Religious Establishment and Regime Survival: The Politics of Religious Education in Morocco and Tunisia, 1956-2010

This dissertation investigates the politics of religious establishment in the Arab Middle East, as played out in the realm of education. Most Arab countries emerging from colonial rule incorporated formal state sponsorship of Islam into their state- and nation-building projects, as reflected in constitutional stipulations that Islam was "the religion of the state." But there has been considerable variation -- both between states and within states over time -- in the configuration of this religious establishment, i.e. in the way these states have institutionalized religion and regulated religious practice and interpretation. This variation has been evident in any number of policy domains, not least in the realm of education, but an overarching theory to explain such variation has been elusive. Building on recent scholarship, the thesis argues that the nature of religious establishment in these countries has resulted from the interplay of three key factors: i) the regime's ideology of legitimation, ii) the arrangement of opponents and supporters confronting the regime, and iii) the regime's institutional endowment (e.g., whether the regime enjoys a hegemonic party and/or a bureaucracy capable of imposing its will). By analyzing the political processes at work as Morocco and Tunisia regulated religious education, the thesis takes us a step closer to understanding the factors fueling differential religious establishment, and sheds new light on the connections between political authoritarianism, government entanglement in religion, and state-religion relations more generally in the Arab world.