August 2003 Archives
Wafin: Morocco in North America
"On visiting Moulay Idris, however, I realized I was in a unique expression of Islamic culture. I arrived in the afternoon, when sufi chants were being sung by a group of devotees; women, men and children sat in the sahn, and then sometimes entered to the hall of the tomb where they sought blessings, prayed, or simply meditated. The shrine conveyed an intense religious feeling, perhaps only equaled in my experience with the Dome of the Rock and the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem. Moulay Idriss is an expression of Islamic piety unique to the devotion of Morocco. Not only the dialect but the devotion was distinctly “Maghribi.” The more I learned about these “saints,” the more I could understand the tensions of early modern Moroccan history between the makhzan/government and the sufi lodges."
BBC NEWS | World | Africa | Moroccan king targets slums
"On a tour of the north of the country, the king presided over the start of building work on new housing projects for slum dwellers in Tangier."
The Blogalization Conspiracy: Marginalia and Glossae
"So, really, the experience of a reader confronted with a newspaper in modern standard Arabic is not so much analogous to our being confronted with a New York Times in Latin, as Prof. Haeri suggests. It's more like a speaker of any medieval Romance dialect being confronted with a song in Provencal, a language that came to have a special role as a sort of international lingua franca of poetry."
The experience is even more convoluted for the English speaker learning Arabic, who generally learns Modern Standard Arabic before learning any of the various spoken dialects. I had the unusual experience of learning the Moroccan dialect before being exposed to MSA in any formal sense.
One might just as well have made the comparison to the speaker of any medieval Romance dialect who wanted to read a book or correspond with someone who spoke a different dialect in the Middle Ages. In such cases, books and letters would almost certainly have been in Latin, which by that time was an acquired tongue for all its speakers.
The Dazzle Is in the Details (washingtonpost.com)
"Microfibers are easy-care technical wonders. But for emotional connection, they have nothing on the splendid spangled silks and striped cottons from old Marrakech, Fez and Rabat."
"The pianist and conductor Daniel Barenboim, left, and his West-Eastern Divan Orchestra of Arab and Israeli musicians are to give their first performance in an Arab country on Sunday in Rabat, Morocco, Agence France-Presse reported."
Morocco Sentences Four to Death for Bomb Attacks (washingtonpost.com)
"RABAT (Reuters) - A Moroccan court sentenced four men to death on Tuesday for their role in bomb attacks in Casablanca three months ago that killed 45 people, including 12 suicide bombers."
