Political Islam is generally represented as is it was a unique political milieu, intrinsically homogeneous and easy to be distinguished from others. Despite this assumption so rooted in the common sense, political and historical sociology has shown with efficacy that different political experience generally represented as part of the "political Islam family" might not fit at all in the same category, suggesting the heuristic fallacy of the very notion of political Islam (Precursor of this approach is Geertz 1971; more recently, particularly convincing in this sense is Bayart 2010). In the case of Morocco, a State built on the assumption that the king is the Commander of the Faithful (Waterbury 1970), the complexity of political Islam, and the diversity beyond such category, have been convincingly depicted, by considering its relations to different political positions towards monarchic power (Tozy 1999) and by mapping the variety of its everyday representations (Tozy et al. 2007). This paper aims at shading light on the societal cleavages that might be unveiled beyond the category of political Islam in Morocco, by an approach of historical sociology of politics and economics. A sample of "Muslim entrepreneurs" – different in terms of generation, geographic origin, social class of origin, intellectual level and economic weight – will be the starting point for analysing different expressions of political Islam in which societal cleavages are generally translated. The analysis might help to sketch some hypotheses on the usefulness of the cleavages theory, and on the weakness of categories such as "political Islam" and "Muslim entrepreneurs" itself. This work is part of a wider research project about contemporary capitalism and new visibility of political Islam in Morocco and Turkey, promoted by the Fonds d''Analyse des Sociétés Politiques (FASOPO) and realized in 2009-2011 with Ayse Bugra, Béatrice Hibou, Osman Savaskan, Mohamed Tozy and Mohamed Wazif.
