Morocco's Model for Religious Toleration

Since the turn of the 21st century, Arab states and societies have witnessed an increasing debate over Islam. Middle Eastern and North African states lost their long-held grip over the religious domain, which they controlled until recently through their oversight of mosques and of public and private media. Morocco, however, has regained control by implementing a set of national policies that others in the region would do well to emulate.   In the 1970s, widespread economic failures in the Middle East and North Africa as well as the rise of political Islam contributed to misgivings among young people about the ability of their governments to offer new economic, cultural, and political alternatives, and to their loss of faith in state-sanctioned Islamic ideologies. By the late 1980s, independent Islamic preachers emerged and contested the Islamic discourse of official state institutions and challenged the jurisprudence of scholars tied to government centers of Islamic learning.