Religious Authorization of the Justice and Spirituality Movement in Morocco.

Jamaat al-Adl wal-Ihsan, or the Justice and Spirituality Movement (JSM), is the largest oppositional movement in Morocco, which combines Islam and politics to mobilize against the monarchy for greater democratization in the country. JSM is neither a political Islamist movement nor a Sufi order but it combines spirituality and justice, piety and politics. This article examines how JSM combines spirituality and politics in practice by analyzing the religious authorization process with ethnographic data based on participant observation and interviews. It illustrates that JSM is able to combine spirituality and justice through its central activity of Majlis al-Nasiha. There are various practices involved in this biweekly gathering of members and novices such as rituals, informal talks, and also qas ru'ya, or the sharing of dreams and visions. This article argues that JSM is able to combine spirituality and politics through vision-sharing, which combines the mystical form of dreams with political content in the religious authorization process of JSM. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]