The Qarawiyin Mosque Student Strike of 1937

In the heady days of Morocco's nationalist struggle in the 1930s, people's allegiances, roles and recourses did not always break down along simple resistor/collaborator lines. Individuals appealed to the power of France's colonial institutions at the same time as they beseeched the courtly practices that preceded France's presence and had adapted to it. A student strike at the Qarawiyin Mosque that spanned several weeks in the winter of 1937 provides an dynamic episode in order to explore this assertion. The student strikes were a good subject for exploring these issues of contestation within contestation, of local struggles in the lives of colonized Moroccans, because the mosque temporarily brought together actors – students, instructors and administrators – who had different backgrounds, economic statuses and regional origins and languages, as well as different, and sometimes competing, short and long-term objectives. Morocco's struggle against colonial oppression and loss of political autonomy was surely important for students in the Qarawiyin in the 1930s, but clearly, based on their actions, so were other internecine struggles, which get obscured by the colonial and nationalist narratives. While the strikes were indeed aimed at the educational administration, they were also about disagreements amongst the students themselves, about the struggle between students who embraced modern administrative, organisational and pedagogical aspects of education and those who opposed them and favoured the maintenance of methods and systems that had been in place prior to colonisation. This larger rubric of the specific direction that education in the Qarawiyin should take encompassed contests between other categories as well; urban students versus rural students living and studying in the city; Sufis versus Salafi reformists; students with Eastern and European concerns – looking toward Cairo and Paris – versus students with southern concerns looking toward the redoubts of the High Atlas Mountains, the fields and orchards of the Sous Valley, the Anti-Atlas and beyond.