Baba Adou, University of Florida
In the early 2000s, the Mauritanian regime faced two kinds of pressure linked to Islamist politics and jihadist violence. In June 2005, a major attack on a military post near the Algerian border—attributed to the Algerian Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat (GSPC)—was followed by a series of attacks and kidnappings, including incidents in Nouakchott and against Western embassies.[1] Around the same time, the regime also confronted a rising Islamist movement that gained prominence as an opposition force in the late 1990s and early 2000s.[2] The movement’s political wing—later recognized as the National Rally for Reform and Development (Tawassul)—sought to position itself as a credible alternative, especially during the Arab Spring.
Both currents have since weakened. Mauritania has not witnessed major jihadist activity since at least 2012, while Tawassul has faced leadership cooptation and declining electoral performance. This essay argues that the regime weathered these challenges not only through policing and repression, but also by leveraging the country’s religious context and presenting itself as a custodian of Islam in public life. In a low-capacity state setting where “official Islam” cannot be built into a fully centralized religious bureaucracy, the regime instead pursued Islamization from above—appropriating religious language and investing in religious institutions and education. Over time, this strategy narrowed the discursive space available to Islamists for recruitment and mobilization. It also lowered the moral and reputational costs for Islamist elites to accommodate the regime. That is, when the state itself adopted an Islamizing posture, shifting political affiliations from opposition to support became easier to justify to followers, facilitating leadership cooptation.
The essay draws on political history and fieldwork from a larger project on state–Islam relations in the Sahel, including interviews with Islamists and state officials involved in religious administration conducted in Nouakchott and remotely.
‘Official Islam’
‘Official Islam’ refers to state-sponsored religious institutions deployed and funded by regimes to (1) generate support for state policies, (2) prevent or monitor opponents’ mobilization through religious spaces, and (3) contain radical or transnational currents.[3] The literature is anchored largely in cases such as Morocco, Algeria, Egypt, Jordan, and similar contexts where religious establishments are deeply entangled with state formation and where states possess relatively strong bureaucratic capacity to manage diverse Islamic organizations and movements.[4] In North Africa, especially Morocco and Algeria, official Islam is also often associated with a state-endorsed framework that privileges Sufi-oriented traditions as a counterweight to Islamist and Salafi rivals.[5]
Scholars diverge, however, on the autonomy and influence of official Islam: some emphasize that religious bureaucracies can acquire autonomy simply because they are large and complex,[6] while others stress deliberate state construction designed to serve broader regime projects.[7] Mauritania presents a different dynamic.[8] Because the state lacks bureaucratic and coercive capacity, “official Islam” is less centralized and less insulated, and it can more readily absorb other forms of Islamist and clerical organizing—making it more plural and open to different religious orientations. At the same time, the function of these institutions appears to differ from their counterparts in North Africa. While these institutions still provide religious justifications for state policy, the broader Islamizing shift has also given them—and the clerics associated with them—greater leverage to shape, negotiate, and sometimes constrain policies, often before they are finalized.[9]
Islamists in an Islamic Republic
Officially, Mauritania is an exclusively Muslim society with a deeply conservative public culture and a long tradition of religious learning. Traditional mahdara education has produced religious scholars with influence beyond the country.[10]This setting created favorable conditions for Islamist activism: a receptive audience, a vibrant religious education sector from which to recruit, and the absence of a strong competing political force that contested state–Islam relations, leaving Islamists as the primary religiously framed opposition to the state.[11]
From its early emergence in the 1970s,[12] the Mauritanian Islamist movement largely avoided direct confrontation with these traditional milieus—even when some of its intellectual inspirations came from abroad. Instead, it worked within them. In practice, mahdara graduates and students and graduates of the Higher Institute of Islamic Studies and Research (ISERI) and other public and private religious education establishments became movement foot soldiers and supplied parts of its leadership.
Formally, Mauritania is an “Islamic Republic.” That label has not always meant Islam dictates state policy comprehensively,[13] but it provided Islamists with a rhetorical resource: the ability to criticize government decisions by invoking the state’s own declared identity and pressing for a larger role for religion in public life. At the same time, the phrase “Islamic Republic” remains contested among some Islamists. A Salafi cleric I interviewed argued that “republic” implies popular sovereignty while “Islamic” implies the sovereignty of sharia, and he described a tension between constitutional appeals to Islamic law and references to international commitments that emphasize expansive individual freedoms.[14]
One might therefore expect Islamists to have risen quickly to prominence once electoral competition becomes possible, as was the case in some post-Arab Spring Middle East and North Africa contexts. After the 2005 coup in Mauritania and the elections that followed legalization, Tawassul secured modest but real gains. However, the party did not translate that opening into sustained electoral growth and instead experienced stagnation and decline. What explains this reversal?
One former Islamist leader explained this trajectory in terms of the conditions under which Islamist movements tend to flourish: in his view, repression can generate sympathy and cohesion, while state withdrawal from the religious field can leave Islamists space to build influence through preaching, education, and community work.[15] These dynamics help explain the movement’s rise in the early 2000s under Maaouya Ould Sid’Ahmed Taya, when crackdowns targeted Islamist leaders and Islamist-linked spaces, and detention sometimes became a site of religious exchange and recruitment.[16]
In the 2010s, a few restrictions on Islamist-associated organizations occurred alongside deepening state involvement in religious affairs. In 2014, the state closed the Association al-Mustaqbal and in 2018 the Center for the Training of Clerics, both institutions linked to the Tawassul party. Resistance to this wave of repression was relatively modest. That is partly explained by the fact that these moves followed years of state investment in presenting itself as a custodian of Islam, which made it harder to frame such actions as “anti-Islam” in the way earlier crackdowns could be narrated. This is a critical point: the impact of state appropriation extends beyond coercion. It reshapes Islamist politics at the level of discourse, mobilization capacity, and elite cohesion.
Electoral trends provide one visible indicator of the Islamist decline. The parliamentary results reported here show a steady decline in Tawassul’s representation from 2013 to 2023. A similar pattern appears at the local level, where the party’s municipal councils fell from around 18 in 2013 to just 7 in the 2023 elections.
Table 1. Tawassul’s Results in Legislative Elections (2013–2023)
| Legislative election | Tawassul MPs / Total | Share
|
| 2013 | 16/147 | 11% |
| 2018 | 14/157 | 9% |
| 2023 | 11/176 | 6% |
Source: Compiled by the author from CENI election reports, supplemented by figures reported in reliable media outlets.
Leadership fragmentation is another indicator. After President Mohamed Ould Cheikh El Ghazouani’s rise in 2019, several prominent Tawassul figures—including some founding members—exited the party and aligned themselves with the new presidential camp. This trend continued in the years that followed. A particularly significant episode was the former Tawassul leader Mohamed Jemil Mansour Ould Mansour’s resignation and subsequent creation of a pro-presidential party.
The 2024 presidential election further underscores Tawassul’s limits at the national level. Tawassul’s candidate finished third with 12.78 percent.[17] This election also marked the first time Tawassul foregrounded Sharia implementation so explicitly as a campaign theme. Like many Islamist parties in the region, Tawassul has usually downplayed such slogans in its official messaging as it seeks to present itself to external and state stakeholders as a moderate actor worthy of inclusion in the political process. Yet even in a conservative society like Mauritania, that message did not automatically translate into broad mobilization. One reason is contextual: as a former senior party leader put it in an interview, Mauritania lacks the sharp ideological divide found elsewhere between an Islamist movement and a secular current. In his words, nearly everyone—whether by conviction, accommodation, or social convention—operates within an Islamic frame of reference, and “there is not an ideological sharpness between the Islamic orientation and the secular orientation.”[18] That observation is true, but it does not fully explain the decline of the Islamist party in the country. The next section traces how the state’s evolving posture toward Islam reshaped the terms of religious competition and contributed to the weakening of Mauritania’s only Islamist party.
From “official Islam” to state Islamization
In the final years of Maaouya Ould Sid’Ahmed Taya’s regime (1984–2005), the state did try to lean on official religious channels, such as the Ministry of Religious Affairs and prominent clerics close to the presidency. But Islamists largely retained the upper hand in discourse and popular mobilization. Official Islam often appeared less credible when it was seen defending an unpopular regime and providing blanket religious justification for state policies.
Under President Mohamed Ould Abdel Aziz, who came to power through a military coup in 2009, the state moved more heavily into the religious sphere. This shift reflected both the regime’s initial legitimacy deficit and a political climate shaped by continued jihadist activity and, later, Arab Spring–inspired mobilization. A broader Islamization of the state followed—rhetorical distance from “secularism,” expanded investment in religious education and institutions, and greater incorporation of religious actors from multiple orientations into state-linked bureaucratic and advisory roles.
In practice, this Islamization included expanding and servicing mosque infrastructure (construction, maintenance, and, in many cases, payment of utilities); professionalizing the imam corps by recruiting—reportedly for the first time in the Islamic Republic’s history—civil-service cohorts of imams on fixed salaries while extending subsidies to thousands more; and institutionalizing training through dedicated tracks at the Higher Institute of Islamic Studies and Research (ISERI).[19]
The official attention to the mahdara was not entirely new. The state had already created ISERI in 1979 as the first higher-education institute dedicated to students coming from mahdara backgrounds,[20] and in 1984 it established an “original education” high-school track[21] that integrated students with traditional religious training and enabled access to certain university specialties (such as languages, law, social sciences, and humanities). What changed in the 2010s was the scale and political centrality of these investments: the regime further upgraded and funded Islamic education, presented the mahdara as a national asset to be modernized and aligned with state priorities, increased support to mahdara teachers, and opened two Islamic universities in addition to ISERI.
The regime also promoted a state-branded “Mauritanian Islam” through symbolic and media initiatives. It printed and distributed the Qur’an in recitation styles commonly learned in Mauritania (Warsh and Qaloun), and expanded religious broadcasting through Qur’an radio and a televised Mahdara Channel. Yet the effort to give this state Islam a distinctly “local” and, at times, Sufi-inflected framing was not a defining feature of the post-2010 regime in any strict or exclusive sense. In practice, the institutions most closely associated with official Islam—above all the High Council for Fatwa—reflect the country’s religious diversity rather than a single, tightly policed identity.
This complicates the idea of a coherent, state-imposed “Mauritanian Islam.” Salafi actors, for example, often reject the notion that Salafism is necessarily foreign to Mauritania. Instead, they present their orientation as rooted in early Mauritanian scholars and thus as continuous with local traditions of learning and reform.[22] In that sense, “Mauritanian Islam” is not a fixed package that the state can simply define and transmit; it is a contested field in which multiple currents claim authenticity.
Nevertheless, these initiatives were visible enough that some religious leaders and political supporters celebrated Mohamed Ould Abdel Aziz as the “President of Islamic Action.” [23] The significance of these initiatives lay less in giving the government full control over the religious sphere than in signaling a political shift toward appropriating Islam as a source of legitimacy. Capacity constraints and the size and diversity of the religious field remained real limits—illustrated by the scale of religious infrastructure itself, with a government census in 2010 reportedly counting around 8,000 mosques for a population of roughly 3 million.[24]
Two episodes of political unrest illustrate how the Mauritanian regime used religious rhetoric as a tool of crisis management—preempting street mobilization around religious grievances by presenting the state as the primary defender of Islam. This mattered in a regional Arab Spring climate, when opposition and youth groups, often with Islamists in leadership roles, sought to replicate street protests that overthrew regimes in Middle East and North Africa. In April 2012, after activists of the anti-slavery group, Initiative for the Resurgence of the Abolitionist Movement (IRA), publicly burned Maliki legal texts to denounce slavery’s religious justifications, imams and religious leaders mobilized in front of the presidential palace, and the president responded by pledging strict sharia enforcement against those involved, declaring secularism as politically irrelevant.[25] A similar script reappeared in January 2014, amid mass mobilization after a blogger was accused of insulting the Prophet. Speaking to demonstrators, the president again declared that Mauritania “is not a secular state”—insisting that democracy does not permit violating sacred values.[26] These initiatives mattered less for creating a unified “official Islam” than for changing the political playing field—making Islamist critique less resonant among the largely religious audience and accommodation less costly for Islamist elites.
Conclusion
State Islamization in Mauritania took the form of an explicit appropriation of Islamic language alongside policy shifts that expanded state involvement in religious education and the public custodianship of Islamic affairs. This shift weakened the Islamist movement in at least two ways. First, it narrowed the discursive and organizational space for recruiting and mobilizing within a largely Muslim electorate: the state increasingly competed with Islamists on the terrain of religious legitimacy and moral authority. Second, it lowered the moral and reputational costs for Islamist elites to accommodate the regime. As the state adopted an Islamizing posture, shifts in political affiliation became easier to justify to followers, facilitating leadership cooptation.
To be sure, other factors—including tribal dynamics and ethnic politics—also shape both the state’s turn toward religious appropriation and the Islamist movement’s trajectory and electoral performance. Leadership cooptation may also reflect tactical adaptation by Tawassul figures seeking to reposition themselves within the political system and reduce exposure to repression. Even if tactical, such defections reflect an awareness that changing state–Islam relations have altered the terms of political survival—pushing some actors to prioritize the longer-term continuity of the movement over the cohesion and autonomy of the party.
[1] Anouar Boukhars, The Drivers of Insecurity in Mauritania. Carnegie endowment for international peace Vol. 30 (2012).
[2] Zekeria Ould Ahmed Salem, “Islam in Mauritania between Political Expansion and Globalization: Elites, Institutions, Knowledge, and Networks,” in Islam and Muslim Politics in Africa, 27–46 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan US, 2007).
[3] Nathan J. Brown, Official Islam in the Arab World: The Contest for Religious Authority, vol. 11 (Washington, DC: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 2017).
[4] See Quintan Wiktorowicz, “State Power and the Regulation of Islam in Jordan,” Journal of Church and State 41, no. 4 (1999): 677–696; Michael Robbins and Lawrence Rubin, “The Ascendance of Official Islams,” Democracy and Security 13, no. 4 (2017): 363–391;
[5] See Ann Marie Wainscott, Bureaucratizing Islam: Morocco and the War on Terror (Cambridge University Press, 2017); Francesco Tamburini, “The Bureaucratization of Islam in Algeria: the State as the Only Controller of Religion,” Journal of Asian and African Studies 60, no. 4 (2025): 2286–2307.
[6] Brown, Official Islam in the Arab World.
[7] Ann Marie Wainscott, Bureaucratizing Islam; Francesco Tamburini, “The Bureaucratization of Islam in Algeria.
[8] Some studies on Mauritania argue that clerical independence was easier to sustain before the post-9/11 “war on terror,” after which clerics became more cautious about openly challenging authority (See Alexander Thurston, “Clerical Independence and the Religious Field in Post-Colonial Mauritania,” Journal of Islamic Studies 34, no. 2 (2023): 212–241.). The evidence discussed in this essay points to a different mechanism, especially from the 2010s onward: reduced confrontation is not simply a product of fear or repression, but of shifting incentives. As the state increasingly Islamized its own public legitimacy and expanded its presence in the religious field, it narrowed the space for even sincerely motivated clerics to adopt a confrontational stance toward the regime
[9] Two episodes illustrate the autonomy of these institutions and the clerics associated with them: (1) during the Ould M’Khaitir blasphemy affair (2013–19), official religious bodies contributed to pressure for a tougher amendment to Penal Code Article 306; and (2) in efforts to pass a draft family/gender law, the High Council for Fatwa and Grievances reportedly returned thirty amendments and intervened proactively, while prominent figures linked to this constitutional body openly rejected the bill.
[10], Michael Farquhar and Alex Thurston. “How Mauritania exports religion to Saudi Arabia—And not just the other way around,” Brookings (2018).
[11] On the wider political role of Islam and its links to questions of national identity and political competition in Mauritania, see Baba Adou, “Islam and the Struggle for National Identity in Mauritania,” Souffles Monde, Issue 4 (2025).
[12] For an overview of the early history of the Islamist movement in Mauritania see Zekeria Ould Ahmed Salem, “Islam in Mauritania between Political Expansion and Globalization”, especially 29-30
[13] Zekeria Ould Ahmed Salem, “Bare-Foot Activists: Transformations in the Haratine Movement in Mauritania,” in Movers and Shakers: Social Movements in Africa, ed. S. Ellis and I. van Kessel (Leiden: Brill, 2009), 156–77.
[14] Written communication with a Salafi cleric, November 2025.
[15] Interview with a former senior leader in Tawassul, interview conducted by field assistant in Nouakchott October 2025.
[16] Zekeria Ould Ahmed Salem, “Islam in Mauritania between Political Expansion and Globalization”, 32.
[17] Tawassul has not consistently competed in presidential elections with a party nominee. It fielded a candidate in 2009 (about 5 percent, in a widely contested election) and supported a non-party candidate in 2019 (about 18 percent, third place).
[18] Interview conducted by field assistant in Nouakchott, October 2025)
[19] Information in this paragraph and the next two paragraphs is synthesized from contemporaneous reporting in Mauritanian local media and official outlets on government activities; see, e.g., https://www.ami.mr/archives/29798
[20] Hamidou Dia, Elemine Ould Mohamed Baba, and Mohamed Salem Ould Maouloud, Programme de recherche « Éducation arabo-islamique au Sahel »: Rapport Mauritanie (Plateforme d’Analyse du Suivi et d’Apprentissage au Sahel; Production PASAS, January 1, 2022), https://pasas-minka.fr
[21] Hamidou Dia et al., Programme de recherche « Éducation arabo-islamique au Sahel »: Rapport Mauritanie
[22] Remote interview with a Salafist activist based in Nouakchott, October 2025.
[23] “مدير التوجيه الإسلامي يكتب: شهادة لله ثم للتاريخ في حق ‘رئيس العمل الإسلامي’ محمد ولد عبد العزيز” [“Director of Islamic Guidance Writes: A Testimony for God, Then for History, Regarding the ‘President of Islamic Action,’ Mohamed Ould Abdel Aziz”], Wetani, August 3, 2019, accessed February 14, 2026, https://www.wetani.info/index.php/2011-08-28-14-08-38/4015-2019-08-03-00-04-21
[24] “وزير الشؤون الاسلامية يستعرض مهام قطاعه ويرد على اسئلة الصحفيين خلال برنامج ‘الحكومة فى الميزان’” [“Minister of Islamic Affairs Reviews His Sector’s Tasks and Answers Journalists’ Questions During the Program ‘The Government on the Scale’”], Agence Mauritanienne d’Information (AMI), June 1, 2010, accessed February 14, 2026, https://www.ami.mr/Depeche-13918.html.
[25] “الرئيس الموريتاني يتعهد بتطبيق الشريعة الإسلامية في من قاموا بحرق الكتب الفقهية” [“Mauritanian President Pledges to Apply Islamic Law to Those Who Burned Fiqh (Islamic Jurisprudence) Books”], Sahara Media, April 29, 2012, accessed February 14, 2026, https://saharamedias.net/6382/
[26] “رئيس الجمهورية: موريتانيا ليست دولة علمانية والإسلام فوق كل اعتبار” [“President of the Republic: Mauritania Is Not a Secular State, and Islam Comes Above All Considerations”], Agence Mauritanienne d’Information (AMI), January 10, 2014, accessed February 14, 2026, https://www.ami.mr/Depeche-32427.html.