Fundamentally, the book provides interesting support for how the Moroccan system of authoritarianism is structured, but not as much for why it is stable or why any of the components involved are crucial factors to Arab autocracy in general. The explanation may, however, come from future analysis of the experience that most significantly separates the Moroccan transition to from divinely-guided feudalism to nation-statehood from the European transition: for Morocco, nation-statehood was an external idea with no cultural foundation and thus the nation-state bureaucracy could be molded by the Moroccan political culture’s master (the king) after the completion of the protectorate. Unfortunately, this specific aspect of the articulation between protectorate and sultanate is not explained in Master and Disciple, which leaves much to be desired in the book.