Someone told me this story: “I met a European couple, who said to me, ‘When we wanted to come to Morocco as tourists we gave our bathing costume and trunks to our friends in Spain, because we assumed that we wouldn’t need them once we got into Morocco, which is a Muslim state. But as we arrived in Tangier we were floored. We saw Moroccans in their swim trunks at Tangier beach!’”
Also in Tangier, when I was a student there, I once got into my school library and found a white American woman in her early thirties dressed in a Moroccan jellaba and head-scarf. She was sitting at a table and reading the Quran. Around her were Moroccan female students in T-shirts and tight jeans."
“So what?” someone would say. “Where is the problem?”
The problem is that sometimes we judge before we know. Between prejudice and reality there is only one step to take. It is to know. So what do we know about our region? In my country, Morocco, there’s at least one magazine fully published in Moroccan Arabic. And you have Algerian Arabic, Libyan Arabic, Egyptian Arabic, Syrian Arabic, Iraqi Arabic, Yemeni Arabic, and everybody has his own Arabic. You needn’t wonder at it, since many of us have never been to school, for only at school can one learn the Arabic which our forefathers learnt at home as their mother-tongue and in which the Quran was revealed. Now that Arabic is nobody’s mother-tongue anymore. Moreover, there’s not just the Arabs in the Arab world. And so everyone has their beloved language That’s why most of us simply don’t know the Quran. And most of those of us who do read the Quran don’t understand it the way our forefathers did. So the Quran has had a limited impact on our lives for a long time now. Even now, for many of us, we only know some of it through our centuries-long customs and traditions.
This tenuous connection with the Quran is far from being over. Another thing is the struggle for power. Wars of succession have wreaked unforgivable havoc throughout our history. It’s the same old greed for authority, the same old love of the throne, the same old hunger for worldly glory. It is therefore quite natural if each Arab country has now its own Arabic, its own “caliph”, its own army, its own borders. Needless to say it's good or bad. Suffice it to say this is the world where we live in today.
For various reasons, this same Arab world, where I live, has long been very important for many people in other parts of the globe. As early as the 19th century, several renowned Russian authors, for example, wrote beautiful things about Arabs and Islam. Curiously, people in the West, too, began embracing Islam in their thousands after 9/11. America suddenly discovered that it had full-fledged imams who spoke Arabic better than many Arabs, and who knew the Quran and the Hadith by heart -which is not given to all Arabs and Muslims-, and who were duly authorized to issue fatwas. Some American imams became stars and were invited to speak on American TVs. It was then discovered that American Muslims showed their fellow brothers and sisters in Islam how to create Islamic websites and how to run Islamic satellite TV channels. All this is to say how much it’s important to know before judging.
When, in 1995, the Qataries launched Aljazeera, many Arab regimes were afraid for their local audiences, afraid that these audiences might snub their propaganda-packed radio and TV stations. After Aljazeera came a myriad other Arabic-language satellite TV stations, mostly financed by TV ads. This inspired people in many Arab states to launch, if not “free, independent” TV stations, at least radio stations. (That is not a criticism though. You know better than I that even in the best democracies in the world there is less and less press freedom.) And so, in Morocco, for example, we have 13 independent radio stations, all funded primarily by advertising. At least half of these radio stations have religion-related shows. Some of these shows turned out to be so popular, so successful, that some of the best known preachers and religious scholars in the country were hired to boost the audience, to bring in more cash to the radios -although this money is never enough. On some of such radio shows you would hear an Islamist university professor discuss peacefully with a communist activist; you would hear people talk of their problems, of their sufferings, of their criticisms of the government without being persecuted. Similarly, other people became increasingly convinced that Islamic banks (also called participative banks) would have a huge success. Result: we have several of these banks right now. I’m not saying that’s good or bad. J’m just saying this is the world where I live.
For several decades our country was occupied by France. It was therefore quite normal that the French language was for some a means of social mobility and for others a means of social distinction. Speaking French in public has long been synonymous with belonging to a certain elite, to a certain class. School massification, television, gradual enrichment of certain sections of society through commerce or the civil service or by expatriation (in France, in particular) -all this made possible good command of French by a greater number of people- until public schools, increasingly Arabized, became, on the contrary, a brake preventing thousands and thousands of people from gaining access to this status of French-like elite.
Even before Independence (in 1956), the "conventional" elite, highly qualified, was already influenced by Western culture. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Karl Marx, Hegel, Weber, Montesquieu, Greek literature, Freud, etc. were common readings by these people, who would understandably jeer at those who read "yellow books", in Arabic language, printed locally or imported from Mashriq (the Middle East). This elite, often politicized, was naturally able to take up positions of responsibility, opening the way to a certain like-father-like-son inheritance. And when new prospects, even more promising, opened up before the offspring of this elite, spoiled by the historic opportunity of the time, the development of events meant that, after Independence, the State had to Moroccanize the administration. This progressive Moroccanization meant that the Arabic language had to go in parallel or at the expense of the French language. The demographic factor has resulted, among other things, in the proliferation of faculties and universities, where, through the translation into Arabic, complete courses started to be taught in Arabic. And so more and more teachers no longer needed to master French, or even literary Arabic. A teacher of History and Geography in Arabic received the same salary and social advantages as a Physics-and-Chemistry teacher in French. Both could live decently, build a house or even a villa, buy a nice car and so on. One and the other was able to express himself as he saw fit, or read what he wanted, or join the political party of his choice, etc.
It just so happens that elites from here and everywhere else have always been associated with politics. And just like anywhere else, here too money has a say in politics. We have a lot of polyglot, very cultured entrepreneurs who contribute greatly both to the economy and to the management of the country. Everyone has their place.
Of course, here as elsewhere, there are problems every day. But what is beautiful is that there are solutions every day too. Almost always news programmes begin with the red of blood and end with the red of roses.
