Master and Disciple: The Cultural Foundations of Moroccan Authoritarianism.

• Author: GREGG, GARY S.
• Position: Review

Master and Disciple: The Cultural Foundations of Moroccan Authoritarianism. By ABDULLAH HAMMOUDI. Chicago: UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS, 1997. Pp. xxiv + 195. $38 (cloth); $13.95 (paper)

Abdullah Hammoudi's Master and Disciple weaves historical and ethnographic inquiries into a bold, cogent account of "modern authoritarianism" in Arab societies. For both the broad strokes of its interpretation and the careful detailing of its analysis, it makes a major contribution to the study of Middle Eastern political culture, and should alter the dyadic-negotiation view of Moroccan society and self advanced by Geertz, Rosen, and Eickelman. Hammoudi contends that the "amazing degree of consistency in the way power is experienced throughout the Arab world" (p. 3) arises from a cultural model of senior-junior, patron-client, master-disciple relationships that hegemonically guides elite and popular imaginings of political association. Pervading the etiquettes of daily life, this model operates at the "threshold of enunciability" (p. vii) and effectively undermines more egalitarian forms of association.

Yet Hammoudi never speaks of the master-disciple model as if its historical longevity derives from its own momentum. He marshals an array of ethnographic material to demonstrate that master-disciple is not the only model of association available to Moroccans, and that the model itself is an unstable, volatile one, charged with ambivalence and incipient rebellion. To this he adds an historical analysis that shows how the model coalesced in the pre-colonial century and underwent important transformations in colonial and post-colonial eras. His skillful braiding of these two lines of inquiry yields a nuanced description of how political processes flowing from the center have refashioned authority schemata that developed on the periphery, and projected them into newly created social domains (schools, bureaucracies, unions, parties)--establishing a predominance of stylized "precedence relations" that are neither traditional nor modern.

Master and Disciple is perhaps most impressive for the detail with which it builds its interpretation--testifying to a century of ethnographic research in Morocco and to the author's ability to sift and synthesize it. The work focuses innovatively on the historical persona and role of the rural notable. Even though tribal big men and saints represented antipodes in pre-colonial Morocco, Hammoudi argues that they developed parallel...