The Urban and Virtual Rhetoric of Tcharmil

The Journal of North African Studies
ISSN: 1362-9387 (Print) 1743-9345 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/fnas20
The urban and virtual rhetoric of tcharmil: display,

violence and resistance
Moulay Driss El Maarouf & Taieb Belghazi
To cite this article: Moulay Driss El Maarouf & Taieb Belghazi (2017): The urban and virtual
rhetoric of tcharmil: display, violence and resistance, The Journal of North African Studies, DOI:
10.1080/13629387.2017.1364630
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THE JOURNAL OF NORTH AFRICAN STUDIES, 2017
https://doi.org/10.1080/13629387.2017.1364630
The urban and virtual rhetoric of tcharmil: display,

violence and resistance
Moulay Driss El Maaroufa and Taieb Belghazib,c
a
English Department, Sidi Mohamed Ben Abdellah University, Faculty of Letters and Human
Sciences, Fez, Morocco; bResearch Center: The Human, Languages, Civilizations, and Religions,
Mohamed V University, Faculty of Letters and Human Sciences, Rabat, Morocco; cSchool for
International Training (SIT), Study Abroad, Brattleboro, VT, USA
Downloaded by [Georgetown University] at 15:07 20 August 2017
ABSTRACT
‘Three years after the “Arab Springs”, “operation tcharmil” resembles a
postrevolutionary suspense, a police enigma where the culprits are known
and the crime has yet to be discovered’ (Florence Aubenas, Le Monde, 4
August, 2014)1 This paper revolves around Tcharmil, whose spatial and
structural manifestations (i.e. in urban and internet spaces) signal a
paradigmatic shift in the existing simple and straightforward meanings of
youth violence. It recommends a way to link youth subcultures with the rising
spirit of banditry, while minding the broad context of social resistance to
political stagnancy as well as the deterioration of fundamental sectors, such
as health, education, security, etc. In so doing we could further intensify the
diverging symptoms of Moroccan youth’s being in the world as well as
register the characteristics worth deriving from youth phenomena. By the
same token, we aspire to contribute to a far more adept reading of urban
youth practices and new (sub)cultural stipulations. The accounts of mcharmlin
are therefore vigorous texts for the inspection of conceptual categories like
street violence, urban dynamics, youth resistance and counter-power.
KEYWORDS Urban violence; tcharmil; subculture; MENA uprisings; youth display
Introduction
The measures of panic and danger intrinsic in violence have definitely
become most macroscopic as of late. Violence has been indisputably mani-
fested as a non-random rewording of our global contemporaneity. As a
case in point, we will focus on the tcharmil phenomenon in Morocco, which
embraces most of the country’s everyday narratives of endemic vehemence.
As we proceed, we will examine how it is intuitively situating the concept of
violence at the crossroads of today’s social, economic and political realities.
Tcharmil captures both an enigmatic and an intricate moment of melange.
Etymologically, the term is inspired from charmoula – a spicy sauce made
CONTACT Moulay Driss El Maarouf elmaaroufmoulaydriss@gmail.com Avenue Mohamed V, 33C,

number7, Sala Al Jadida
© 2017 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
2 M. D. EL MAAROUF AND T. BELGHAZI
from various ingredients like garlic, lemon, olive oil, fresh herbs (i.e. coriander
and parsley), paprika, cumin, etc., – that runs high in the daily jargon of the
Moroccan culinary system. Like charmoula, tcharmil signals an unusual
gesture of becoming, through which a mcharmal – the person practicing
tcharmil – both communicates and embodies a condition of mélange (i.e.
he can only be defined in relation to other social, political and economic
conditions).
Tcharmil is an interesting trans-urban2 phenomenon in the way it both dis-
sociates itself from the traditional meaning of violence and at the same time
associates itself with it. Tcharmil is represented by a group of youngsters, who
roll out flamboyant clothing and jewellry and fondness for the violent courte-
sies of the street. The representatives of this trend belong to low class families,
and live in the poor neighbourhoods of metropolitan cities such as Rabat.

They are perceived as young, delinquent, depressed school drop outs,
jobless, marginalised, as well as aggressed by the lifestyle of the rich.3 The
way of life they have chosen, according to Ahmed Ghayet, distances them
from their sordid reality and everyday life, which is made even unlivable by
contempt, exclusion, and rejection, revealing the failure of the country’s edu-
cational system and limits of its youth policies, needless to speak about the
external signs of ostentation and opulence that some people hit them in
the face with, generating in them both vengefulness, and hate (2015, 89).
Due to such suppressive and violent social inequality, they tend to settle
accounts by way of the variegated modes of violence available to them.
Unlike the traditional image of the thug, who gets born in the street and
dies in the street, the mcharmal’s life is divided between the street and the
cyber. Hence they expand their acts of violence by engaging in acts of
cyber intimidation4 and criminality. A web-influencer notes that the mcharmal
thinks that the virtual world swarms with the wealthy, the intellectual, the
degree holder, and the poor.5 Acting within the framework of the last cat-
egory, the mcharmal runs a counter-show. He avails himself of the social
network to boast the things he can easily accomplish: knock off accessories
and a bunch of violent methods. Ahmed Ghayet reminds us that their
methods do not necessarily pigeonhole them as originally criminal, because
for him this is just a fit of display by a bragging youth who have no idols, a
social category which adopts some clothing codes, a language, a haircut,
and lives vicariously (2015, 89).
Since the social media is both a real mask for those who want to hide, and
enormous zoom for those who want to show themselves (Toufig 2015, 76),
mcharmlin employ the internet as the most efficient instrument of propa-
ganda with which they try to negotiate their marginality. They display
elements of the zanqa (street), as a theatre for the disrespect of the law
(Toufig 2015, 81).
THE JOURNAL OF NORTH AFRICAN STUDIES 3
Mcharmlin post on the Internet what they claim to be the hot goods of the
day, the spoils they have allegedly seised by force in the street (purses, jewels,
cash, etc.). There are people who believe tcharmil to be a moment of youthful
exhibitionism. Others, far from looking at the trend as an instance of post-
modern parading, flamboyance, and fun, blame tcharmil groups for the
spread of terror on the internet and in the street, the promotion of an existing
culture of urban aggression, and benefiting city delinquency and criminal pre-
dilections. However, the importance of a study on tcharmil lies in the complex
crossing it achieves between crime, politics and youth subculture and the
manner by which it presents a mode of violence that is at odds with the
ways violence is generally apprehended. Besides, by looking at it as a mode
of behaviour, as an aesthetics and as a congeries of social practices, we
seek to elucidate the implication of this category of youth in the post Arab
Spring politics.
It is difficult to dismiss tcharmil members simply as petty criminals, or
bandits in the pay of politicians. To be sure, mcharmlin are not the same as
glue sniffers and hashish traders or smokers, because these tend to linger
on their fallibility or that of the system to exhibit a passive reaction to margin-
alisation. Hashish smokers and glue sniffers are charged by the promptitude
to exit social action. Theirs is a shift from marginalisation to the far depths
of the margin. On the other hand, hashish traders maneuver systems of econ-
omic survival that lack in political enthusiasm.
In fact, mcharmlin rather seem to act along Oscar Wildes’ vision that ‘man is
least himself when he talks in his own person, give him a mask and he will tell
you the truth.6 Between hiding and revealing, violence can be launched,
organised, legitimated, sold, praised, and put to use by mcharmlin.7 Here
we should take note of the distinction between the mcharmal and the delin-
quent, since this comparative gesture would reduce his complexity to a
monolithic label.
The mcharmal, first and foremost, is at odds with the system, hence his per-
formances carry with him a flavour of political travesty and dissent. He both
participates and involves participation on social networks, and succeeds to
throw provocations at the feet of the state. In fact, he is not only capable of
upping the stakes with the state, but coerces it to act correspondingly. For
example, the profusion of men in swords on the net and the street have stimu-
lated edgy actions by the police department. These came in the form of par-
allel show-off demonstrations by police figures like Hicham Mallouli, a young
martial arts expert, who got recruited by the GDNS (General Directorate of
National Security) or alternatively the DGSN (La direction générale de la
Sûreté nationale), subsequent to promoting his skills on the social networks.
A huge bulk of photos on the social networks that show his topless muscular
body, while performing difficult athletic moves, dangerous acrobatics placed
him in the spotlights as the Moroccan Rambo boy of Abdellatif Hammouchi
(head of GDNS) that will ultimately destroy urban evil in the bud. He has been
celebrated as the Moroccan Bruce Lee, hence soon upgraded as trainer of
security forces. Interestingly, there is the impression that Mallouli’s heroism
is the state’s staged response to the tcharmil fad, a counteraction that lionises
the might of the security system. Yet, this kind of backlash appears to signal an
implicit acknowledgment of mcharmlin, and a validation of their aura,
because it is carried out in the same style of the latter. The photos of Mallouli
carrying katana swords, balancing himself on top of huge motorbikes and
objects, wearing shiny sunglasses, showing off tcharmil-like hairdos, huge
necklaces assist the opinion that members of the police are impressed by
tcharmil, or in the least, trapped into playing their game.
Therefore, it is rudimentary to study mcharmlin because, as a category,
they are situated at the crossroads of a number of overlapping domains,

which is why we draw on interdisciplinary measures and readings to
come to grips with the phenomenon in Morocco. Towards having better
insight into the subject matter, we conducted ethnographic research visits
between 2015 and 2016 to four marginal areas in Sale and Rabat (i.e. Takka-
doum, slums of Hay Salam, Lwad, and Qaria). The empirical data, observations,
and analyses hereby presented are the outcome of regular visits to districts
in Rabat and Sale, in which mcharmlin live, as well as of interpersonal
engagement with ordinary interlocutors from these foregoing sites. We
could speak to a 8 active and 7 non-active mcharmlin through the help
of a former prison guard (M. C.) an ideal gatekeeper for this kind of research.
We would have had difficulties talking to the mcharmlin mentioned in this
article, without the support of M. C. Some mcharmlin refused to talk to us,
but others accepted, because they know M. C. personally. He was well
respected by some of the ex-prisoners from Rabat, Sale and elsewhere,8
since he is known for having had empathy towards most prisoners in
prison life; unlike the other guards who harassed them, treated them
sadistically and pitilessly, the mcharmlin we interviewed were confident
that M.C. can’t be involved in any matter that has harmful consequences
on them.9
Putting tcharmil on the map

In this section, we depart from a basic question: How does research on
mcharmlin contribute to our understanding of marginalised groups involved
in banditry and criminality in the Middle East and North Africa? To begin with,
tcharmil needs to be recognised as a behavioural an attitudinal way of expres-
sing one’s marginal status. It encapsulates the problems lived by a multitude
of groups that are marginalised in the region. These groups may display a
number of internal and external symptoms and follow a variety of strategies
that may be seen in other groups such as a) looks (style of clothing, hairdos)
b) state of mind or dominant psychological setup (i.e. anxiety, traumatic mem-

ories, bereavement) c) emotions (i.e. bitterness, despair, hope), attitude (i.e.
violent, vengeful, insurgent) state of being (class, age, gender, etc.) (see
Toufig 2015).
Towards the study of the possibilities and chances of evolvement of this
culture, one could trace the demographic, social and economic conditions,
which helped boost this criminal culture. On the demographic front, youth
bulge is a key factor. Morocco is a country with high fertility rates whereby
the annual no. of births as of 2008 for example (in thousands) was 646, of
which the total fertility rate was 2.4%. In spite of the recent decline of fertility
rates, Morocco remains the third most populous country in the Arab world
and the seventh among all countries in Africa.10 Morocco is a demographically
young nation with nearly 40% of Moroccans under age 15, and by 2020 it is
estimated that its urbanisation will grow massively, whereby the urban popu-
lation will grow by an additional 15 million, more than the entire 1965 popu-
lation of Morocco.11 The urbanisation boom surely influences the eruption of
urban criminal dynamics.
On the social front, the rise of a young population against the soaring rates
of youth unemployment, deterioration of public education, and absence of
job’s training leaves youngsters with very few options: either the street, or
prison. Alarmingly, the street and prison keep exchanging youngsters forth
and back between themselves in continual transference. Of the citable
factors behind the proliferation of criminal conduct in Morocco (as well as
elsewhere in the MENA region) is the rampant ab-use of drugs (i.e. note the
rampant production of hashish in Morocco, an industry which is reported to
be sustained by the employability of more than 800,000 workers. On the struc-
tural front, the proliferation of informal housing structures certainly lies
behind the advent of tcharmil. The difficulties facing the ‘villes sans bidon-
villes’ (cities without shanty towns) programme, which promises to provide
safe and adequate housing for the poor, contributes to the expansion of crim-
inal groups. With the failure of accommodating the needs of these margin-
housed social categories, their siblings seem most likely to lump together in
(pseudo)criminal collectivities.
Furthermore, the very bad socio-economic conditions in large Moroccan
cities (i.e. Casablanca, Rabat, Sale) due to rural to urban migration, tallied
with the assembling of manufacturing plants (especially in Casablanca)
during the colonial period.
Specific historical conditions in Morocco might have laid the groundwork
for these groups to come about, breeding a legacy of youth criminality in
urban areas extending back to the colonial period.
Generally speaking, the sense of hogra12 (the state of being put down),
along which citizens feel worthless, helpless and weak, drives members of
marginal groups to generates counter-methods of relocation by subjecting
violence on other innocent civilians. They relocate hogra off of their chests, by
assaulting people, who, in the end, will feel encroached upon. The incivilities
encountered by people on a daily basis, as well as the broad heritage of urban
based violence in big cities can be traced back to the ‘siba’ of the post-colonial
period, which has sprung up in major urban areas in the Arab world. The
absence of such violent measures in rural areas could be explained along
Remy Leveau and others who point out that the makhzan (state) areas have
been traditionally those controlled by the rural notables (dignitaries) allied
with the regime.13 The fellah (peasant) operates along structural and social
confinements that secure the sustainment of power. In rural sites, everyone
else knows everyone and everyone knows the sheikh (representative of the
state), and is well-known by him. In the countryside, politics are a minor
concern, and life far less stressful (i.e. the absence of luring luxuries), which
explains why in comparison to the city the pace of the former tends to be
slower.
Citoyen or citizen: on being a mcharmil in the city

In urban sites, criminal behaviour evolves due to the element of anonymity:
a mcharmal invests in acts of crime against the vast category of the people,
members of whom which he does not (want to) know, as well as in a place
where he can easily dissolve in the crowd. A mcharmal would say: ‘ana
man3qal 3la ta wa7ad’ (literally meaning I wouldn’t recognise anyone).
That’s to say, in moments of adversity and conflict, he would pretend he
doesn’t know the person he is brutalising. Drugs assist them in not recognis-
ing the moral stipulation that they shouldn’t be assaulting the people they
know. Hence, they go about choosing victims randomly. In order to con-
vince people that they are capable of no appreciation of those they know
(neighbours, relatives, etc.) they cover their bodies, (mainly arms and
chest) with scars. The logic behind these acts of self-harm is always con-
fessed shamelessly: ‘If I can harm myself, why can’t I harm you?’ By not
recognising the self and other, mcharmil go against the standards of
being in society. Moroccan geographer Mohammed Naciri refers to this
display of recognition skills in his discussion regarding the city dweller
(mdini, le citadin). For him mdini in old cities like Fez, Marrakech and Salé
is someone capable of telling the genealogy of an inhabitant of the
mdina. The mcharmal subverts both this sense of the citadin as someone
who is positioned on a historical continuum and the mdini as a citoyen or
citizen,14 because he attacks the norms of civility.
The city is replete with political, economic and social ambitions that render
its zones highly competitive, hence increasingly conflict-laden. In the same
vein, Matt Buehler points out that countries like Morocco, Jordan and the
Persian Gulf states, experienced popular protests that thrust open political
opportunity structures (Buehler 2015).15 These protests usually take place in

urban areas that have a prominent labour force, which, in time of uprising,
are joined, according to Buehler, by unemployed citizens and slum dwellers
who took to the streets, escalating the seriousness of protests (2015). These
protests are indicative of an urban calamity, in which formal and informal pro-
tests come in different forms (from rioting to urban aggression).
Interestingly enough, both organised protests (i.e. demonstrations) and
wanton forms of social riots, (i.e. tcharmil) have common denominator: they
represent a group’s angry protest against social, economic and political injus-
tices. Koenraad Bogaert points out that soaring prices, austerity and economic
deprivation were obviously behind the riots, but he puts emphasis on the
element of hogra, what Barrington Moore (1978), Walton and Seddon
(1994) describe as a sense of injustice and strong feeling of indignation

prompted by the discrimanotory urban practices of the state that overburden
the urban poor, the working classes and the growing middle class. Urban vio-
lence is generated by hogra, the same malpractice by which the French pro-
tectorate thought through the famous division of Morocco as ‘Maroc utile and
Maroc inutile’16 This partitioning of the colonial period, which continues today
in the form of lopsided urban strategies usually proves lodge the interests of
power (i.e. coloniser, state). This ideological profitability of urban projects
based on inequity and hierarchy has a political premise.17 Zemni and
Bogaert note that colonial logic persists today with the dominant ‘focus on
metropolitan growth and the prioritisation of tourism, real estate develop-
ment, offshore activities and megaprojects such as Tanger Med, Casablanca
Marina and the Bouregreg project in Rabat (2011 as cited in Bogaert 2015).
Such urban taxonomies along useful and non-useful Moroccan cities can
only culminate in turmoil. Mohamed Naciri (1999, 34) predicted in 1999
that such distinctions of worth and worthlessness would threaten Morocco’s
national cohesion if nothing radically changes within the next 10 years.
Urban phenomena like tcharmil cannot be read in isolation form uneven
urban development. The hierarchical rendition of the urban automatically
leads to the omission of urban socialities from the developmental plan, an
overpass that results in the expansion of a marginal nation that leads
through brutality, confusion, and foul play. The state has difficulties having
the upper hand on marginalised neighbourhoods, and major urban periph-
eries (poor areas, slums, etc.), from which a spirit of nonconformity and resist-
ance takes the form of urban aggression. Yet, the reoccurrence of urban
assaults awakens the people to the need to protest against the state’s proto-
cols of isolationism and disinterest, which has recently featured in a national
campaign against urban violence. This national campaign started on the social
networks, with the motto ‘Zero Grissage’, which was enthused by the ‘Zero
mika18’ awareness campaign against plastic bags. This procedure was
advanced by The Moroccan Coalition for Climatic Justice (CMJC), which
launched the ‘Zero Mika’ campaign as an environmental strategy that imposes

heavy fines on smugglers, producers and traders of plastic bags. Users of
social media networks adapted the slogan to the pressing need to criticise
the state’s aloofness regarding other major urban plights such as violence,
which they also deem polluting to the streets of the country. Environment
has never been a major issue for marginalised people. For them, it is a
luxury to speak about environmental development. Rather, they prefer to
speak about things that are closer to them.
Mcharmlin are a continuation of the urban based, sporadic violence that
has affected Morocco since the post-colonial period and earlier.19 The
regime has trouble controlling urban areas, which are a new realm of dissi-
dence to its rule. Theirs is a perplexing activity because of the way they
stage themselves in the media. Indeed, they achieve a media impact that
gives the impression they are everywhere. To be sure, reports on tcharmil indi-
cate that they are in the thousands. Between the 1st of January and the 30th
of June, 256.171 persons were arrested, as indicated by the DGSN, in reaction
to the ‘zero_Grissage’ hashtagged protests on social media networks such as
twitter and facebook.20 These numbers are a concern to citizens and man-
agers of the security department because they know the potential of this mul-
titude of crime-capable nation at disturbing the peace of an entire society. In
fact, they are a real burden to the police because they work through the day
and night. This accentuates the public perceptions on their voluminous exist-
ence. Moreover, mcharmlin are characterised by their violent aggressions.
While traditional aggressors use their knives to scare their victims and
solicit quick cooperation, as the flashing of the knife signals the promise of
its use, mcharmlin terrorise through an inversion of this principle. They hit
first, and then make it off with the valuables of a badly compromised victim.
But unlike the above, the tcharmil operation is unique because of its cross-
ing of all of the above. Its adherents operate within the ambition to place vio-
lence within a new politics of the mind. They stimulate utmost terror by way of
subjecting the public to tremendous panic through the sharing of images
with violent content on the Internet. Khalil Ibrahimi reports in ‘le360’ elec-
tronic page the incident whereby eight teenagers were arrested in 2016 in
Hay Moulay Rachid (Casablanca) in the midst of a histrionics of criminality.
The eight boys, who were caught with the following accessories: a camera,
a cord, a blood-soaked cloth, a saw, and a motorcycle, confessed they
wanted to instil fear in the inhabitants of the metropolis by uploading the
videos and images on a special Facebook page.21 These and other incidents
were inspired by the first tcharmil attack in March, 2014, when three young
boys rushed with axes to a beauty salon, terrorising the owner, customers,
and, by extension, the entire population of Lamaarif district in Casablanca.
Later on a player of Wydad (WAC) was also assaulted, giving whistle to the
movement of tcharmil, which started in Casablanca, and quickly swept over
other cities, such as Rabat, Sale, Temara, Fes, Marrakech, Meknes, Agadir,
Essaouira, Tangier, etc.
In Rabat and Sale, for instance, mcharmilin work at night, making advan-
tage of people’s inactivity. They rob uninhabited homes, break into cars,
assault unaccompanied individuals, and vandalise personal property. A
mcharmal, 25 years old, from Sale and we had the following conversation:
-- what are you days and nights like?
Mcharmal: Listen! First of all, I work in the night. That’s when I hunt most of the
time. I cover my face and go out. I do cars, most of the time. People forget their
radio players, wallets, mobiles and other personal belongings. You, friends,
might think these are easy snatches! But don’t forget that we are playing with
fire. Someone might leave a bag of foreign currency in his car, and that will
make you rich. Or he might forget a locked suitcase with a gun and documents
with delicate information, and you end up in prison for the rest of your life. (…)
After work, I either go back home to sleep or wait for a stranding victim to
appear, a girl, a man, anyone who might be carrying some goods or money
enough for the day. You know I need money for lbalya (my drug addiction),
dariya (my girl), and lfamilya (my family).
-- who wakes you up?
Mcharmal: My mother, or, at times, (he laughs) the chief officer himself! (from a
personal interview with a mcharmal from Sale).
During the day, the Mcharmlin of Sale hang up in police-free areas. After they
sell some of their stolen goods, they gather in the neighbourhood to roll up
joints, and share adventures from the previous night, in the midst of which
a fight or two usually erupts among members of the gang that will cause
the mob to disband. They also like to gather in places like Takadoum, Hay
Al Farah, Al Wad, and Sidi Moussa. The mcharmlin of these city districts
usually compete with others from far away. M. C (our informant). described
how inside the prison itself, mcharmlin identify themselves in relation to
their districts.22
Mcharmlin between Visibility and Invisibility

--Do you ever work 23during the day?
Mcharmal: I mostly work in the night, but the majority of my ashrani (friends),
choose to work during the day (from a personal interview with a 17 years old
mcharmal, from Lwad, Sale) (Figure 1).
Tcharmil tribes are mostly made up from young males whose age ranges from
15 to 30. The groups are ethnically diverse, accommodating marginal residues
from both Arab and Berber families. However, the majority of tcharmil prac-
tioners are males from marginalised communities residing in Casablanca,
Rabat and Sale, but who share the same outlook.
Figure 1. Tcharmil’s most common Hair and clothing style.
In a digitalised world, street-based/youth-inspired fright walks easily to

people’s homes via the Internet. The new intersection of violence with
global forms of expression in the world wide web and social networks,
where violent content is increasingly on the rise, has largely twisted the
face of today’s violence. In the past, urban violence was sustained as a discreet
show of bloodshed, where the culprits are always said to ‘must have been
around’, but rarely spotted doing it. The economy of urban violence today
is that in which the culprits invest more explicitly on being explicit about
their exercise of violence. Thugs today luxuriate in we-must-be-known scen-
arios, lingering leisurely on the visual to a point where the work of violence
has developed, in the absence of job prospects, into a career, and, in the
absence of recognition, into a voice. Brad Weiss alludes to this by asserting
that the thug ‘is not able or willing to work at all [and] whether he lives on
urban rural turf his lack of employment causes him to decline into an
immoral condition fraught with violence and death (White 2004, 156)’. But
for Weiss the options left for the thug, that inform his criminal predispositions,
‘unravel the values of social life’ (2004, 156).
It is as if mcharmlin want to make sure that the right to visibility in the
urban, which is their permanent work site, would belong to them only.
Their acts instigate laws and images that can be captured permanently
inside the popular imaginary, through means that could make them readable,
audible and visual, before or even after arrest. The mcharmlin of Morocco thus
activate new methods of re-imagining urbanity and sociopolitical orders in
times of hardship and conflict. For Weiss, the process of self-designation
along meanings embodied by the thugs ‘is plainly a way of inviting scorn,
and thus showing one’s toughness in a world of confrontation (Weiss 2002,
108)’. However, the rise of violent activities during an allegedly peaceable
Figure 2. Tcharmil Style : A young Mcharmal posing with a sword, displying a replica
watch, and a bottle of whiskey.
situation begs for an inquiry into the underlying movers of and motives
behind the rising rituals of urban brutality. As one mcharmal put it: ‘kayban
likom bnadam 3ando danya hanya walakin rah bnadam 3ando l7arb f qalbo’
(you might think that one is full of peace, but in one’s heart there is war
(from a conversation with a 26 years old mcharmal from Qaria, in 26, April,
2015) (Figure 2).
To be sure, tcharmil individuals are masters of a theory of crime, harnessed
to promote a sociology of ‘banditism’. In a sociology of this kind, it is not the
criminal act itself, but the vogue of crime that carries weight. Mcharmlin
trumpet a popular sentiment about crime as a prevailing social reality. The
proliferation of their images on the social networks, carrying swords and
14-inched knives, signals an attempt to bring crime into being as a documen-
table sociality. A famous saying circulated among the Mcharmlin ‘aouelha
lebss ouakherha hebs’ (It all begins with dress and ends with prison) reflects
the close link between Mcharlin’s politics of display and criminality.
They promote the image of a lawless self, shielded usually through a delib-
erate offing or concealment of the head. Facebook pages swarmed with see-
my-back mcharmlin, posturing with blades, loots (lady handbags, purses,
money, smartphones) more imaginary than real. It could be argued that tchar-
mil is a social media event whose virtual representation merges with its
deployment in reality. If anything, tcharmil’s greater sway was largely
achieved from the way it was understood on the Internet. Hence a major con-
versation around the phenomenon got all the way entertained on social
media, giving the term more semantic richness, especially as social media
users began to deploy the term to refer to other subtler forms of violence,
such as political corruption, embezzlements, hogra, poverty, etc. Indeed, in
the wake of the MENA upheavals, the topic has already been at issue
for the public, entertained by other non-official media (social networks,
blogs, etc.), by demonstrations for jobs by organised graduates, who think the
state is no different than the mcharmlin, since it displays the same sleights of
violence by way of suppressing the rights of citizens while, at the same time,
claiming the right to their pockets.24 Mcharmlin’s ambivalence have been
backed up the amounting of self into an overwhelmingly unabbreviated plur-
ality, comprising a jumble of political, social, and intellectual realities.
This employment of the term within a new discursive gymnastics has suc-
ceeded to refer to politicians as belonging to the same mentality and status
of mcharmlin, deploying politics the same manner the formers use knives
and swords.
Looking at it this way, tcharmil has gained shape as a concept, that could
also enfold the makhzan, hence used to refer to the manner by which the
various components of the Moroccan state escape answerability to the

people as a deplorable threat. Yet, it is celebrated by youth as a new sub-
cultural ‘non-movement’. But this non-movement, rather than undertaking
what Asef Bayat, in his discussion of non-movements calls the ‘quiet
encroachment of the ordinary (See Asef 2010)’, destabilises the ordinary
through a politics of display that is highly mediatised. Furthermore, tcharmil
is a conceptual platform for the upgrade of the youth scene in Morocco
from the ordinary to the extra-ordinary; that’s to say, from the re-production
of the images of anger through art and cultural performances (hip hop,
music, style, etc.) to the artistic installation of images of danger (i.e. bandit-
ism, brutal force, use of blades).
Figure 3 is an interesting example of how the imagery of tcharmil is
deployed through art to seise a typical scenario of political clash, the wildness
of which denoted thereby through the exaggerated use of blades, and half
naked bodies. The cartoon hence features two men armoured in blades of
different types, apparently spitting out a violent jargon at the door of the
Figure 3. The Prime minister between Political tcharmil and partisan tcharmil.
head of the government’s office, Abdelilah Benkirane. The hairy man on the
left represents the leftist party, Al-Ittihad Al-Ishtirakiy Lilqawat Al-Sha’abiyah,
(the Socialist Union of Popular Forces party), while the not less furry man
on the right exemplifies H izb Al-Istiqlāl, (Independence Party). The cartoon
borrows tcharmil’s vivid connotations to refer to the opposition parties’
violent attitude towards the current government.
Indeed, this cartoon captures one of the ongoing storylines on politics
in the country. Accodring to Stuart Hall, these storylines help understand
culture in terms of ‘shared meanings’, to which language is central to the
production of culture, as without it we can’t make sense of things at all
(Hall 1997, 1).
This is an example of how political violence and con-fusion have been
arrested through the metaphor of tcharmil, declaring politicians no less

dangerous than thugs. The term has been summoned from grassroots crim-
inal culture to the lofty domain of politics, thus depicting how politicians
bring the zanqa to the house of politics, and together with it, the chaos, vio-
lence, madness, and foulness it models. Tcharmil’s expansive capacity is first
and foremost an expression of a ‘reversible reality’ in which meta-texts (politi-
cal figures) are altered by their existence in and encounter with new realities
of seeing power. Mobilisation of zanqa to come to terms with the unfolding
political narrative, at home and away, is contingent on the contaminating ges-
tures of zanqa in relation to supposedly ‘formalistic’ social and political land-
scapes. Therefore the distinctness of political autocratic icons, originary and
original, is tainted by tcharmil’s translation effect, in which they are depicted
clearly, as Homi Bhabha has it, ‘both as representation and as reproduction
(1990, 211)’ of the culture of tcharmil. Besides, there are inevitable impli-
cations of the ‘melange’ between tcharmil and power, resulting from the
reversible interplay of politics and zanqa, at the wake of which zanqa
becomes political and the political grows zanqawi (street-minded). Tcharmil
renders fixed meanings convertible, mostly by coercing them to the logic of
zanqa.
Zanqa (street) between state ownership and subcultural

resistance
I ‘d flash out my seventeenish knife
Yet lhanana 25 would redeem it with a payoff
Lmzakhzan26 is never on my min’
As in the zanqa all’s mine
If I get high, I would be all quiet
If I get drunk, you’d have to be patient
But as to dope, I’m most reactive
Even t’ my neighbour, I’ll be most abusive
When my senses go black
You’ll find me hunting, in the dark

And while in me, drugs keeps working
Through force, I’ll be earning my living
Such is a crazy life state
Against dawla, I await my fate (…) [translated by authors]
Tcharmil manages new rites of zanqa proprietorship, upon which the mchar-
mal’s privileges (entitlement of use) are generated through the manifestation
of some non-formalistic mapping of self on the urban, falling back on the
history of individual presence in the zanqa, from the houma (neighbourhood)
to the medina (city). This idea is well-demonstrated in Emcee Mr. Crazy’s rap
song, ‘3aqliya Mhabsa’ (Prisonized Mentality) featuring a mcharmal narrating
his personal real-life reflections within the practice of tcharmil.
The song is most interesting, because it captures important dimensions of

tcharmil: modes of dress (hood and gold 007 swatch), criminality (aggression,
sba3tasha (17 inch blade), and anti-establishment attitudes. It also instantiates
mcharmal’s deliberations about being in the zanqa, and being in the dar.
While the former is a site of freedom and domination, the latter is a territory
of fear, watchfulness, and caution. Dar, for him, is a point of possible arrest, a
field of constant trepidation, a recognisable abode of containment, easily
tracked by the police.
The mcharmal’s view of the world rises up from his understanding of tchar-
mil as the layout of an irregular topography, in which he is most comfortable
in ‘the shaaba’, a narrow slope between two mountains, used as it were as a
shelter point, a hideout field, a site of illegal transaction, and zone of unremit-
ting clash. The shaaba subcultural flows run opposite to the two mountains –
symbolised here by the mcharmlin’s parent society (i.e. mainstream culture,
parents) as well as control society (i.e. state, police) –, embodying a new era
in the trajectory of Morocco’s grassroots resistance non-movements. From
the marginal social discreteness of shaaba expands a remarkable nation of
teenagers, forcefully claiming visibility, looming large in the youth lineaments
of shaab (people) not only in local contemporaneity, but also in the imaginary
of the global world at large.
Let’s return: the mcharmal in the song knows it is likely to be watched and
controlled, vulnerable to police crackdowns. He makes this clear as he points
out that he can’t sleep at night, because he keeps thinking about his state and
mnakri (worrying) that the police might at any moment break through the
door of the house, during his sleep, to seise him. Yet, he ascertains the
point that the ‘zanqa kulha diali’ (entirely his), and that police agents, sup-
posed to affirm law and order in the street, are mere dogs at the beck and
call of the mcharmal, who maintains their servitude through bribery. It also
affirms the mcharmal’s attachment to the figures of dar – the father and
the mother – whom he cares about and does not want to subject to pain
because of his own ordeals in prison. The song’s mention of the makhzen,
the dawla (state) the mcharmal’s degree, which is of no help, and his waiting
of the babour taliani (Italian boat) is a vital indication of the inner web of con-
flicts that results in defining and shaping the youth’s becoming. Tcharmil’s
temperament is produced through a fundamental alteration in the heart,
which, previously full of benevolence and hope, is now totally mfari (lacking
compassion and sympathy). However, he draws attention to the sentiments
lodged in the heart of his mother (lhannana) whose tenderness urge her to
comes to his rescue at the police station, usually through bribery.27
Tcharmil is hence a non-formalistic urban operation that activates and is
activated through a new mode of seeing self and other, dar and zanqa.28 It
brings these together in a mélange that upsets the system’s quest for order.
Such is an occasion for the materialisation of exceptional urban codes that
bring the formalistic urban contract into an impermanent alleviation, the

system into a temporary incapacitation. Tcharmil causes the collapse of the
urban space codes of safety, and the state’s mythology of control. It is interest-
ing that in the aftermath of a series of tcharmil incidents in Moroccan cities, a
number of protest marches against the state’s lack of control of the issue
were staged. Casablanca protesters created a facebook page where they
called for ‘A March against Prevalent Insecurity in Casablanca’ to put pressure
on the government to curb tcharmil. The march didn’t take place, but the gov-
ernment proceeded with a number of arrests based on the net photos and face-
book pages. Those arrests were accompanied at times by police human rights
abuses as a number of human rights organisations allege. A case in point is the
suicide of a youth who felt humiliated when the district chief allegedly shaved
his hair because his hair was cut in the manner of the Mcharmlin.
Concluding thoughts
The rise of the thugs in full persuasive gore and loutishness in other parts of
the MENA region during and after the Arab movements of 2011 has produced
a compilation of digital images that the media have eloquently depictured at
home in the attempt to capture tcharmil’s rainbow of meanings. The people
have come to understand that the contagious capacity of mediatised violence
in countries that go through similar situations of social, economic and political
inequality could result in the appropriation of violence, causing an unprece-
dented proliferation of panic at home. An important dimension of this
panicky arrangement is what Stanley Cohen describes as a moral panic in
his Folk Devils and Moral Panics (1973). Moral panic takes place when ‘[a] con-
dition, episode, person or group of persons emerge to become defined as a
threat to societal values and interests (Cohen 1973, 9)’. In the the way they
put underground criminal practices on display, images of urban panic have
transformed our understanding of the cityness of the city, and of the zanqa
as its embedded dual self.
In reaction to this fit of moral panic, especially the residents of Casablanca,

unto whom the movement was born, King Mohammed VI gave instructions to
combat the phenomenon, urging the security services to improve their
working methods and take tighter measures against its culprits.29 Towards
the effective implementation of security measures, the Minister of Interior,
Mohamed Hassad, and the Minister Driss Cherqui were assigned with the
responsibility to further ensure the safety of citizens and secure their property.
People who fear that these security measures are never enough or fail
alone to contain the overwhelming ferocity of violent groups, resort to the
implementation of their own laws. A group of citizens of Moulay Rachid dis-
trict in Casablanca, for instance, decided to establish its own local justice.
They established a collective flush bowl after several assaults with knives,
theft and other offenses committed by offenders. Hence, three persons,

who were elected by the inhabitants of Moulay Rachid and Al Baraka neigh-
bourhoods, have been recruited by the local community to protect these
areas, by preventing the intrusion of foreign suspects as well as arresting
anyone involved in a robbery in neighbouring districts.30
The centrality of the tcharmil in contemporary political and social debates
has been underlined by the much space that has recently been given to it in
newspapers, parliamentary discussions, Televised programmes, and in virtual
cyberspaces. This work is hence an attempt to arrest the new meanings sur-
rounding tcharmil as a novel sub-cultural movement and a form of youth vio-
lence in Morocco. This article also tags along the task to examine the ways
youngsters react to the continuous changes affecting what we called ‘the ima-
ginary of the global world.’ Having explored the emotive aspect of violence, we
have aspired to capture the paradoxes of youth emotionality; that’s their feel-
ings of fear and fearlessness, of vulnerability and of vanity, of cruelty and of
compassion, (i.e. towards the mother figure), and of hogra and vengefulness.
Amid the various colours of this emotive resourcefulness, this article jitters in
the excitement of having the chance to argue that violence in contemporary
youthscapes hinges so much on emotions as on social and economic realities.
The research initiative taken by Fatima Mernissi points to the type of
research required by tcharmil. The urging demand for interdisciplinary
methods to study this phenomenon enthused Mernissi to invite contributions
by journalists, social activists, psychoanalysts, sociologists, etc. In factuality, no
single discipline or concept can do justice to a multifaceted phenomenon like
tcharmil. This article is a further step into these directions. Hopefully others
will follow.
Notes
1. Florence (2014).
2. It goes beyond urbanism, and embraces spaces like the internet.
3. See Ouadrhiri (2015).

6. In The Artist as Critic: Critical Writings of Oscar Wilde, ed, Richard Ellmann.
New York: Random House, 1, 1968; p.389.
7. See Toufig 2015.
8. For disciplinary measures, some prisoners get transferred prisons located very
far from their homes, so their relatives can’t regularly visit them or bring them
food, cigarettes, etc.
9. For the sake of ethicality and anonymity we have protected the identity of our
research informants and interviewees by keeping their personal information
confidential. The initials of the guard’s and mcharmlin’s names in this article
do not refer to their real names.
10. Unsigned. Available at <https://www.census.gov/population/international/>
[online] [accessed 19 August, 2016].

11. Unsigned. Available at <https://www.census.gov/population/international/>
[online] [accessed 19 August, 2016].
12. See El Bouih, 2015 for more insight on the concept of Hogra.
13. See Leveau, 1976.
14. See Naciri Mohammed, 1985.
15. M. Buehler, 2015. Available at < https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/monkey-
cage/wp/2015/03/24/how-moroccos-unions-took-advantage-of-the-arab-upris
ings/> [online] [accessed 19 August, 2016].
16. See Bogaert 2015 for a more detailed discussion on this point.
17. See Abu-Lughod, 1980.
18. Mika is the word used in Morocco for plastic in general. In this context it particu-
larly refers to plastic bags.
19. See Matar 2001; Nickerson 1928; Bekkaoui 2010 for a detailed review of early ver-
sions of Mediterranean banditry at sea and land.
20. These numbers were anounced by bladi.net in http://www.bladi.net/personnes-
arretees-criminalite-maroc,45908.html [web], accessed in 20 August, 2016.
21. See K. Ibrahimi, 2016. Available at http://fr.le360.ma/societe/casablanca-
arrestation-de-8-faux-mcharmline-qui-voulaient-semer-la-panique-65069 [online]
[accessed 22 August, 2016].
22. From a personal interview in August, 2016.
23. We did not use more specific verbs, such as assaulted, aggressed, etc., to avoid
provoking our interviewees.
24. Abdelilah Benkirane’s government has been criticised for making the life of the
poor most intolerable, by increasing the prices of daily basic consumables like
sugar, vegetables, fruits, pastries to fix the country’s budget deficit.
25. Loving mother
26. The State
27. He uses the word ‘tfari’, which in street colloquy suggests the act of giving money
at the local police station, either to the police or to the suing party or to both to
deactivate the normal procedure, at the end of which the crime perpetrator is
most likely going to be summoned to court and eventually imprisoned.
28. The macharmlin might seek to reinforce the logic of violence through the illu-
sion that aggression is a form of protest. In so doing, they exploit the zanqa
as a territory for change, as theatre for the enactment of the existing inequalities
through a display of a twisted sense of justice.
29. For more details, see http://www.lemag.ma/Le-Roi-Mohammed-VI-s-attaque-au-

phenomene-du-Tcharmil_a82296.html [web], accessed in 26 August, 2016.
30. Unsighed, 2016. Available at http://www.lesiteinfo.com/habitants-de-quartiers-
loi-a-casa-2/ [Web], accessed 28 August, 2016.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
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The Urban and Virtual Rhetoric of Tcharmil

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The Journal of North African Studies

ISSN: 1362-9387 (Print) 1743-9345 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/fnas20

The urban and virtual rhetoric of tcharmil: display,

Moulay Driss El Maarouf & Taieb Belghazi

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13629387.2017.1364630

Published online: 10 Aug 2017.

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Download by: [Georgetown University] Date: 20 August 2017, At: 15:07

The urban and virtual rhetoric of tcharmil: display,

KEYWORDS Urban violence; tcharmil; subculture; MENA uprisings; youth display

CONTACT Moulay Driss El Maarouf elmaaroufmoulaydriss@gmail.com Avenue Mohamed V, 33C,

and live in the poor neighbourhoods of metropolitan cities such as Rabat.

they are situated at the crossroads of a number of overlapping domains,

Putting tcharmil on the map

b) state of mind or dominant psychological setup (i.e. anxiety, traumatic mem-

Citoyen or citizen: on being a mcharmil in the city

opportunity structures (Buehler 2015).15 These protests usually take place in

(1994) describe as a sense of injustice and strong feeling of indignation

launched the ‘Zero Mika’ campaign as an environmental strategy that imposes

-- who wakes you up?

Mcharmlin between Visibility and Invisibility

Figure 1. Tcharmil’s most common Hair and clothing style.

In a digitalised world, street-based/youth-inspired fright walks easily to

various components of the Moroccan state escape answerability to the

arrested through the metaphor of tcharmil, declaring politicians no less

Zanqa (street) between state ownership and subcultural

You’ll find me hunting, in the dark

The song is most interesting, because it captures important dimensions of

bring the formalistic urban contract into an impermanent alleviation, the

In reaction to this fit of moral panic, especially the residents of Casablanca,

theft and other offenses committed by offenders. Hence, three persons,

3. See Ouadrhiri (2015).

[online] [accessed 19 August, 2016].

29. For more details, see http://www.lemag.ma/Le-Roi-Mohammed-VI-s-attaque-au-

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