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| Assahifa, 11-12-2006 |
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| What is your commentary on the recent confrontation between the State and the Justice and Spirituality Movement (JSM), namely the police campaigns that aimed to prevent the JSM’s activities like the “open doors”, the sessions on spiritual counseling [majālis an-Nassīha], and the series of arrests and trials against your members that ensued from such campaigns? |
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| We cannot talk of a confrontation, but rather of arbitrary practices performed by the regime against a movement that refuses to yield to its game by getting involved in a prefabricated and padlocked system that leaves no room for a genuine political action nor a dynamic of change susceptible to save the country from total decline. The regime wants to discredit us by attempting to involve us in a stagnant political scene it controls fully, whereas we believe that the sole guarantee for us to remain politically dynamic and socially effective is to hold to our status as an association—a status we have chosen but whose recognition the regime has chosen to withdraw. Our spiritual education and our choice of nonviolence as a basic principle make us stronger than any war of attrition waged on us—a war that exhausts none but our adversaries. Law and justice favor nobody; we are with the law and justice, and for the sake of law and justice, we perform our jihad through peaceful, perseverant resistance, and draw our strength from God’s assistance. |
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| Haven’t those campaigns weakened the JSM and curbed the impact of its activities? |
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| The JSM is a dynamic and solid movement that has been used for decades to coming with a new spirit after any campaign the regime conducts against the movement. The movement’s members have increased as of the recent events. Better still, the morale of the new generations that were not used to enduring provocative adversities and arbitrary arrests with peaceful steadfastness was boosted thanks to the regime’s stupid strategy that has met failure as usual. Those campaigns were an educational instrument that the Makhzen offered us thanks to the futile counsels of some of its advisors. The Makhzen needs to pension those advisors off or “discipline” them with dungeons as it is now known amid circles that have sold their moral conscience and dignity in return for some positions here and there. |
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| Some human rights’ activists cast responsibility on both the regime and the JSM for those events. They say that both parties infringed the law: the regime banned internal activities of your movement, and the JSM did not perform—as it is prescribed by the law—public activities after the competent authorities authorized the movement to do so. What can you say about that? |
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| Those so-called human rights’ activists, and many others, look at Morocco from the demagogic viewpoint, the official and semi-official discourses that present this poor country in an image that seeks to reassure foreign investors about their investments whose profits fall eventually in the hands of the ruling elite. But in reality, the concern about adorning the country’s sullied image has created a blurry legal space that wavers between legal texts and the Makhzen’s practices. Our movement, which has chosen to work within a legal framework, clashed with such contradiction, namely because the movement did not accept those arbitrary practices that hide behind the country’s legal appearances. If some people have accepted to live with this duality, we, on our side, decline such duplicity and want a solid and pure law that is immune against the stratagems of the “elite” that despise our people, taking advantage of their ignorance of the abc’s of politics and civil rights. So it is the regime that violates the law by misusing it. As for us, we are victims just like all the Moroccan people. The difference is that we embarrass the regime by not accepting “the mentality of the herd” which the Makhzen expects from its “subjects”. |
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| Some accuse you of provoking the political system by declarations and talks of visions that are construed as an attempt to undermine the regime and sap its foundations. What is your reply? |
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| The vision is part of Prophecy, as is stated by the teachings of God’s Messenger (God bless him and give him peace). It has a great and sacred significance for anyone whose heart still hosts the belief in God and in the Unseen. It is far more sublime to be put in a political conflict, or used as an attempt to undermine a particular regime. All I may say is that our education is multidimensional, and that we seek to revive practices that have been effaced by the Muslims’ involvement in a historical course in which the Muslim community was dumbfounded by the purely materialistic civilization of the superpowers. We want to lift the siege on a basic dimension in Islam: the dimension of the Unseen. This dimension is very present in our popular culture, but it is mixed with magic, sorcery, and a covert form of polytheism [that is, seeking aid from shrines]. Such mixture has confined this dimension in the cage of taboos and listed it among legends. On the other hand, the history of Islam evidences that some visions came true as they were exactly reported. The Makhzen does have a palpable historical legacy in this field that makes it very uncomfortable about our visions. As far as we are concerned, we take them as glad tidings, and believe that if a science of interpretation of visions exists, then it behooves upon us to give those visions their true worth and lend them credence. That does not mean that we rely on visions to make a decision or adopt a plan of action. |
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| But the regime, or let’s say some influential circles, interpreted your talk of a momentous event heralded by the JSM’s visions that will take place in Morocco as an offensive that targets the State. So they conducted those campaigns as preventive operations? |
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| We did not seek to publicize those visions because of our belief in their sacred nature. It is the regime that took the initiative, propagated them, coated them with lies in order to despise us and discredit us, spent a lot of money and recruited charlatans, slanderers and spreaders of rumors of all stripe to this end. We are not to be blamed if the regime fell in the trap it had set for us! As for the visions, we have been relating them in our educational and spiritual sessions in imitation of God’s Messenger (God bless him and grant him peace) and his Companions for 30 years now, that is, long before 2006. |
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| Only a few weeks remain before the end of 2006 without anything your visions have heralded taking place. How do you explain that inside the JSM, and how do you justify that to your members and to the public opinion at large? |
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| Whenever I am asked this question, I smell in it the flavor of sorrow for the absence of any change in Morocco. I also smell a duplicity that discloses the Moroccans’ despair of the tangible methods of change and their hope in the occurrence of a particular miracle. As far as the JSM is concerned, we have never relied nonchalantly on the visions for the reasons I have stated above. For those who want more details, let them refer to the writings of the JSM’s founder who made of reviving the dimension of the Unseen a part of an educational program that is to be patterned after the conduct of God’s Messenger (God bless him and grant him peace), who believed in visions, but abided only by the logic of field action. So if our visions frighten the regime and disturb our adversaries, we regard them as letters from the Unseen that bring us further assurance and as a rope joining heaven to earth, and we would not dare subject things that are a matter of God’s Will to worldly calculations. However, 2006 has not ended yet; there are still some days and nights, hundreds of hours, thousands of minutes and seconds. When God intends a thing, His command is only to say: “Be and so it is!” |
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| Some analysts say that your talk of this event is only a desire of the JSM to induce the regime to conduct police campaigns against the movement so that you may play the human rights’ abuses card, attract new supporters and have more media coverage? |
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| The JSM has indeed a complex thinking and a multidimensional course that is not easy to be grasped even by shrewd analysts. As for the pseudo-analysts, especially if to their lack in analytical tools they add allegiance to a particular ideological trend or a lust for some interests, they will none but engage in gratuitous guesses and improvised hypotheses. Each has his own reading that unmasks his inner intentions. Many regard having good ratings and extensive media coverage to be their long-sought paradise. To them I say: You and we are worlds apart! Politicking is not our profession. |
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| Do you still hold on to your Republican views? |
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| They are no longer my views. After bringing them before courts, those views have become the subject of a national dialog which the virtuous of our country are enjoined to make an opportunity for a historical change towards a better future. |
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| Does your father agree with you on them? |
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| I am the daughter of my father’s school. The question to be asked is to what extent those views are compatible with the principle of the Caliphate which is regarded as one the basic principles of the School of Justice and Spirituality. The answer is that there is no contradiction whatsoever, as some superficial analysts may wrongly think. The Caliphate is an original, authentic spirit that may materialize in any modern form of government that human experience has produced and innovated. |
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