Morocco's Little Inquisition
KAZEMZADEH, F.
THE CAMPAIGN AGAINST BAHAI Morocco's Little Inquisition By F. Kazemzadeh When on January 5 of this year it was announced in Rabat that three ministers, all members of the powerful Istiqlal...
...The arrests in Nador had been preceded by a press campaign waged mainly in the pages of the Casablanca newspaper...
...Since the indictment declared that prosecution had been initiated on the urging of El Fassi, the Minister of Islamic Affairs, the defense lawyers asked that he appear in court...
...and that they did not conform to the Moslem practices of prayer and fasting...
...Undeterred, the court continued the trial without the defense...
...The Government surely does not share the view of its servant...
...The arrested men were all held without formal charges until the end of October...
...He went on to say, though, that while there was freedom for all religions in Morocco, "Bahai is not a religion, [it is] rather something that attacks public order...
...All are relatively young and, as one newspaper pointed out, they constituted the intellectual elite of Nador...
...Tolerance can be limited only by a real attack on public order...
...that this happens in Morocco is, as Le Monde put it, a matter for stupefaction...
...The court's verdict shocked the liberal and democratic elements of the Kingdom...
...The Cabinet, composed of disparate elements, had in fact been rent by dissension...
...It is dedicated to the principle of the unity of mankind, and teaches that the great religions of the world are essentially one, being multiple expressions of one reality...
...These are the Bahais...
...Government spokesmen explained that the resignations had been caused by disagreements over economic and financial policy...
...The reaction of the French and British press added fuel to the controversy raging between EI Fassi and his liberal opponents...
...In a letter of protest they denounced the trial as a violation of legal procedure, the Constitution and the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights...
...As is often the case, the official explanation was utterly inadequate...
...American Bahais appealed to President Kennedy...
...He did not "agree with the death sentence," however, and declared that if all other appeals were exhausted, he would pardon the condemned men...
...The setback suffered by El Fassi may be only temporary, but it is evident that a grave decision is at hand, a decision which will in the end rest with young King Hassan II: Will Morocco continue along the path of constitutionalism, tolerance and freedom, or will it turn away from the progress achieved since its independence and turn toward fanaticism and oppression...
...If nothing else, the courage and dignity of the accused won them the admiration of the vast throng that gathered in the courtroom and loudly expressed its disapproval of the proceedings...
...But it was neither economics nor finance that forced Allai El Fassi, Istiqlal's leader, and his friends out of the Government...
...Asked about the Bahai case, the King stated that he thought the conviction had been a just one...
...We cannot help but write that if God is indivisible, so is tolerance...
...Exactly a year ago this month, on April 10, 1962, five adherents of the Bahai faith were arrested and jailed in Nador...
...The Bahai International Community, an organization representing the faith's National Assemblies in 57 countries, cabled U Thant...
...Les Phares, a Moroccan weekly founded and directed by Ahmed Reda Guedira, Minister of the Interior and of Agriculture, wrote on December 22 that Morocco, "which, on the initiative of a young and dynamic Sovereign, open to modern ideas, had given itself a Constitution acknowledged as liberal by the entire world," was not the country where such events should occur...
...The new Moroccan Constitution, guaranteeing religious freedom and other liberties, had been adopted less than two weeks before the end of the Nador trial and now appeared to be dying in its infancy...
...The immediate cause of their withdrawal was a trial that had taken place in the small Riff town of Nador in which three men had been sentenced to death, five to life imprisonment and one to 10 years...
...THE CAMPAIGN AGAINST BAHAI Morocco's Little Inquisition By F. Kazemzadeh When on January 5 of this year it was announced in Rabat that three ministers, all members of the powerful Istiqlal (Independence) party, had resigned from the Moroccan Cabinet...
...But the record of pre-trial interrogation and of the trial itself shows that the police and the court were conducting a religious inquisition...
...Morocco's Supreme Court of Appeals will review it sometime in the near future...
...And the facts appear to support the thesis...
...In each instance, the dismissed man was told that his religion made his further employment impossible...
...On December 7, 1961, Al Alain claimed that Islam was in decline because of the activities of Christian and Jewish missionaries, adding to these "another community which was driven out of the Islamic East and came to Morocco with its destructive ideas...
...It was specifically stated that the accused "have studied books treating of the Bahai faith and its philosophy and that they believed in it...
...Their every move having been frustrated, the lawyers advised their clients to answer no further questions and themselves withdrew from the case...
...The trial opened December 10, and from the very first it became clear that justice would not be done...
...The bill of indictment contained five charges: rebellion, formation of an association of criminals, illegal formation of an association, conspiring against public order, and offenses against Islam...
...Protests and appeals for justice initiated by Bahai communities in Europe and America further alarmed those Moroccans, including Cabinet Ministers, who were concerned about their country's good name...
...Le Figaro, France-Soir and, especially, Le Monde denounced the Nador verdict as a barbarity which besmirched the good name of a friendly nation...
...a belief held by Christians but not by Bahais...
...That their case was finally brought into court may have been the result of intervention by the International League for the Rights of Man, whose chairman, Roger Baldwin, had expressed his concern to the Moroccan Government over the detention and the treatment of 14 men who had not even been accused of any crime...
...When Louis Gravier reported in Le Monde on January 1, 1963, that El Fassi, Mohammed Boucetta, and Mohammed Douiri had resigned from the Cabinet, the story was denied...
...F. Kazemzadeh is Associate Professor of History at Yale University...
...It has been suggested with far greater plausibility, however, that El Fassi was using a religious issue for political purposes...
...And the Manchester Guardian, on December 21, wrote: "It is astonishing enough that courts should still be condemning men to death for their religion anywhere in the world...
...Bahai advocates, among other things, the elimination of religious, racial and national prejudice, universal education, equality of sexes, adoption of an international auxiliary language and the abolition of war...
...To have discovered and eliminated a plot against the official religion and the State would have given the Istiqlal a tremendous advantage on the eve of the first election under the new Constitution...
...Finally, on January 5 it was officially announced in Morocco that El Fassi and his friends had left the Government...
...The instigators of the campaign against the Bahais claimed that their only purpose was to defend Islam against a dangerous heresy...
...If one is to judge by what King Hassan said during his visit to New York early this month, prospects for religious tolerance in Morocco are not very good...
...His position in the Cabinet was uncertain...
...In short, according to this view, El Fassi needed a dramatic issue, and he found it in the form of a small, politically powerless minority...
...And what turned the Nador trial into a cause célèbre, precipitating a bitter controversy in the Moroccan press, evoking unfavorable comment in France, Britain and elsewhere, and ultimately leading to the Cabinet reshuffle, was the nature of the case itself...
...British adherents wrote to the Queen...
...The judges, however, refused to call him...
...The attacks in the press were followed by the dismissal of several Bahai adherents from their jobs—one of them a professor of fine arts at the University of Tetouan...
...His party would have found it difficult to gain mass support with such issues as the development of the Sahara or the rate of economic growth...
...Bahai, the faith that had attracted their interest, originated in Iran in the middle of the 19th century...
...The Nador case is not over...
...The men arrested included several schoolteachers, a police inspector and several provincial Government officials...
...In a two-part article entitled "The Witches of Nador," the Rabat daily Maroc-Information on December 16-17 deplored "this embryonic inquisition which knocks on the doors of the Kingdom...
...that they "believed that God can be imagined in the state of a person and can be situated in time...
...Over the next three months four others were apprehended, as were five Moslems who had discussed the Bahai religion with their friends, read or owned Bahai literature or associated with Bahais...
...Al Alani, an Istiqlal organ...
...On January 2 Gravier repeated his report, pointing out that the struggle between El Fassi, Boucetta, Douiri and the nonIstiqlal members of the Cabinet was waged over the issue of Nador as well as the older issues of economy and finance...
...One might, indeed, write of the judgment as an example of the small-town obscurantism with which every country is plagued, were it not for an article by an official in the Ministry of Islam Affairs, who said that the court had only applied the national law in a way that did not contradict the Declaration of Human Rights...
...From the pages of Moroccan newspapers the controversy over the Nador verdict moved into the secret recesses of the Government...
Vol. 46 • April 1963 • No. 9
