A battle is brewing on Moroccan beaches between religious hardliners and the kingdom’s authorities.
Moroccan authorities intervened July 8th
to prevent more than 60 students belonging to the banned Islamist group
Al Adl Wal Ihsane (Justice and Charity) from setting up camp on Terga
beach, 40km from the city of Tetouan in the country’s north.
The leaders of the ruling Justice and
Development party (PJD) said the aim of the Al Adl Wal Ihsane camps was
to provoke the government, rather than recreation.
“I do not favor summer camping of a
sectarian and group nature, because this type of camping may be
considered a provocative step more than summer vacationing and
entertainment,” PJD leader El Ali Hami El Din said in response.
Addressing the banned group, Hami El Din
added: “I am against camps that only comprise followers of a trend or a
particular group, because camping then becomes factional. But in return
I ask the authorities to push for clean beaches consistent with the
wishes of conservative families.”
Responding to Hami El Din, Hassan
Bennajeh, a member of the General Secretariat of the Political
Department of Al Adl Wal Ihsane, told Magharebia he hoped the remarks
were “a slip of the tongue”. Bennajeh continued, “I rebuke his use of
the term sectarian.”
Bennajeh explained to Magharebia that
“the authorities intervened violently and forbid a faction of Al Adl Wal
Ihsane students who were preparing to camp in the Terga area from doing
so”.
“The intervention resulted in a range of
injuries among the students and created an atmosphere of terror after
the doors of the dwellings they had rented were broken down and the
students were taken out by force, and they were forced to leave in the
direction of their cities,” he claimed.
The official spokesman for the banned
group, Fathallah Arsalan, has defended the right of his group to
organize their own closed camps.
“We still stand by our right to camp the
way we like it, as guaranteed to us by law [under] the right of
association and movement,” he said.
Al Adl Wal Ihsane has been prevented
from establishing camps since 2000. It had attracted more than 40,000
summer visitors in the year before the ban. At that time, Al Adl Wal
Ihsane divided Sidi Bou Alnaim Beach into two parts, one for men and
another for women, keeping them from seeing each other. Its tight
organization overwhelmed authorities, who decided to prevent camps whose
visitors increase year after year.
Salé resident Hamid Buras, who attended
the last Al Adl Wal Ihsane camp, told Magharebia that he did “not know
why the state is fighting the camps of the group, which seeks to create
an environment for summer vacationing respectful of conservative
families”.
“The group’s camps respect our
conservative Islamic society, and we and our children have the right to
enjoy the beach away from views of nudity, debauchery and immorality
that characterize nowadays our Moroccan beaches,” Buras added.
In contrast, Khalid Amar, an employee,
contended that the conservative group had no right to control Moroccan
beaches and make them exclusive for its followers and supporters.
“Whoever wants recreation, let him take
his family to the beach and no one will stop him, but to monopolize the
beach and wear beards to display their strength, I am firmly with the
intervention of the state,” he added.
For his part, Islamic scholar Abdel Bari
Zamzami said: “It is not the right of members and supporters of the
group to monopolize areas of the beaches for themselves to the exclusion
of the rest of God’s creation”.
“And if the group decides to organize
its summer camps by descending on public beaches by force in the same
way in which it succeeded for years, the authorities will prevent
it—then it will be legally prohibited without dispute,” he added.
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