Tower of the Sun: Stories From the Middle East and North Africa (31 page)

That history is unique in large part thanks to geography. I drove from Rabat to Marrakech—a perfect city for tourists—and from there into the towering Atlas Mountains. Morocco is huge. It’s rugged and craggy. Much of it is green. Part of it is on the Mediterranean, but most is on the Atlantic.

It doesn’t look like anyplace in the Middle East and nothing like the culturally vacuous Persian Gulf emirates. It doesn’t look like a Mediterranean country or an African country. Morocco is just Morocco, separated from Europe, the Middle East and sub-Saharan Africa by water, mountains and the hottest desert on earth. Over the centuries, its history and geography have sculpted a culture that’s partly Arab, partly Berber, partly European and even partly Jewish. Its government is so stable, it’s an anachronism.

The capital is 3,000 miles away from Mecca, the center of the Islamic world, while the city of Tangier is so close to Europe that you can see Spain across the Strait of Gibraltar. A fit enough person could swim there. The Spanish city of Ceuta on the north coast of Africa is actually contiguous with Morocco. It has been free of Muslim rule and either self-governing or Spanish for almost 600 years.

In the past, Morocco ruled parts of Spain. More recently, the Spanish ruled the southern provinces of Morocco, the contested region known today as the Western Sahara. And there is no doubt that the two countries have influenced each other. One of the more striking things about Spain’s southern region of Andalusia is how it looks and feels vaguely Moroccan, especially compared with Madrid. No one can visit Morocco without noticing that parts of it look and feel vaguely European, especially compared with the heartland of Arabia.

Moroccan culture is also influenced by sub-Saharan Africa and by Judaism, which has existed there for thousands of years. The new constitution defines Moroccan identity itself as partly Jewish.

What’s really striking about Morocco, however, is how much less Arab it is than other Arabic-speaking countries. That’s partly because nearly half the people aren’t even Arabs. They’re Berbers—or Amazigh, as they call themselves—an indigenous people who predated the 7th century Arab invasion by millennia. Morocco is a diverse and polyglot place, but its people have managed to create a coherent and unified culture that is rarely prone to the sectarian and ethnic violence that has torn other Middle Eastern countries apart.

But it’s not just the Europeans, Berbers, Jews and black Africans that make Morocco unique. It’s also the country’s distance from the Arabian Peninsula and the core of the Islamic world.

I met with Dr. Ahmed Abbadi, who holds a Ph.D. in Islamic studies from the University Qaddi Ayaad in Marrakech. Before 1995, he taught comparative history of religions and Islamic thought. Today he teaches sociology in a cooperation program with DePaul University in Chicago. He agrees that Morocco’s uniqueness is geographic in origin.

“Morocco used to be called the Far West before America was discovered,” he told me. “The Atlantic Ocean was known as the Sea of Darkness. We didn’t know if there was anything out there beyond it.”

Indeed, when I stood on the beach in Rabat, it felt strange to think that directly across the water lay not Turkey or Iran or Yemen or Pakistan but Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. From the United States, Morocco is closer than most of Europe. Baghdad is as far from Rabat as Canada’s Prince Edward Island.

“We’re separated from the center of the Middle East by great distances and great mountains,” Abbadi said. “Because we are so far away, we have time to analyze everything that comes out before it gets here. Everything emanating from the Middle East arrives on our shores in milder form. To quote Frank Sinatra, we did it our way.”

The ancient Phoenicians helped establish the rudiments of civilization in Morocco, but the early Moroccans resisted the Roman Empire. “We also resisted the Umayyads,” Abbadi said. “We resisted the Fatimids. We did not accept the Ottomans. We stood at the border of Morocco and Algeria and told the Ottomans no.”

Robert D. Kaplan, in his fascinating book
The Revenge of Geography,
notes that mountains are a conservative force. For good or bad, they block the spread of ideas. The Atlas Mountains are a powerful conservative force: not only do the snowcapped peaks slow the progress of ideas and culture coming from the Middle East, but they also create hyperlocal cultures within Morocco itself.

Port cities, moreover, are inherently liberal, and Morocco has lots of them. Because they are hubs for travel and trade, they provide access to foreign people, ideas and culture, and they do it safely because the sea protects them from ground invasion. Morocco’s port cities are all right next to Europe.

Morocco’s geography, then, is a blessing. Its port cities near Europe tend to bring good ideas in, and its mountains keep some of the Middle East’s worst ideas out.

Arab nationalists like to claim that the Arab world is a single nation cruelly divided by European imperialists, but this is a fantasy. The Arab world is coherent as a civilization, but like all civilizations, it’s splendidly diverse and tragically fractious. Not even Lebanon can hold itself together as a coherent nation, and it’s smaller in population than metropolitan Houston. So of course Morocco is different from other Arab countries. All Arab countries are different from other Arab countries.

When the Prophet Muhammad’s armies swept out of the Arabian Peninsula 13 centuries ago, they spread their religion and language, but they didn’t exterminate and replace indigenous populations. And the natives often influenced their conquerors as much as vice versa. In Egypt, Arabs became Egyptian even as most Egyptians eventually converted to Islam and learned Arabic. In Tunisia, the conquerors assimilated themselves and their religion into a highly advanced civilization that was Western in orientation. And in Morocco, they mixed with a Berber population linked to both sub-Saharan Africa and southern Europe. This is how it always goes for imperial expansionists. Mexico, for example, is to this day a fusion of European and Aztec cultures.

Religions also change as they spread. Christianity is practiced in strikingly different ways in Norway and Cuba. And both are very different from Christianity as practiced in Jerusalem, its birthplace. In the same way, Islam as practiced in Rabat is very different from how it’s practiced in Mecca. Like everything else in Morocco, it’s milder.

I asked Abbadi what he thinks of the term
moderate Islam.
Some Muslims don’t like it. Some non-Muslims think moderate Islam doesn’t exist. Even some Muslims insist that moderate Islam doesn’t exist.

“I prefer ‘ponderous and reflective’ Islam,” he said. “The word
moderate
per se doesn’t mean anything. Islam should be modern, teleological, clear, contextualized, realistic and feasible.”

“The reason I ask,” I said, “is because I want to know what you think about something Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan once said. Quote, ‘There is no moderate or immoderate Islam. Islam is Islam, and that’s it.’”

“That’s very dangerous,” Abbadi said. “Islam is not absolute. It is yoked to the human dimension. It is we humans who understand Islam. It is subjected to my reason, my way of understanding the world and my analysis. Religions encounter previous cultures, previous religions, previous visions and cosmologies. It merges with all of them. No religion falls from the sky onto bare ground.”

*  *  *

Moroccan journalist Abderrahman Aadaoui laughed when I asked him if he needs a license from the government to practice his profession. “Of course not,” he said, as if my question was bizarre. But journalists in plenty of Arab countries do need a license. They are heavily regulated by the dictators they write about. Not sufficiently toeing the party line? Say goodbye to your license and income, perhaps your family and home, and maybe even your life.

Aadaoui graduated with a degree in English literature from University Mohammad V in 1985, and he works today as the moderator of a weekly political show called
Issues and Opinion
on Moroccan TV.

I asked him about red lines in the media. Surely they must exist. All Arab countries have red lines. They aren’t the same everywhere, but they exist everywhere. And of course they exist in Morocco, as well.

The red lines are these: You can’t bang on the king. You can’t bang on Islam. And you can’t question the territorial integrity of Morocco—meaning you can’t say that the still-disputed Western Sahara region belongs to the Polisario, a communist guerrilla army backed by Fidel Castro and Muammar Qaddafi that tried to take over the region after the Spanish imperialists left.

Theoretically, Moroccan journalists can say whatever they want about anything else, including the parliament and the Arab-Israeli conflict.

“But Moroccans can even cross those lines now to an extent,” Aadaoui said. “They can write about the king and argue about Islam.”

“Can you say terrible things about the king?” I said.

He smiled and laughed. “Well, it depends,” he said. “What do you mean by terrible? You can talk about his fortune, his wealth. People are talking about that right now. You can talk about his personal life. There used to be a red line, a wall, that has been destroyed. The word
wall
is better than
line.
Like the Berlin Wall, every day someone takes another brick out of it.

“As far as liberty,” he continued, “Morocco has recently gone from zero percent to 95 percent. But we don’t have total freedom. Once in a while somebody goes to jail. And people ask, How come during the reign of Hassan II nobody went to jail? The reason is because no one wrote about anything controversial. Those were real red lines back in that day. No one had the right to write anything about the king except what was official, the things he was doing. Now people take the initiative and write about the king.”

Moroccan journalists do get arrested sometimes, and not only for crossing those red lines. For instance, in 2011, Rachid Niny, a controversial newspaper publisher, was jailed for a year for supposedly publishing “disinformation” about Morocco’s intelligence agency.

Because of incidents of that sort, and because of the red lines, Freedom House ranks Morocco’s press as “not free” even while listing Morocco as a “partly free” country.

Aadaoui thinks that’s grossly unfair.

“Freedom House,” he said, “is critical of Moroccan press freedom because they were expecting 100 percent freedom. They shouldn’t make judgments about the current era without taking into consideration what we had before. There was enormous oppression. We weren’t allowed to say one single word. I left during King Hassan’s reign. I went to the United States. And when I came back, Morocco was a different country. You had to have lived in the period before to enjoy what we have now.”

I can understand his frustration, but that doesn’t make Freedom House wrong. The ranking doesn’t by itself reveal that Morocco is more free than it used to be, but it’s nevertheless the case that the media isn’t yet free. The rating is accurate even if Aadaoui is right that the press is freer than it was.

Aadaoui sees a glass that’s half-full while Freedom House sees a glass that’s half-empty. They’re both right. They even agree with each other. Neither disputes the fact that half the glass is filled with water while the other is nothing but air.

He and I discussed the society as well as the media. Morocco is an inherently conservative place. It’s like Japan in some ways. Change occurs gradually and very carefully over long stretches of time. That’s how it has always been there. That’s one of the reasons Morocco still has a king with actual power long after its European neighbors across the Mediterranean got rid of theirs.

But this is the 21st century, and no culture is static.

“The modern political parties talk about separating religion from government,” he said. “This is new. But you should understand something. You see all this modernity around you.” I did, indeed, see a modern-looking country around me. “We’re modern in the street, but we are conservative when we go home. We have two faces. A man may watch a pornographic movie outside, but if he’s home with his wife and he sees a kiss on the TV, he might change the channel. This is Morocco.”

“Can you explain that?” I said.

“Modernity is new here,” he said. “We got some of it from French and Spanish colonialism, and from America. After the French and Spanish left, modernity stayed. There will always be a debate between modernity and conservatism, but the new generation can be as modern as they want to be. They’re on Facebook and Twitter. They know only one thing. They are separating from the past. In 20 or 30 years, I think, we will no longer have two personalities. The duality we have here will fade. But people my age live in both worlds at the same time. And you find both points of view in the media. Some newspapers are strictly modernist and constantly attack the conservatives. One newspaper has pictures of women on what’s called the ‘hot page.’ It’s almost pornographic.”

“The women are wearing, what, swimsuits?” I said.

“Not even swimsuits!” he said. “You don’t see this in other Arab countries.”

“Which side does the king come down on in the argument between the modernists and conservatives?” I said.

“He isn’t supposed to take sides because he represents all the people,” Aadaoui said, “but he’s young and he encourages the modernist current. He says Morocco can’t abandon its roots or religion, but he insists all the time on modernity. It is a key word in his speeches.”

*  *  *

The United States has precious few allies in the Arab world. Only two Arab governments are genuine friends instead of friends of convenience. One is Jordan. The other is Morocco. Unlike “frenemy” nations like Egypt and Pakistan, Morocco is a real ally of the United States and has been for more than 200 years.

Morocco has never done anything bad to America. Unlike Libya and Algeria, it was not even a belligerent in the early 19th century Barbary Wars. Likewise, America has never done anything bad to Morocco.

Morocco was the first country on earth to recognize America’s independence from Britain, and it was one of the first countries the United States liberated from Hitler. (Incidentally, even when it was occupied by the Nazis, the Moroccan government refused to hand over its Jews.) During the Cold War, Morocco stood fast with the United States not only against the Soviet Union but also against Arab nationalism. Today, it stands fast with America against radical Islam.