Second Wind

Keeping up even one weblog is a lot of work, and I have not had much success keeping up a second. This is particularly true when the second weblog is about a far away country about which I have a general, not a specialized, knowledge. Nevertheless, since I regard the a la menthe as something of an extended love letter to the country where I lived once and from whom I have been too long away, I am willing to give it another go.

One reason for the neglect of this blog was that I found that I wanted to include my occasional observations about Morocco in my main blog, A Web Undone 2. Now with advances in blogging technology (the MultiBlog plugin) I can include content in both blogs at once! Bismillah!

Roots of Terror in Morocco

The New York Times > International > Africa > Morocco Connection Is Emerging as Sleeper Threat in Terror War

"It's easier for the Moroccans to place responsibility outside Morocco and blame Al Qaeda, because it frees them from responsibility," said one senior Belgian intelligence official. "They refuse to see there's an internal component of the problem, one of poverty and despair."

The bad news is that European indifference to the Casablanca bombings and cultural misunderstandings have hampered coordination between Morocco and Europe of efforts to combat suspected Moroccan terror cells. The good news is that cooperation seems to be getting better as the two sides better appreciate the gravity of the threat.

Churchill at Marrakesh

Responses to "Sir Winston Churchill's art" August 12, 2003

Painting joined Churchill's vocations of politics, reading, bricklaying and writing. In his little book Painting as a Pastime he tells of the benefits and joys of his forty-year hobby. We've included some of Winston's paintings and a few of his perceptive insights in the current clickback at www.painterskeys.com/clickbacks/pick.asp

Among the paintings described and shown above is Churchill's painting of the Koutoubia mosque in 1948.

Our Prayers Are with Them

"RABAT, Morocco - A powerful earthquake struck northern Morocco early Tuesday, toppling houses and killing at least 300 people, local authorities said. Many of the victims were women, children, and the elderly."

Pardon for the Press

MoorishGirl

"I just heard that Ali Lamrabet was pardoned today, along with several other journalists. I would have preferred for the courts to rectify his situation rather than the king, but at this point I'm too thrilled by the news of his release to be cynical."

High Times

Guardian Unlimited | The Guardian | �7bn cannabis crop strips Morocco of trees and soil

"Cannabis production is expanding so fast in Morocco that it is causing soil erosion and the destruction of long-established forests, the UN reported yesterday."

The increase in production is apparently driven by spiraling European demand. Europe, like the United States, is left in the position of publicly deploring drug production while paralyzed by its own insatiable consumption.

R.I.P.

MoorishGirl

"I've just heard that Moroccan author Mohammed Choukri passed away this weekend at his home in Tangier. A contemporary and friend of Jean Genet, Tennessee Williams, Paul Bowles (with whom he later had a falling out), and others, Choukri is probably best known for his semi-autobiographical novel Al-Khubz Al-Hafi, which dealt with famine in the 1940s and his experiences with drugs, homosexuality, and prostitution.

I guess I need to add Choukri to my list of people to read. It's not the first time I've heard his name, but I'm sorry to learn about him because of his death.

Textiles

Over the weekend, I caught the end of the National Museum of African Arts' exhibit The Fabric of Moroccan Life -- a show about Moroccan textiles. The show illustrated the central role of textiles in Arabic and Berber decor, and showcased a variety of clothing, curtains, pillows, and wall hangings. Like most shows at the Museum of African Art, the selection was chosen so that it could be seen in the space of an hour and a half. I came away not only with a new appreciation for Moroccan textiles, but also with two CD's of Moroccan music and a beautiful set of tea glasses.

The Professor Visits

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."

Language of the People

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.

Music in Morocco

Arts Briefing

"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."