Recently in Maghreb Category

MoorishGirl: Enjoying the Hospitality

And so I've been gorging myself on couscous, pastilla, rghaif, mechouis, escargot, all sorts of fish, and drinking glass after glass of mint tea.

My mouth waters just thinking of it. When am I going back to Morocco?

The New York Times > Sports > Olympics > Track and Field: Guerrouj Gets His One Missing Honor

Aug. 24 - Hicham el-Guerrouj dropped to his knees and kissed the track, snapping the spell of two straight Olympic failures for himself and for Morocco.

With a defiant, redemptive kick, Guerrouj outlasted Bernard Lagat of Kenya in the final thrilling 50 meters of the men's 1,500-meter race on Tuesday and then edged him at the line by 12-hundredths of a second, a blink that became the achievement of a lifetime.

MoorishGirl

MoorishGirl mentions that the latest issue of Tingis is out.

The Summer 2004 issue of Tingis, a quarterly magazine devoted to Morocco, is now available, with non-fiction by Anouar Majid, David Kuchta, Oumelbanine Zhiri, and others.

I like the magazine, so I am pleased to see it getting more exposure, and I am looking forward to receiving my summer issue.

In the meantime, I am trying out my new CD of Gnawa and Issawa music.

Charleston.Net: News from the Associated Press

MADRID, Spain (AP) -- Europe's biggest terrorist threat is Morocco - seething with as many as 1,000 al-Qaida adherents capable of suicide attacks and skilled at slipping through the continent's southern gateway, Spain's leading anti-terrorism judge testified Thursday.

It's not as though Spain has been pointing the finger at Morocco for the last 1500 years, or anything.

Casablanca Plays It Again at Rick's Cafe

It appears that an American entrepreneur has finally succeeded in opening a "Rick's Cafe" in Casablanca. The Reuter's article suggests that maybe this new restaurant, rather than being simply a crass knock-off of one of America's most popular movies, has a certain charm of its own. One thing is for sure, it's more Moroccan than the film, which was produced and filmed entirely stateside during World War II.

Some years ago, I started a web page devoted to collecting information about Moroccan Villages. Over the years this page has undergone a number of iterations, but it gradually fell by the wayside both because it was too much work to maintain and because users could not contribute easily enough. For a long time, I have hoped to revive this page as a forum to which users could easily contribute with relatively little oversight by me. Since my current hosting configuration allows me to do this, I am pleased to offer the Moroccan Villages Forum.

Send in the Peace Corps

"The question of how to reorganize the armed forces should be turned on its head: instead of making the military better at humanitarian assignments (in Iraq, Afghanistan and perhaps Liberia), humanitarian groups should strive to become more comfortable in military situations."

I agree with the author that we were too quick to pull our Peace Corps Volunteers out of longstanding programs in Jordan and Morocco. Refocusing the Peace Corps' mission from longterm development to military relief would be a mistake, however, and not just because it would increase the danger to volunteers. Frankly, the thought of turning the Peace Corps into an adjunct of the Bush administration's military adventurism revolts me.

I managed to catch the question and answer period of a lecture on North African zawiya -- or religious brotherhoods -- at the Middle East Institute. One of the more interesting points was that many of the Moroccan dynasties began as zawiya. Coincidentally, I began to read about their modern role in Morocco in Elizabeth Warnock Fernea's A Street in Marrakech. Although I saw many maributs -- or saint's tombs -- while I was in Morocco, I lived there in complete ignorance of the complex societies that exist around them, about which I am only now beginning to learn.

Muslims in U.S. Feel Targeted By Anti-Terror Business Policies (washingtonpost.com)

"The controversy reflects a new concern rippling through Muslim and Arab American communities, already on edge because of hate crimes and a law enforcement crackdown since the 2001 terror attacks. Now some Muslims say they fear that businesses are singling them out unfairly in an effort to comply with U.S. anti-terrorism measures."

I attended a fascinating lecture at the Middle East Institute today by Jean Abinader of the Arab American Institute. In the course of an hour, Mr. Abinader discussed many of the stereotypes and preconceptions that color both popular discourse and national policymaking in the United States. For example, contrary to popular perceptions, most Arab Americans are Christian not Muslim (a reflection in part of declining Christian communities in Arab countries). Moreover, only 20 percent of Muslims in America are Arabs; Arabs are far outnumbered by South Asians and African Americans. Arab Americans have made a point of distancing themselves from the despotic regimes of the Middle East, and have not traditionally thought of themselves as a minority. In fact, most Arabs in America do not think of themselves as Arabs at all, but as Egyptians, Lebanese, Moroccans, Syrians, etc. (Many associate the label "Arab" with Nasser's discredited pan-Arabism.) Increasingly since 9/11, however, Arabs have found themselves consigned to minority status and facing many of the same problems that other minorities have faced in this country. At the same time, the community is coming to grips with the fact that if they want to have a political impact in the United States, they need to come together, and that the label Arab-American is one under which they can unite to pursue their common interests and influence U.S. policy. On a local level, AAI is pursuing legislation to preserve civil liberties in Virginia, Maryland, and the District of Columbia.

I have almost reached the end of Albert Hourani's History of the Arab Peoples. Not only is the separate history of Morocco fascinating, but also the ruthless colonization of the Maghreb as a whole by the European powers. The situation in Algeria today is much easier to comprehend once one understands the extent to which the French colonizers completely subjugated the Algerian people, reserving land, wealth, education and power to themselves. My friend Rachid once said to me in Morocco: "Nous somme les indiens." At the time, I did not really see the parallel to the American frontier, but the parallel is a little clearer after reading Hourani's account of the colonization of Algeria and its cataclysmic war of independence.