Islam et modernité dans un manuel d’école au Maroc

Abstract

In this article, we try to show how the school textbook, understood as a physical object, transforms a student’s relation to Islam. To do this, we first look at the “semantic contents” of a third-year primary school Arabic textbook used in Moroccan public education. We show how Islam is explicitly linked to Moroccan identity and the monarchy. We then place these discourses into perspective with the concept of an “objectification” of Islam. Further, we consider the material forms of the textbook to show that processes of objectification also take place “subliminally” at the level of the page layout, in the gaps and tables that we come across page after page. Finally, we show how these particular material forms respond to a specifically modern disposition of knowledge and how these impact perceptions of Islam.

Keywords

• Islam
• Morocco
• school
• textbook
• objectivation
• modernity