Western Sahara before Palestine: King’s decision forces Moroccan Brotherhood to submit to ‘nation-state’

Sarah Rashad

The agreement that US President Donald Trump announced, reached between Morocco and the Israeli occupation, in the second half of December still casts a shadow over the Moroccan political reality, specifically the Brotherhood-affiliated Justice and Development Party (PJD), which found itself forced to accept the agreement approved by the king, or rather even completing the procedures, as it is the party responsible for the government.

Wide criticism

While the PJD received widespread criticism after agreeing to the agreement due to its inconsistency with the slogans it had long raised against normalization, last Sunday the party held a special meeting of the General Secretariat chaired by the Secretary-General and Head of the Moroccan Government, Saad Eddine El Othmani, in which he clarified the party’s position. Moroccan newspapers reported that the PJD concluded by stressing that the party stands behind the decisions of King Mohammed VI, and that Western Sahara comes before the Palestinian cause.

The Moroccan Hespress website quoted a PJD leader as saying, “All members of the party’s General Secretariat agreed on the slogan of the national issue first and the Palestinian cause always,” and that they emphasized the need to confront the rush to normalization and set up mechanisms for that.

Patriotism or Islamism?

Besides that the position of the Moroccan Brotherhood is inconsistent with the position of the international Brotherhood, which attacked the recent Arab normalization agreements with Israel and considered it leniency and an abandonment of the agreed foundations, the party’s position, which is summarized in the “national issue first and the Palestinian issue always,” reopens the file of the nation-state and its position in the Brotherhood’s understanding.

Although all references and studies have argued that the Brotherhood has always rejected the concept of the nation-state and placed before it the concept of the nation and the Islamic state, PJD statements indicate that the party places the interests of the nation-state before the Islamic ummah, which contradicts the Brotherhood’s understanding.

According to the WikiBrotherhood website, Brotherhood founder Hassan al-Banna explained the differences between the Brotherhood’s understanding of patriotism and its general concept, saying, “The face of the disagreement between patriotism, as understood by the Brotherhood and advocates of abstract patriotism, comes at the forefront of the disagreements that the basis of Muslim patriotism is the Islamic creed and Islam.” He made the national feeling a creed, not a sexual fanatic, and his goal was to work for good for the sake of human beings.

A recent study by the Trends Center for Research and Consultation, which dealt with the concept of patriotism among the Brotherhood, warned of the group’s threat to the foundations of the nation-state and a coup against it. Banna had a clear vision for building a parallel state, and despite Banna’s description of his group upon its founding as a movement seeking to bring about social change and having no interest in politics, a decade after its founding, specifically in May 1938, it announced its entry into the political arena and adopted positions hostile to the government and the existing political elites. It even worked to form groups within the army, the police, and the judiciary, in addition to establishing the Special System in the late 1930s, specifically in May 1938.

The center added that the idea of ​​governance and the administration of the state continued to entice Banna, but when he chose the way to pass that, he advised controlling the curricula and systems of education, media, and charitable institutions, leading to control of the state and penetration of official institutions.

The study went on to state that hatred of the nation-state is the most important pillar of the Brotherhood project. Members of the Brotherhood have been brought up to antagonize the state as an ignorant state that must be changed by all means, just as the nation-state does not constitute to them any importance compared to the realization of the dream of “world mastership”, so they understood what they believe to be the only legitimate form of society in Islam as a transnational caliphate.

This refers to the dilemma that the Moroccan Brotherhood is going through to the extent that it made them contradict the international group’s position and one of its foundations, which Badriya al-Rawi talked about in a study entitled “The State Among the Thinkers of the Muslim Brotherhood.”

Rawi explained, “The Brotherhood’s wings are used to manipulating positions, so they see them in a regional and international axis here and an axis hostile to it in another region.”