The word “bureaucracy” rarely provokes images of timeliness and excitement. Rather, this word conveys mental pictures of administrative red tape and deadwood government employees. Yet, in her new book built on extensive fieldwork, original interviews, and primary Arabic sources, Ann Marie Wainscott makes bureaucracy sexy. Specifically, her timely, well-written book seeks to answer the fascinating question: How have states of the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) responded to the War on Terror? Although this subject has been investigated extensively in sub-Saharan African states, Wainscott emphasizes that scholars of the MENA have left it underexplored (p. 13). Whereas most Arab states have used coercion to stunt the growth of terrorism and control the religious sphere, Morocco—as Wainscott shows—has used bureaucracy as a strategy to accomplish these objectives. This is the core and crucial theoretical contribution of her book, Bureaucratizing Islam: Morocco and the War on Terror.

Morocco's “bureaucratization of Islam,” Wainscott explains, is a strategy that “co-opts existing religious elites and allows the state to form new, loyal religious elites,” by assuming control of existing educational institutions that train religious leaders, confer their religious credentials, and provide employment (p. 2). By religious leaders, Wainscott mostly means Islamic religious scholars (the ‘ulama, imams, etc.), and the book delimits its analysis to these political actors. Ultimately, this strategy contains potential opposition from religious leaders, who become a new “loyal class of bureaucrats” embedded in government ministries, think tanks, and institutes (p. 7). Morocco's state “centralizes religious authority within its own institutions,” making religious leaders its bureaucrats (p. 14). In articulating this theory, Wainscott also introduces a continuum of coercive and non-coercive strategies to control these religious leaders, including “security approaches on one end and bureaucratic solutions on the other” (p. 8). The book surmises that Morocco's approach represents a “more sustainable” strategy to control the religious sphere (p. 2), because it employs far less coercion (pp. 2, 27). Indeed, Morocco's strategy to control the religious sphere “stands out for how little coercion it has required” (p. x).

The book's internal chapters support this theory, drawing on unique evidence from over 18 months of overseas research in Morocco. Chapter two explains how Morocco began with a “security-focused approach” to control the religious sphere immediately after the 2003 Casablanca terrorist attacks but, subsequently, pivoted toward a bureaucratic approach. Chapters two and three, respectively, describe the regime's main reforms and programs that have been implemented to bureaucratize Islam. These included, first, theological reforms that have encouraged Sunni Malikism and Sufism and discouraged Salafism and Shi'ism (p. 72). Second, the regime financed a large expansion of Morocco's religious bureaucracy, creating numerous new Islamic agencies, institutes, and think tanks. It also dramatically expanded the staff employed at the Ministry of Endowments and Islamic Affairs, increasing 774 percent between 2003 and 2014 (i.e. from 451 to 4,081 employees) (p. 105). The ministry's budget also grew by an average of 19 percent per year during this period, and spiked up to 73 percent in the years immediately following domestic terrorist attacks (p. 106). Chapters five, six, and seven examine at particular policy areas—family law, education policy, and foreign policy—that show the effects of Morocco's bureaucratization of Islam (135). This reader found the discussions of the Moroccan state's domestication of Qarawiyyin University (p. 184-190) and its training of West African Imams (p. 207-236) particularly informative.

This book features few shortcomings, and its highly original evidence and novel theory intrigued this reader. At first glance, Morocco's state does indeed seem to have used less coercion than other Arab states in stunting potential religious opposition. Yet, as Wainscott's book effectively shows, this approach has been most exemplified in its dealings with religious scholars (‘ulama, imams, etc.). However, when we look at how the Moroccan state has dealt with other types of religious leaders, notably those of Islamist political parties and social movements, the record is more mixed. Following the Justice and Development Party's (PJD) large parliamentary gains in 2002, for example, the Moroccan state nearly banned this Islamist party in 2003. Indeed, the PJD was so afraid of potential repression that, as Michael Willis has shown, it willfully restrained its electoral victories to avoid provoking the regime's ire (“Morocco's Islamists and the Legislative Elections of 2002: The Strange Case of the Party that Did not Want to Win,” Mediterranean Politics, vol. 9, no. 1). Then, in the late 2000s, the regime permitted this Islamist party to win elected positions, though it also used coercion against some of its candidates. It ousted the PJD mayor of Meknès (Aboubakr Belkora) from his post in February 2009, beat a PJD candidate into a coma in Oujda in June 2009, and imprisoned the PJD vice mayor of Salé (Jama'a Moatassim) for several months in late 2010. Moreover, although the PJD was permitted to win the 2011 and 2016 parliamentary elections and form coalition governments, the regime ultimately forced its prime minister, Abdelilah Benkirane, to resign because he was perceived to have become too popular and powerful. The book could also have benefited from examining the case of another small Islamist political party, al-badil al-hadari, which the regime banned in 2008. Had the book also analyzed religious leaders from such Islamist parties and movements in addition to religious scholars, then perhaps its theory would also have depicted Morocco's security and bureaucratic strategies as working simultaneously, or in tandem. Certainly such strategies are not mutually exclusive, as Wainscott notes (p. 7).

In sum, Bureaucratizing Islam is a highly original and readable book, which makes an important contribution to scholarly understanding of the relationship between religion and politics in Morocco, specifically, and the MENA region, more broadly.