Un groupe religieux à l’épreuve du parti politique
Sécularisation de l’islamisme au Maroc : mouvement de l’unicité et de la réforme-Parti de la justice et du développement  (1996-2011)

Throughout the Islamic world, a political family composed of what are rightly or wrongly named “moderate Islamist parties” obtains exceptional results whenever one of its members participates in an election that is minimally transparent (for instance in Turkey, Morocco, Palestine and Egypt). This rule is confirmed by the initial involvements of Islamists in the Arab Spring (in Egypt and Tunisia for example). Academically, in this context an important hypothesis emerges according to which the evolution of many Islamist organizations into political parties that actively participate in the public life of their countries would indicate that these organizations are undergoing a process of secularization motivated by a sincere conversion to democracy. Islamism’s hypothetical tendency towards secularization and conversion to democracy seems reminiscent of a remarkably similar experience in the Christian West, namely the theoretical and organizational evolution of political Christianity, which gave birth to what is known today as “Christian democracy”, in response to a long series of intellectual revisions.  Might moderate Islamism be secularized and converted into democracy in a mode similar to that which gave birth to Christian Democrat parties in the West? In this thesis, prepared under joint supervision between the University of Montreal in Canada and the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes Paris-Sorbonne in France, the aforementioned hypothesis is verified in a very specific context. The scope of the study is limited to examining a particular group within the Moroccan Islamist landscape—the Parti de la justice et du développement (PJD), as well as its sister outfit devoted to religious predication, the Mouvement de l’unicité et de la réforme (MUR). This period under consideration ranges from the birth of the PJD in 1996 to its coming to power in 2011. Moreover, the reconstitution and the socio-historical analysis proposed in this study begin in 1969 with the birth of the Mouvement de la jeunesse islamique, from which the group being examined evolved. The study asks very specific questions concerning the fate of the religious movement in response to the challenges of the political party. Further still, it examines the challenging relation of religion and politics in the group’s actual modes of thinking and acting.      With this purpose in mind, the study adopts an interdisciplinary framework combining approaches that stem from political and religious sociology as well as other social sciences, such as history and political science. Its analytical corpus is the product of fieldwork research being done during numerous trips to Morocco from 2008 to 2014. These trips made it possible to reconstitute a timeline of events and to gather necessary documentation from the PJD/MUR. It also provided the opportunity to meet and interview leaders and ideologues that are most influential in the ideological and organizational evolution of the movement.

Keyphrases: Islam, Jeunesse islamique, Islamism, post-islamism, Secularization, Christian democracy, Morocco, Monarchy, Islamic state, Democracy