The Moroccan street: No to violence, no to Western disrespect

Thu, 09 Feb 2006 12:16:00 +0000

The Mohammed cartoons are the talk of Ifrane, a town of 10,000 one hour's drive from Fez up into the Middle Atlas Mountains. They are the talk in the marché, where Berbers and Arabs, academics and shepherds, women veiled and not, come to shop and chat; in sidewalk cafes, where TVs play soccer matches and burning embassies; in small apartments in back streets, where women stand at the stove and men mull over the many rumors; and in mosques, where Friday prayers also serve as a community gathering.

"You can insult me, my mother, my father, but not the Prophet," my friend Abdelghanni tells me, going on to explain the heart of the matter. He's 45, an Arabic teacher in an English-language high school. "If you draw a picture of the Prophet, you will make a mistake. It will be false. We already have his description from the Koran: his eyes, his nose, his face, his hair, and so we don't draw him because we don't need to and because we don't want" -- he searches for the word -- "to pollute our image."

The view from Morocco

Sun, 30 Jan 2005 00:42:00 +0000

The view of Iraq on election eve suggests a dervish nation whirling toward civil war. "This is the calm before the storm" is a refrain heard by commentators in the Iraqi press. "Doomed" is a word you also hear. But even with optimism in such short supply, you can still look at the Iraqi people as though they've just come out of a prison psycho ward after serving 30 years on false charges. And you think: give them time to adjust, give them a moment to trust somebody, and they just might make it.

We live in a small university town in the Middle Atlas Mountains of Morocco. My wife teaches high school English. I teach a college journalism course. My 10-year-old son is in school. For weeks, I've been watching and reading news of Sunday's elections in the local Iraqi press. I've been particularly interested to see Iraq without the traditional American news filters.

The view of the elections from Morocco is like the view across a room through someone else's bifocals. You have only the vaguest sense of Iraq. The truth is, the elections have never been a big story here. That may be difficult to understand when you live in the United States, the world's news hopper. But it may be American-centric to think otherwise.

Salon.com > Mark MacNamara

The Moroccan street: No to violence, no to Western disrespect

The view from Morocco