Sacred Performances

by M.E. Combs-Schilling

With penetrating insight Combs-Schilling illuminates the remarkable survival of one of the world's oldest monarchies, still ruling after 1200 years. The author unravels the paradox of this ancient yet progressive institution that has weathered invasion, economic collapse, and colonial assult. The pillars of stability for which political analysts typicaly search ― military strength, bureaucratic control, and commerical prosperity ― have often been absent in Morocco, sometimes for centuries. How then has the monarchy stood firm?

In this remarkable book, Combs-Schilling argues that the answer is to be found in the distinctive forms of ritual practice developed during times of great crises. Unique among Islamic governments, the Moroccan monarchy became cnetral to the popular celebrations of the most sacred rituals of Islam, cloaking itself in their sanctity.

Combs-schilling breaks new ground in thinking about ritual. The author explores the consequences of the replication and reinforcement of Morocco's national ceremonies in viallages and homes and the metaphorical equivalence thereby built. The author outlines how ritual metaphors simultaneously fuse the monarchy with the hallowed prophets of Islam and the mundane structures of family life.

In elucidating the forcefulness of ritual embodiment the book challenges anthropological theory. It demonstrates that rituals created realities by inscribing them deeply within the individual's body and mind. Rituals use eros and physical substance to build imaginative abstractions. Performances of exquisite beauty and grace make the monarchy intrinsic to definitions of male and female, to experience of birth, intercourse, death, and to the ultimate longing to break death's bonds.

Combs-Schilling creates a model for national political analysis that takes meaning as well as strategic power into account. The author applies the anthropological analysis of rituals to new arenas ― the nation-state and the world political economy ― without ever losing sight of the individual and the flow of daily life. The book clarifies a distinctive form of nationalism that expands the boundaries articulated by Anderson in Imagined Territories . Rituals rather than territory or administration came to define the Moroccan monarchy and the Moroccan nation under Western assault, and enabled them to survive.

For the novice, the book provides an unusual and compelling entry into Islamic culture and history. Yet it is provocative for the expert in its reinterpretation of the strategic dimensions of Muhammad's marriages and the political potency of the rituals of Islam where power, sacrifice, and sexual identity converge.

By revealing the link between national ceremony and individual identity, the author calls into question the popular view that sharply divides East and West and suggests commonalities in the structures of political-sexual power that are built into societies that operate within the cultural contexts of the world's three monotheistic Islam, Judaism, and Christianity.

Genres: Anthropology

377 pages, Paperback

First published October 15, 1989

Reviews

[Nick · Rating 2 out of 5]

"Sacred Performanes" is alternately a perceptive explanation of Moroccan Islam and a somewhat scary exploration of sexuality and politics in the region. Those are adjectives that aren't normally used in a review of this kind of academic book, although the former is more common than the latter. It is strongest and most convincing in its explication of the sources of authority for the Moroccan kingship, rooted in their blood right as descendants of Muhammad. As descendants, Combs-Schilling makes the case that the Moroccan kings are more legitimate than any other Muslim monarchy, specifically the Hashemites of Jordan or the Sa'uds of Saudi Arabia. The praise of the Moroccan kingship carries through Muhammad V's struggle against the French in the fifties and Hasan II's survival of coups in the 70s. (No mention is made, at least in the edition I read, of Malifa Oufkir's recently published story of how the children of one rebellious general were imprisoned in heartless conditions for at least a decade). But the politics are interesting; where it turns stomach-churning, is where it travels from Abraham, to the ritual sacrifice of rams, to the nature of kingship, to -- of all places -- the bridal chamber. "Moroccan rituals not only play upon the most basic experiences of life -- birth, intercourse, and death-- but systematically combine them with the physical attributes of the male form--a single, erect figure in white-- to create a powerful basic level experience that confirms the male's dominance of these processes... the ritual confirms that males engage in the decisive actions upon which the fate of the whole depends." That is a chilling refusal of modernity, a ratification of the medieval. One can only hope that the analysis has gone overboard.

[Misamay · Rating 1 out of 5]

orientalism at it's most painful-when the author actually thinks her sensationalist, fetishized account of Moroccan religious rituals is different from the centuries of western scholarship on the area, the orientalist western scholarship of the area-typical western liberal academic rubbish that tries to fashion itself as a compassionate and aware study of Moroccan society and Islam.

[Shiye Fu · Rating 1 out of 5]

Totally bullshit!