Sexual Panopticon in the Kingdom of Morocco

“Are you guys having sex in there??”

Let’s talk about sex. Specifically, let’s talk about the bizarre dynamics of how sex is policed in the Islamic Kingdom that is my homeland.

Morocco’s government is explicitly religious — there is no such thing as separation of Mosque and State. The constitution establishes the King as Amir al-Mu’minin, the supreme commander of the faithful. Morocco isn’t alone here, as Muslim countries are notable not only for formally adopting a state religion but for regularly using government violence to enforce pious conduct among their populaces. This kind of enforcement is facilitated by a population’s homogeneity — ninety-nine percent of Moroccans are Muslim and drawn from the same Arab-Berber ethnic stock. Given these factors, you might expect a very strict, orthodox version of Islam to reign, but the truth is a little more complicated. 

Saudi Arabia stands out for its uniquely puritanical approach to Islam (known as Wahhabism), and for the notoriety of its religious police force (known as the mutawwa’in). The stories you’ve heard about Islam in general are probably true. Alcohol is haram. Pork is haram. Premarital sex is hella haram (unless you get a temporary marriage with a prostitute), and don’t get me started on the premarital sex with a drunken pig hat trick. Some edicts are easier to enforce than others (say, by monitoring agricultural supply chains), but because fornication usually happens behind closed doors, the mutawwa’in schlep around Saudi Arabia’s public spaces to cut off the problem at the source: ensuring no unrelated people of the opposite sex ever get a chance to interact alone. The authorities will do things like surveil entrances to shopping malls and make sure single men never set foot inside unless they’re accompanied by a female relative. Any boy and girl caught on a date at a park or wherever might get forcibly escorted to the local police station. (Paradoxically, this obsession with disrupting such dyads might have the unintended consequences of making it easier for gay men to date — no one bats an eye at two dudes hanging out.)

Morocco is significantly chiller on this front. Compared to other Muslim countries, Morocco is known for being fairly relaxed — the land where women can wear bikinis to the beach and are not legally prohibited from operating motor vehicles, and where men and women freely comingle in public without the threat of being caned.

What accounts for this? It’s Complicated™, but one explanation has to do with tourism. As the birthplace of Islam, Saudi Arabia welcomes millions of visitors for the Hajj — the annual pilgrimage to Mecca. Because this enormous “tourism” economy comes preinstalled, the country has long been kind of hostile to and uninterested in Western tourism (entire cities, like Mecca and Medina, are completely forbidden to non-Muslims).

In contrast, Morocco’s location as one of the gateways to the Mediterranean is consistent with its long history of welcoming Western visitors (fun fact: it was the first country to recognize the newly independent United States back in 1777). Morocco often ties Egypt for first place as the most popular tourist destination in Africa, with millions of visitors every year, despite not having any pyramids. The economy’s heavy reliance on tourism necessarily encourages tolerance of foreign kafirs purely as a cynical, pragmatic matter.

The puzzle about how the government can have its cake (enforce religious mores) and eat it too (don’t scare the tourists) nevertheless remains. One way it tries to solve this conundrum is simply by explicitly bifurcating the legal code, with some laws carving out broad exceptions for foreigners. It’s impossible to keep this laissez-faire approach exclusively quarantined just to les étrangers, and so the tolerance for secularism necessarily bleeds out somewhat.

While Morocco may lack Saudi-style Sharia SWAT teams, a distributed network of civilian snitches can step in to fill the void wherever the government’s efforts at morality policing fall short. In 2016, two gay men were violently beaten by neighbors who shouted on the now-unavailable video “this is not manliness” throughout the attack. The assailants were the ones who summoned the police, who then arrested the victims for “sexual deviancy.” For economic reasons, but also to avoid the impropriety of scandal, single adults in Morocco are expected to reside with their families and move out only when they get married. Studies have consistently established that the most reliable form of birth control is to live in your parents’ apartment with your four siblings. And so landlords in Morocco will flat-out refuse to lease apartments to unmarried individuals, especially women, for fear of potentially bringing dishonor to their roof. Good luck finding a place to hook up with your Minder match.

“What about hotels?” you sheepishly ask. You naive fool, they’re way ahead of you. The ultimate example of this public-private partnership enforcement is Article 490 of the penal code, which prohibits unmarried couples from renting hotel rooms. Anyone caught is liable to jail terms, and hotel keepers are legally required to ask for marriage certificates, with police officers checking their logs every week to ensure compliance.

I was subject to this myself. The last time I visited my homeland, I briefly stayed with my sister at a hotel. I announced myself at the front desk, and upon realizing that I, a full-blooded male with no wedding ring, was going to reside in the same room as a female who also lacked a ring, the clerk gave me a raised eyebrow. You’d think our sharing a last name would have been sufficient evidence for the front desk, but given the prevalence and acceptance of cousin marriage in this area, I was required by the keeper to provide proof of sufficient consanguinity. Season two of the masterpiece TV show Ramy portrayed the titular character confronted by Cairo hotel staff about him shacking up with his cousin (spoiler: they were indeed fucking).¹ The encounter was surprising (and terrifying) enough that some viewers expressed incredulity at this plot point, but rest assured, it’s a depiction of something very real.

A cousin of mine — male, single, unmarried, and on the aforementioned form of parental cohabitation birth control — told me his favorite method for finding a place to hook up: Arrive separately to the hotel, get two separate rooms, and sneak into the same room when the coast is clear. If somehow the double-booking scheme falls through, you can get the hotelier to look the other way with a fistful of dirhams.

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Maybe now’s a good time to talk about how corrupt Morocco is. Not only can you bribe cops, bureaucrats, judges, officials, whoever to make problems go away, it’s expected of you to make anything happen. Because corruption is, by definition, surreptitious and thus difficult to observe and measure directly, the best evidence normally available are studies like the Corruption Perception Index, which rely on subjective reporting. On that ranking, Morocco places eighty-seventh out of 180 countries for honesty. But perception doesn’t tell us the full story on corruption, so I want to take this opportunity to cite what is perhaps my favorite economics study, based solely on its ingenious methodology.

Diplomats enjoy legal immunity, and for a while this extended even to banalities like parking tickets. Researchers examined the pattern of parking violations of United Nations diplomats working in Manhattan and used it to construct a plausible heuristic for each country’s social norms for corruption — the idea being that a history either of no violations or no unpaid tickets (despite the lack of legal penalties) would indicate a low propensity for corruption. By the unpaid tickets standard, Morocco ranked #13 in the world for corruption.

This illustrates the other way the legal system is functionally bifurcated: money. The ban on unmarried couples staying in hotels is one of the laws that, at least on paper, applies equally both to Moroccans and foreigners. But officials know not to do something as idiotic as enforcing fornication prohibitions on dumbfounded white people just there to hashtag-Marrakesh and, most importantly, spend money. Everyone knows not to kill the golden goose of tourism, but equally as important is not to slut-shame it either.

Similarly, Muslims — which all Moroccans are legally assumed to be unless officially denoted otherwise — are purportedly prohibited from purchasing alcohol of any kind in Morocco, and yet this decree is flagrantly and openly violated every day. Alcohol bodegas are found on almost every corner, and none of the proprietors inquire about the Shahadah at the point of sale. Same with Moroccans rich enough to eat at a restaurant — they’re presumed to be secular enough to be trusted to peruse the wine list. Either way, there’s enough lucre to grease the wheels and keep the coppers at bay.

The economist Bruce Yandle coined the term “Bootleggers and Baptists” to describe a type of regulatory capture. Baptists are the ones pure of heart, who want to ban alcohol for moral reasons. Bootleggers are the profiteers, who want to ban alcohol for their pecuniary benefit because they have a competitive advantage working within an illicit market. The ones who want to uphold the law work synergistically (if unintentionally) with the ones seeking to break it for profit. The movement to repeal Morocco’s hotel law has made some progress, but it has also been hit by pushback from Baptists and Bootleggers alike. The Baptists are ever concerned about the youth’s downward trajectory into degeneracy, and anxious about transforming the Kingdom’s hotels into functional brothels (which, given the lack of hook-up venues, is not an unreasonable concern). The Bootleggers are hoteliers who benefit from the “double-booking” trick and government officials reluctant to give up a source of extorted bribery. Meanwhile, the loopholes built into the system mean that the law really only applies to the poors, so who cares?

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I’ll end with a story an aunt relayed to me, which perfectly illustrates the bizarre amalgam of business-as-usual corruption within Moroccan law enforcement.

My aunt was driving with her friend to another city, miles away from her home. A cop pulled her over for speeding. The traffic code is enforced under penalty of a fine, with the money paid directly to the officer (I know, it’s nuts). If you don’t happen to have the money on hand, not a problem — they’ll just confiscate your actual driver license and hold it at the local Sûreté Nationale bureau until you can come back with the funds.

Problem number one: My aunt did not have enough to pay the full traffic fine amount, the functional equivalent of about $40, and having her license confiscated this far away from her home would be an enormous hassle. While the cop was away, her passenger helpfully suggested offering a $10 bribe to the officer. But problem number two: My aunt had only a $20 bill, with no way to make change. Ten dollars would be a perfectly appropriate amount for a bribe, but getting only a 50% discount on the traffic fine felt like an awful bargain.

The cop heard all this. He popped up and said, “I have change for a twenty.” My aunt kept her license that night.

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Yassine Meskhout is a contributing writer at Singal-Minded. You can read more about him here. Questions? Tips on how to evade the morality police? Email him at ymeskhout@gmail.com or me at singalminded@gmail.com. The image at the top was created with the help of InvokeAI.

1. I can’t say enough good things about this show, and I have emphatically written my praise for its contribution toward providing “true” diversity in media.