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Various End-reckonings, based on both the Talmud and the Zohar, led to the conclusion that the Messiah would appear in 5600 A.M. (the six-hundredth year of the sixth millennium), corresponding to 1840 C.E. The firmly entrenched belief appears in documents from throughout the Jewish world: Persia and Kurdistan, Morocco, the Land of Israel, Eastern Europe (Hasidic and non-Hasidic alike), and Western Europe. The documents are relatively few, given the Jews’ reluctance to discuss such matters in writing, but it appears as well in accounts by Christian missionaries of their conversations with Jews in most of those areas.

This chapter on elections and electoral systems in Morocco follows the same format as all the other country chapters in the book. The first section is introductory and contains a historical overview, discussion of the evolution of electoral provisions, an account of the current electoral provisions, and a comment on the electoral statistics. The second section consists of ten tables. These are: 2.1 Dates of National Elections, Referendums, and Coups d’Etat (there have been no coups d’état); 2.2 Electoral Body 1962–1997 (data on population size, registered voters, and votes cast); 2.3 Abbreviations (abbreviations and full names of political parties and alliances used in tables 2.6, 2.7, and 2.9); 2.4 Electoral Participation of Parties and Alliances 1963–1997 (participation of political parties and alliances in chronological order and including the years and number of contested elections); 2.5 Referendums 1962–1996 (details of registered voters and votes cast); 2.6 Elections for Constitutional Assembly (none held); 2.7 Parliamentary Elections 1963–1997 (details of registered voters and votes cast); 2.8 Composition of Parliament 1963–1997; 2.9 Presidential Elections (none held as Morocco is a constitutional monarchy); and 2.10 List of Power Holders 1961–1998.

Stephen Zunes compares and contrasts territorial disputes and forces that have attempted to influence outcome of Indonesian occupation of East Timor and Moroccan occupation of Western Sahara. The author concludes that the institutionalization of expanded borders led to resistance to state downsizing, and that opportunities for withdrawal from the occupied territory emerged in Indonesia only with the fall of the Sukharto regime and subsequent democratization. The author also shows how great power politics of the Cold War enabled the occupations, and the post‐Cold War international community was an obstacle to the full integration of the territories into the two states.

This introductory chapter provides an overview of the book's main themes. The book attempts to unlock the incipient industry of Islamism. This is, at its core, a work of political sociology, informed, most of all, by scholarship in social movement theory, comparative politics, and the sociology of religion. To make the material accessible to a wide variety of readers, the author has aimed to write in a lucid, narrative style. In his nearly four years in Morocco, he witnessed firsthand the development of political Islam in one place. But these experiences also shed light on what is happening in other parts of the Arab world.

This chapter presents the author's reflections on the methods and challenges involved in studying both legal and illegal Islamist movements up close. The author details his attempts to make contact and interview members of the Party of Justice and Development (PJD), a political party modeled after the Muslim Brotherhood. The author describes an approach he calls “shuttle ethnography,” which combines extended ethnographic fieldwork and the analysis of texts and relevant survey data when available (and appropriate). Like a shuttle diplomat, the author bounced between actors, challenging each group's pontifications with insights and objections culled from their competitors. He found that there was no better way to tease out their beliefs and positions than to invoke this contrarian view; and this allowed me to better understand the nuances and distinctions between and within groups.

This chapter seeks to understand how Islamist movements have evolved over time, and, in the process, provide important background on the political and religious contexts of the movements in question. In particular, it shows that Islamist movements coevolve. Focusing on the histories of Morocco's two main Islamist movements—the Justice and Spirituality Organization, or Al Adl wal Ihsan (Al Adl) and the Party of Justice and Development (PJD)—it suggests that their evolutions can only be fully appreciated if they are relayed in unison. These movements mirror one another depending on the competitive context, sometimes reflecting, sometimes refracting, sometimes borrowing, sometimes adapting or even reorganizing in order to keep up with the other.

This chapter delves directly into the lives of young Islamists. Who are the Islamist rank and file? To tackle this initial question, it hones in on the experiences of young people, not because they are anomalous, but because they are decidedly average. These lives are windows into the shared experiences of ordinary young people and an increasingly blurred Islamist base. In this way, they serve as introductions, as springboards, to the stories of citizens, colleagues, peers, confidantes, brothers, and sisters—all seemingly inconspicuous young people of various ages, professions, and backgrounds. To place them in national and regional contexts, the chapter also draws on survey data, census data, and voting results. But it is only from up-close that we can begin to discover critical details that are lost or distorted from afar.

This chapter continues the discussion of the lives of young Islamists, focusing on their articulations of their hopes and goals. Analyzing the trove of data that the author uncovered from first-person narratives and life histories, transcripts, and extended participant observation, the author found that young people were looking for nothing less than a new sense of self. Their decisions are multiple, multilayered, and constantly renegotiated, but they can only be understood by making sense of the new identities that are sustained by their collective action. The author argues that Islamism is not simply ideological; it is instrumental—an avenue to a new identity, to new ways of seeing and thinking about themselves. The author dubs this the new politics of personal empowerment, where Islamist movements are reimagined as individual improvement factories: places to go not simply to become better Muslims, but to better their lot in life or the perception of that lot.

This chapter explores how young Islamists relate to the authority of the state. The dawn of the twenty-first century brought new opportunities for Islamist activists, especially ones from illegal movements, to resist authority and to flourish. To begin with, their funding sources cannot easily be cut off. In addition, their overall ability to communicate is less easily disrupted. Finally, and perhaps most significantly, combating the dissemination of propaganda and publicity is nowhere near as straightforward as it once was. Authorities can outlaw the publication of materials or even confiscate books or clamp down on frightened booksellers, but banned movements can simply print more—and elsewhere.

This chapter considers the question of how an authoritarian Arab state enables or encumbers Islamist mobilization. It elucidates a different model of state action—different in both content and form: in what policies are pursued and in how they are implemented. The chapter suggests that the Moroccan state under King Mohammed VI has not simply elevated one Islamist group at the expense of the other, but rather, it has aimed to impede and impel distinct forms of activism within groups—in this case, attempting to draw new divides between religious and political modes of activism. These are policies that can be understood not simply by the old theory of divide and conquer, but by one more aptly conceptualized as selective suppression.

This chapter considers how young Islamist activists construct religious authority. To engage these questions, the author asked and allowed activists to construct for themselves what authority meant to them, with some even drawing an evolving organizational chart of their movements. The author observed signs of ambiguity, multiplicity, and even inconsistency. Some activists sought to go out of their way to illustrate that they were not under the control of any kind of religious authority, even conceiving something called “religion” as very much distinct from their work. Others blurred these categories, preferring to place their activism under the domain of some kind of religious authority, both explaining and attempting to show how it is part and parcel of their everyday existence. Some failed to mention religion as important to their work at all. Others spoke solely of it.

This chapter argues that young Islamists' constructions of authority are complex and multilayered. They have personalized religious authority by circulating it away from a single reading of a single figure, even one as supposedly central as their “guide.” They have re-appropriated and reconfigured the organization Yassine once established and the scope and the range of the guide's substantive reach. They have even re-appropriated Yassine's memory. From spiritual guide to secular politician, the roles assigned to the head of their organization are constructed to fit their own desires, and, in so doing, they preserve and embrace individual choice, making room for multiple voices within their movement.

This chapter suggests that the representations of religion in young Islamists' lives are not the product of prevarication, but rather of personalization. Religious authority has become circulated to such an extent that it has come to mean multiple things to multiple members. In the midst of this diversification, political party members increasingly appropriate the authority to interpret and represent what “Islam” means or should mean to others. None of these myriad representations constitutes “lies.” Instead, these words and constructions represent and reflect members' own strategic desires for themselves. The chapter shows how the haraka represents for some a site for religious study, a place of Qurʾanic learning unfettered by politics. For others, it is a place to make contacts and to get ahead: an instrumental, not ideological, site. For still others, it serves as a strategic site, a place to try out new ideas, and even as a convenient scapegoat. And, yet, for others, it is completely ignored; it simply has no place in their lives as party members.

This chapter argues that power dynamics within Islamist organizations are changing rapidly and dramatically. And these changes are happening, as they always have, not only from external constraints, but from internal pressures. This book offers new evidence not of the demise of Islamist movements, but of their lasting transformation. Young activists are poised to assert more control within their organizations, even initiate internal rebellions of their own, and perhaps also help break apart the very movements they helped grow. This is the case for four main reasons. First, making room for many might also mean laying the foundation for discord. Second, Islamist successes are increasingly replicable. Third, internal lines of religious authority are growing murky. Finally, skepticism of omnipotent central authority abounds. For members of the next Islamist generation, the Arab Spring is now part of their histories, just as independence struggles were for their grandparents.

There are four major ethnic-minority groups in the Netherlands: labour migrants from Turkey and Morocco, together with migrants from former Dutch colonies in the Caribbean, namely, Antilles and Surinam. Men from all four groups have lower labour-market participation and higher unemployment than the indigenous Dutch, and this holds for the second generation as well as for the first. First-generation Turkish and Moroccan women participate at considerably lower levels than indigenous women, whereas Surinamese and Antillean women participate at higher levels than their indigenous peers. Among second-generation women, however, these differences in participation have largely disappeared. The distribution of ethnic minorities across occupational classes also reveals a major change between generations. Overall, processes of social closure appear to continue to operate within Dutch society. Equal opportunities have not yet been achieved.

This chapter provides an overview of book's main themes. This book explores Kuwait and Jordan as two states that have similar clientelistic ties to the United States. Both are monarchies holding parliamentary elections, and each has similar levels of support for its Islamist opposition movements. However, the two states vary in their levels of anti-American sentiment among these Islamist opposition forces. This core difference reveals how concerns about a country's international relations shape state–society relations more broadly. Although the book builds its argument by focusing on the cases of Kuwait and Jordan, it also draws on evidence from two other monarchies that have varying degrees of anti-American sentiment among their Islamist opposition as well: Morocco and Saudi Arabia. Further, it extends the findings to Palestine's democratic experience, which resulted in Hamas' parliamentary victory in 2006.

Since the independence of Morocco in 1956, youth have been represented as the “dangerous class.” This chapter examines to what degree young Moroccans maintain a homogeneous relationship with political Islam, and investigates whether they are really different from the older generation. Data are used from several qualitative surveys conducted in Morocco during the past 20 years on religious aspects of urban youth to understand intergenerational relations. It is argued that youth do not constitute a coherent, uniform, or isolated unit, but that they position and reposition themselves as they react to internal and external dynamics. Although they feel victimized in different ways, their perceptions of injustice are not sufficient to provoke a passage to collective action. The comparison of today’s youth in Morocco with the older generation shows that they are subject to the same cleavages that run throughout the global society and are part of the process of globalization.