André Azoulay: “Moroccan society has put the richness of all its diversities at the heart of its modernity”

Moroccan society is the best example of a country that has placed the richness of all its diversities at the heart of its modernity. Speaking at a conference on “mutual tolerance” organised by the Moroccan Association of the Legion of Honour at the National Library, André Azoulay, advisor to His Majesty the King, expressed his pride that diversity in Morocco is not only a reality but also a consensus.

“Today, we are a country that expresses a national reality, a social reality, a cultural reality that is the ability to make diversity a parameter, an ordinary dimension of our daily life and our social relations. The remarks were made by André Azoulay, Advisor to H.M. the King, who spoke Thursday in Rabat at the opening of a conference on “mutual tolerance” organized by the Moroccan Association of the Legion of Honor (AMLH).
For Mr. Azoulay, “living together cannot be a rhetoric”. In this sense, he said he was proud that diversity in Morocco is today not only a reality, but that it is a consensus. “I am impressed, especially in the younger generations, by this quest, this will to appropriate this diversity. We are proud, much more often than before, of the fact that we are able to associate our spiritualities, to know our differences better, and all of this reinforces and gives even more legitimacy to our unity,” he noted. Continuing his opening speech, the Advisor to H.M. the King said that “we must collectively have this approach which is to play our Morocco in another division. We have the capacity and the legitimacy to do so. We are reaping the fruits today, where others have turned their backs on this quest and have not been able to give it the response it deserved, when all around us flourished all the archaisms, all the extremisms and all the fractures.” For his part, the professor at the University of Paris-Est Créteil, Ali Benmakhlouf, explained in his speech that the word tolerance contains a double meaning.

The first, a minimalist one, amounts to “refraining from prohibiting”. Tolerance is thus presented here as a “negative virtue”. The second, much more positive meaning, consists of “admitting a way of acting or thinking that is different from the one you adopt yourself,” he stressed. Tolerance recognizes the duality of man and is based on the principle of his ability to freely associate his thoughts. “This is how a judicious education could avoid the uniformity of ideas,” Benmakhlouf said. In the same vein, columnist and journalist Abdellah Tourabi stressed “the need to have (in a society) opinions that are completely divergent”, far from any tribalism. Highlighting the uniqueness of Moroccan society, which lies in its tolerance and pacifism, the journalist noted that the results of the last elections show the secularization of the Moroccan’s political choices, which have opted for political offers other than those based on religious discourse. Organized on Thursday at the National Library in Rabat, this conference is the first public event of the AMLH, as its president, Mr. Azoulay, stressed. “It is the result of a group work and the proof of a capacity to work together for the achievement of common goals,” said the treasurer general of the Kingdom and chairman of the “events” committee of the association, Noureddine Bensouda.