Virtual Magazine of Morocco on the Web
Morocco Week in Review 
February 27, 2016

Students lead women’s running camp in Morocco
February 22, 2016 BY MARGARET MCNAMARA MANAGING NEWS EDITOR

It’s not common to see people—especially women—running and exercising in Morocco. This cultural difference inspired two members of the club cross country and track and field teams to lead a five-day women’s health and exercise program after their study abroad trip to Ouarzazate, Morocco during winter 2015. Seniors Elizabeth Clinton and her teammate, Nora Reynolds, had to keep up with their training while abroad. On their runs they reflected a lot on their own experiences running in a country where it wasn’t common to see women exercising in public. Clinton said the idea inspired her thesis about women’s participation in sports, but she said, “we also wanted to do something concrete—not just research about it but do something about it.”

Clinton and Reynolds applied for grants to return to Morocco to initiate the project. Between grants and some crowdfunding they were able to lead an exercise and leadership program for women called Tessria Camp, which they held this January. They reached out to an organization, the Ministry of Youth and Sport, to help find a community in need of something like this. They heard back from a couple of the Peace Corps volunteers in Ouarzazate, Morocco, a small, conservative town on the edge of the Sahara, who said some of the women they had worked with expressed an interest in exercising. “That was kind of a perfect fit for us,” Clinton said.

Their camp had 20 participants ages 18-30, none of whom spoke any English. Clinton and Reynolds had taken some Arabic classes, but because it differed from the colloquial dialect of the participants, the pair had help from students from the local university who assisted with translating.

In general, Moroccan women aren’t out in the public sphere as much as American women. Clinton said women are seen in public—it’s not frowned upon—but for the most part they are at home and men are on the streets.

For planning purposes, they returned to Morocco for the second time this August to do some baseline research and interviews for the five-day camp which focused programming on running and associated tasks like goal setting, team building and sexual harassment. They also set out to build confidence in the women and provide women’s health education, a limited resource in Morocco. “A lot of these women didn’t have health education in high school, or they didn’t go to high school,” Clinton said. “It was really amazing to talk to some of these women almost 30 years old who didn’t know a lot of this stuff. Some of them have children.”

Clinton said many of the women they worked with had no experience with women’s health exams. She said the women knew they were in need of health education and were interested, which led to meaningful conversations despite Clinton’s initial fear that the dialogue about these sensitive topics would be awkward. Clinton said Moroccan women have these conversations with each other, but it is not something they talk about much, instead trying to
Clinton said sexual harassment was one of the main factors as to why women didn’t feel comfortable running outside.

“When we run—even around Delaware—we get catcalled, but in Morocco it’s crazy,” Clinton said. “There’s a lot of unemployment, so there are men who sit at coffee shops all day because they don’t have jobs and when you’re walking or running it’s pretty much constant.”

Women wear hijabs, and Clinton said she had originally thought the clothing would be a deterrent. However, Clinton said the women were insistent that wearing hijab was their choice, and it didn’t stop them. Clinton found it inspiring that one woman wanted to make hijab outfits for women who want to participate in sports.“Honestly, it was more successful than I thought it would be,” Clinton said.
http://udreview.com/14660-2/
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SIT student nominated for Forbes award starts new project
By Chris Mays cmays@reformer.com @CMaysBR on Twitter 02/23/2016 BRATTLEBORO (courtsey of PCV Justin Bibee)
SIT Graduate Institute student Justin Bibee, who is currently in Morocco serving with the Peace Corps, was a finalist in Forbes 30 Under 30 Social Entrepreneurs.

Justin Bibee isn't your average college kid. Although the SIT Graduate Institute student was not ultimately named one of Forbes 30 Under 30 Social Entrepreneurs, the efforts that got him nominated in the first place only continue to increase.

Bibee, who is currently in Morocco serving in the Peace Corps, received a letter from the magazine and wondered what it was all about. He was a finalist for the 2016 group."I was utterly surprised. I read the letter and had to reread it, this time paying attention to every word," he said. "I was recognized by Forbes for my founding of Humanac."

Previously known as People's Advocate Council, the volunteer-based human rights organization was founded in January 2015 under the premise that it would raise awareness around the importance of protecting human rights through various initiatives. Homelessness, racial discrimination and intolerance were examples Bibee used as issues seen everywhere in society. Humanac wanted to open minds up to seeing new ways to face such challenges, he said. Not only should people be aware of human rights issues, his group would argue, but they should learn how to stand up to them.

Bibee said was, and still is, "sincerely humbled," honored and grateful for the nod from Forbes. But he says he's more thankful about the opportunity he's been given to help others."While it is wonderful to receive awards, knowing I have helped others is rewarding enough," he said. "I know the difference that positive inspiration can make in a person's life. Such inspiration has changed my life."

His latest project is a book of photographs. It will be published in hard copies and sold to benefit the Global Human Rights Project whose aim is to bring human rights activities to every country. Photos are being submitted from all over the world with people holding up signs in support. The funds will allow for the expansion and development of human rights advocacy, said Bibee, who sees "extraordinary potential" in the power of photography."Photographs have a unique ability to move us and drive us to take action," he said. "This project is bringing people together from every country in the world. Photographs are enduring and history will show that the Global Human Rights Project succeeded in bringing together every race, religion and nationality for the advancement of human rights."

Returning from Peace Corps service in April, Bibee will keep working towards getting his master's degree at SIT. He plans to be back on campus in September.
Justin Bibee's book will published in hard copies and sold to benefit the Global Human Rights Project whose aim is to bring human rights activities to every country.

"While everyone else was fighting to be the first to depart Morocco, I chose to be the last," said Bibee, president of the SIT Student Association in 2013. "I have no doubt that my Peace Corps service has prepared me to continue contributing significantly at SIT. I will continue my work with the United Nations Association of the United States of America, working with local communities and elected officials in Vermont to inform, inspire and mobilize Americans to support the principles and vital work of the United Nations."

He also plans to continue the third goal of the Peace Corps, which is to "promote a better understanding of other peoples on the part of Americans through organizing speeches and presentations about Peace Corps service and encouraging others to serve."

Bibee looks at human rights as something that should come before everything else in what he calls the fight against underdevelopment. Obligations around that should apply to all people no matter their location, he said, and acts of human rights violations wherever are criminal and cannot be justified.
"Underpinning my effort is a rational and deeply moral purpose," he said. "There are answers to the world's cataclysms, and that is the respect for — and fulfillment of — human rights."
Contact Chris Mays at cmays@reformer.com or 802-254-2311, ext. 273.
http://www.reformer.com/latestnews/ci_29553353/sit-student-nominated-forbes-award-starts-new-project
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Morocco Launches Website, Apps to Map Location of Over 14,000 Government Services.
Saturday 27 February 2016 -morocco world news By Zainab Calcuttawala Rabat

The Moroccan government launched a new web-based portal on Friday which maps the location of over 14,000 centers of public service, on a website and accompanying iOS and Android mobile applications. The website’s official launch ceremony was conducted by the Ministry of Civil Service and Modernization of Administration. President Abdelilah Benkirane and Mohamed Moubdi, Minister of Civil Services and Modernization, were present at the ceremony in Rabat, along with several other members of government and presidents of the country’s 12 regions.

“This initiative is part of efforts made by the government to simplify administrative procedures for citizens and provide access to basic public services quickly and with reduced costs,” according to a statement by the Ministry. The site – which can be accessed in both French and Arabic at maps.service-public.ma – classifies the country’s public buildings into 19 categories based on their primary function and then locates the buildings on an interactive and easy-to-navigate map.

Users can further specify the locations they are searching for in the many subcategories that are listed. The physical address, phone number, and email address associated with each mapped location are also listed and easily accessible. The “institutional and strategic project” also allows users to mark their “favorite” or most visited locations, calculate routes between two points on the map and locate public services and transportation near their current position.
The mobile application, named “Idarati Map” in the Apple App Store and the Google Play store, provides similar services on-the-go to “put at the disposal of users the necessary information to conduct administrative procedures,” the statement read.
http://maps.service-public.ma/mfpma/geo/front/
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Kenitra Hosts Model United Nations for First Time
Friday 26 February 2016 - Youssef Igrouane Rabat

For the first time, the city of Kenitra will host Model United Nations (MUN) from March 4th through 6th, at l’Ecole Nationale de Commerce et de Gestion (ENCG).
Under the theme of “Peace and Security Threatened by International Acts of Terrorism,” the event will focus on the promotion of human rights, consolidation of international relations, and preparation of students for diplomacy. The forum will provide a platform for the students to improve their leadership, negotiation, and public speaking skills. The three-day event will include round tables, networking opportunities for students and delegates, galas, and a conference about the advancement of regionalization and global terrorism.

The MUN is regarded as an excellent opportunity for the young Moroccans to discover the United Nations procedures and protocols. In addition, it represents a stepping-stone for students to achieve their future dreams of working in the United Nations. During the event’s activities, participants will take the role of budding diplomats, managing the United Nation’s operations and strategies.

“Mohammed Limame Malainine and I are pleased to conduct the MUN, in collaboration with ENCG students and in partnership with Konrad-Adenauer-Stiftung, a German political foundation,” said Youssef Gherradi, Secretary General of the United Nations ENCG-Model and MUN Director Programs in Morocco, to MWN.
“We had the chance before to organize the same event in different cities across the kingdom at several schools, including L’UIR and EMI,” he added.
The event will involve the representatives of 55 countries, 15 security councilors, 40 model councilors, 2 international chairs, and 5 guests of honors.
The ENCG is a public academic institution of higher education created in 2005.

The UN is an international organization was created in 1945, aims to maintain peace in the world through international cooperation and consolidate the harmonious ties between the nations. It also focuses on the idea of promoting human rights and economic and social progress across the world.
https://www.moroccoworldnews.com/2016/02/180675/kenitra-hosts-model-united-nations-for-first-time/
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Cost-Sharing: A Threat to Higher Education in Morocco.
Friday 26 February 2016 - Abdessamad Saidi Fez

Historically speaking, Moroccan universities have a long tradition with the Qarawiyyin University, founded in the 9th century. After the colonial era, a pattern of growth in Moroccan universities began with the duplication of the colonial model (same curricula, same system of evaluation, same language of instruction). This pattern did not last longer after the colonial era as the state introduced Arabization and Moroccanization policies. These policies aimed to restructure the system of higher education by training Moroccan administrative staff who were supposed to replace their French expatriates. At that time, this was the main mission of higher education in Morocco. However, with the new open access policies, which guarantee free access to all baccalaureate holders (and even to those without a baccalaureate degree), higher education in Morocco acquired a new mission of absorbing the growing numbers of secondary school graduates and “preparing them for second rate employment at best and unemployment at worst” Ouakrime (2003).

Open Access Policy in Moroccan Higher Education
After the introduction of the open access policy, which guarantees education for all as one of the tenets of social justice, the pressure of student numbers that result from population growth led the government to introduce more stringent selection procedures (minimum grades in major subjects, competitive examination). In accordance with this, Ait Si Mhamed (2004) argues that the crisis of higher education in Morocco originated from open access policies which led to a rapid expansion of enrollment at universities and to the adoption of selection procedures. These restrictions placed on access to higher education led to the development of, what Ouakrime (2003) calls, a “dual system of higher education,” composed of general higher education (supposed to absorb the growing number of baccalaureate holders) and specialized higher education (which enjoys a highly favorable staff-student ratio and an adequate number of teaching and learning resources).

The results of this dual-system are devastating. Due to the restrictions, many students with a baccalaureate certificate find themselves compelled to join technical institutions (such as ITA, ISTA) which are relatively accessible, though students must pay an annual fee ranging between 700dhs and 800dhs to complete their registration. Other students who face obstacles joining public universities have no choice but to resort to private institutions which forces their parents to carry the burden of paying the education fees. All these changes in the nature of higher education in Morocco are motivated by financial reasons. The main reason behind these changes is the government’s adoption of a cost-sharing policy.

Cost-Sharing in Moroccan Higher Education
Cost-sharing is a “shift of the burden of higher education costs from being totally borne by the government or the taxpayer, to being shared with parents and students” Ait Si Mhamed (2004: 4). According to the author, the adoption of the cost-sharing policy has different rationales. First, there is the need for another source of revenueother than the government. Second, there is the principle of equity, which is based on the view that those who benefit should share the burden of the costs with the government or taxpayer. As far as Moroccan higher education is concerned, cost-sharing takes two forms. First, it takes the form of the government’s shift of fees to the students and families after cutting, either fully or partially, the stipend assistantship/scholarship. Second, it takes the form of shifting enrollment from a publicly subsidized sector to a new private sector in the form of technical schools and private post-secondary institutions (e.g. ISTA).

This raises the  question, to what extent can this cost-sharing policy preserve equity in enrollment and improve the quality of higher education in Morocco? The obvious answer is that this policy is causing more harm to Moroccan higher education. The problem is that the ministry of higher education is no longer able to finance the“public” sector and compels students, who may be competent in mathematics, physics, biology, sociology, or psychology to join technical institutions to study two years of computer science or management.

The  objective to reorient baccalaureate holders, from prestigious institutions and public universities to technical schools, has generally been fulfilled. However, the ministry of higher education looked for more strategies to shift the burden of costs to students’ families. A concrete example concerns the case of master’s students in different universities.  A master’s student is a researcher whose studies are not limited to courses and examinations. The government used to support all master’s students (like PhD candidates) with a scholarship every three months. The eligibility for this scholarship had no restrictions as all master’s students used to receive it. Since last year, however, many restrictions have been put on who receives this grant among MA students. The only ones who benefit from it are the ones who used to receive it during their undergraduate studies. This strategy leads the ministry of higher education, in particular, and the government, in general, to preserve large amounts of the budget from being “squandered” on higher education.

 This policy of cost-sharing is not a menace to all higher education systems throughout the world. It is its poor implementation and the government’s intention to push it to the extreme that makes it a threat to Moroccan higher education. Thus, in Morocco, this policy has created more problems and it will continue to affect the system of higher education if it is not well-implemented or dropped altogether.

Works Cited
Mhamed, A. A. (2004). Cost-sharing and Access to Higher Education in Morocco: What is wrong? Knowledge, Access and Governance: Strategies for Change (pp. 1, 2, 7). Paris: UNESCO Forum on Higher Education, Research and Knowledge Colloquium on Research and Higher Education Policy.
Ouakrime, M. (2003). Morocco. In Damtew Teferra and Philip Altbach (Eds). African Higher Education: International Reference Handbook. Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press.
http://www.moroccoworldnews.com/2016/02/180644/cost-sharing-a-threat-to-higher-education-in-morocco/
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Six Argan Oil Benefits: The Moroccan Elixir for Your Beauty Woes.
Sparshita Saxena , NDTV, Modified: February 26, 2016

It is absolutely impossible to surf the internet and not come across one or two latest trends in the field of health and beauty. There is constant posting on new super foods and exotic ingredients that are not only a rarity (and therefore expensive) but also promise in solving some of the everyday health and personal care issues. On further analysing such trends for the past few years, it wouldn't be wrong to say that now super seeds and essential oils are ruling the charts. So munch on the goodness of flaxseeds, chia seeds, goji berries and the like, and make way for exquisite oils into your personal regime. This piece aims to unveil one such oil from the heart of Morocco. It is excellent for your beauty related woes - introducing argan oil.

Extracted from the kernels of argan tree found primarily in Morocco, argan oil has been used in the region traditionally for treating hair and skin, as well as in a handful of culinary preparations. Argan oil is a rich source of linoleic acid - a polyunsaturated omega-6 fatty acid, which is easily found in other ingredients like sesame seeds and flaxseeds. It is also enriched with omega 3 fatty acids (alpha linolenic acid), antioxidants, Vitamin A and E. Though the Moroccans are known to extract its oil traditionally and use it for various purposes, reportedly, the un-roasted version of the oil is used as a natural remedy to treat skin infections, acne and hair troubles. For culinary purposes argan oil is extracted from the dry-roasted kernels, while on the other hand, its cosmetic brilliance is derived out of the non-roasted kernels.

Though not much research has been conducted on the health benefits of argan oil, the locals use the oil in their salads, as well as in dips and sauces. You can try making the traditional dip of Morocco by grinding together peanuts, sugar/honey, almonds with a bit of argan oil. Other than this, the oil is 80% poly unsaturated fats, which are known to be protective against cardiovascular diseases.

Why Should You Give it a Try: Benefits
1. Hair Conditioning: Argan oil is great for taming dry and frizzy hair. Not only does it add sheen to your lack-lustre hair but also conditions and arms it against further damage. You can also leave a few drops of it in your hair and let it work as a leave-in conditioner.
2. Skin Moisturising: It is used as a traditional Moroccan remedy for skin infections, rashes and acne, as well as a moisturising agent (in case of using the oil directly, make sure to use not more than two drops as it may get greasy).
3. Nail Care, Lips and Heels: It is excellent for treating rough nails, cuticles, chapped lips and cracked heels.
4. For Stretch Marks: Using it during pregnancy over concerned areas can help fight stretch marks. It is rich in vitamin E which has skin soothing and rejuvenating properties that also increses the suppleness and elasticity of the skin.
5. For Glowing Skin: Use a drop or two in your face packs, scrubs or mix it with aloe vera gel and use as a night cream for a radiant, glowing skin.
6. Source of Anti-Oxidants: In a research study published in the Journal of Clinical Nutrition, Argan oil was found to lower bad LDL cholesterol and have anti-oxidant properties.
Argan oil is considered a luxury product in Morocco and is gradually making a mark in the cosmetic industry across Europe for its nourishing properties. A bottle of it won't come in easy of course, but its many benefits are certainly meant to be reaped.
http://food.ndtv.com/food-drinks/6-argan-oil-benefits-the-moroccan-elixir-for-your-beauty-woes-1281499
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Morocco’s Progress toward Economic Diversification Must be accompanied by Greater job Creation and Youth Inclusion.
Friday, 26 February 2016 The FINANCIAL

World Bank Vice President for the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region, Hafez Ghanem, closed on February 25 a four-day official visit to Morocco. He highlighted the critical strategic partnership between the World Bank Group and Morocco and called for continued and enhanced cooperation. In an adverse regional and global contexts, Ghanem commended Morocco for its achievements and acknowledged Morocco’s efforts to spur economic development and job creation, and to advance reforms to promote inclusive growth.

"Morocco is pushing the reform agenda at economic, social and institutional levels and sets an example for the MENA region and beyond. The World Bank Group stands ready to accompany Morocco in this process in order to foster economic and social inclusion” said Ghanem.

During his visit, Ghanem agreed with national authorities to put a special focus on youth, a most pressing agenda for Morocco and the sub-region. Adopting the social inclusion lens, the Bank will steer its programs towards the most vulnerable groups, including women, smallholder farmers, and youth. Looking ahead, the Bank will refocus its engagement towards jobs, lagging regions and education, in addition to youth. This will require adopting a multi-sectoral approach to better integrate policies and programs, according to the World Bank.

Throughout discussions with national and local government representatives, as well as with civil society and the private sector, Ghanem reiterated the Bank’s readiness to help Morocco deepen its policies and programs that promote greater economic opportunities and social participation for the most vulnerable. During the meeting with Abdelilah Benkirane, Head of Government, as well as in separate meetings with the Minister of Economy and Finance, Mohamed Boussaid, and the Minister of General Affairs and Governance, Mohamed Louafa, Ghanem confirmed the Bank’s full support to national and local authorities and their efforts to achieve an inclusive approach and social justice.  

“Morocco is proving its unique position in the region and leveraging its comparative advantage to attract investors and diversify its economy. It can grow its potential by developing its human capital and further strengthening its institutions” said Ghanem in a meeting with employers and young entrepreneurs.
The World Bank Vice President visited the Casablanca Automobile Vocational Training Center to see first-hand innovative approaches linking training and employment opportunities. Local development and the country’s regionalization agenda were also at the center of his meeting with Casablanca’s authorities. To illustrate development impacts of the National Initiative for Human Development, Morocco’s poverty alleviation strategy, Ghanem visited a number of social projects. In the Sidi Moumen Cultural Center, he exchanged with a group of youth about their challenges and aspirations, and was particularly attentive to their call for greater inclusiveness and opportunities; Ghanem stressed the importance of grassroots work to impact the most vulnerable populations and give youth hope to kindle their ambition and drive them to greater achievements.

Finally, Ghanem took the opportunity of his visit to Morocco to participate in an Informal Ministerial Consultation on Education co-organized by the Islamic Development Bank and the World Bank. With the Moroccan Minister of Education, Rachid Benmokhtar, as well as the Ministers of Education from Jordan and Tunisia, the meeting discussed the championing of the Education for Competitiveness initiative aimed at supporting a renewed reform agenda for education in the MENA region, one that promotes critical thinking, creativity and innovation to contribute to inclusive growth, social development and global competitiveness. 
http://www.finchannel.com/index.php/business/item/54967-morocco-s-progress-toward-economic-diversification-must-be-accompanied-by-greater-job-creation-and-youth-inclusion
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Morocco Seeks to Reduce Illiteracy to 5% by 2024
Monday 22 February 2016 - morocco world news Rabat

Head of Government Abdelilah Benkirane on Monday called for reinforcing institutional cooperation and joint action to achieve the goal of reducing illiteracy to 5 pc by 2024. Speaking at a meeting of the Board of Directors of the National Agency for the Fight against Illiteracy, he called on the agency to strengthen its cooperation with the concerned sectors and reinforce its human, financial and logistic resources in order to implement the 2015-2024 road map which also aims to eradicate illiteracy among youth aged between 15 and 24, and improve the skills of the illiterate active population.

He also stressed the necessity to establish efficient monitoring and evaluating mechanisms to fulfill these goals, the National Agency for the Fight against Illiteracy said in statement. He noted that illiteracy is still high standing at 32 percent, adding that “this problem represents a genuine hurdle to the economic growth of our country”, it added. During this meeting, the members of the board of directors followed a presentation on the main points of the 2015-2024 road map.
https://www.moroccoworldnews.com/2016/02/180400/morocco-seeks-to-reduce-illiteracy-to-5-by-2024/
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The 20 February movement's push for reforms in 2011 gained some fragile successes - and left a desire among activists for more change. After the revolution in Tunisia and Egypt, young Moroccan activists of the 20 February 2011 movement have been assessing the successes and shortcomings of their social campaign.
“Thousands of people had gone out to demonstrate for the first time with strong demands and a feeling of release. It was very moving to see all these different people gathered together around the same slogan: dignity, liberty and social justice,” said Soufyane Fares, 25, a human rights activist who took part in the movement in the Moroccan capital, Rabat.

Amina Terass, 25, who was active in Marrakech in 2011, said: “I was impatient to go out on that Sunday morning. The day before, I had not been able to sleep during the night. The first day out in the streets was the one that marked me the most; it was loaded with hope." 

The 20 February Movement (M20F) took advantage of the uprisings in countries such as Tunisia, Egypt and Syria to demand democratic change. The mobilisation had essentially been carried out by young people, who organised rapidly, including via social media, but it was borne from the long political struggles of the past, in particular over the high cost of living, during the reign of Hassan II who ruled Morocco from 1961 until his death in 1999. 

M20F, as was pointed out by the researchers Mounia Bennani-Charaibi and Mohamed Jeghllaly, consisted of a diverse cast: independent youth or youth affiliated with political parties, actors of the non-governmental sector, unions, leftist parties and Islamist movements, as well as the al-Adl Wal Ihsane group (which translates to “Justice and Spirituality”, one of the main Islamist organisations in Morocco, born in the 1970s but never recognised by the kingdom).
This diverse cast, which brought together people who held radically different ideologies, all demanded democracy, a separation of powers, constitutional changes and better governance.

“The 20 February was a peaceful and reformist movement which asked for a parliamentary monarchy and not for regime change,” said Hamza Hachlaf, a former activist of the M20F in Fes and now a member of the leftist movement Clarte Ambition Courage (Clarity, Ambition, Courage). 
The context led “the actors to renounce, in a provisory manner, the expression of their divisions in favour of common de-ideologised demands,” Bennani-Charaibi and Jeghllaly wrote in their article.

The movement organised its first successful demonstration on 20 February 2011. Thousands took to the streets in more than 50 localities throughout the country.
While coordination units had already been established in the two metropolitian areas, Rabat and Casablanca, local coordination cells were created in smaller locales which had spontaneously sprouted up during the first call to demonstrate. Estimates vary widely, with the police claiming 37,000 demonstrators took part, while the organisers asserted they were more than 200,000.

Confronted with this movement, King Mohamed responded by acquiescing to some of the protesters' demands. In his speech on 9 March 2011, he promised to accelerate “the process of advanced regionalisation,” to proceed to “a deep constitutional review,” and to reinforce the independence of the judicial system among other things. Later, he appointed a commission in charge of drafting a new constitution.

Despite these concessions, M20F refused to take part in the consultations, arguing that the members of the commission were selected undemocratically. A new constitution was nonetheless adopted by referendum on 1 July 2011, representing for some a move forward in terms of human rights, participatory democracy and separation of powers.

On 25 November 2011, snap legislative elections were also organised, paving victory for the Islamists of the Party of Justice and Development (PJD).
The royal reaction was together “a response to our demands and a political recuperation. But one thing is sure, it legitimised our claims," said Hachlaf.
Eventually, the rather favourable reply of the monarchy, the diminishing mobilisations, as well as internal divisions inside the movement - including the withdrawl of al-Adl Wal Ihsane in December 2011 after the elections - helped to quell the movement.

It was also hard hit by denigration campaigns against the activists orchestrated by the “young royalists” among others, as well as pressure from the Makhzen (the governing insitution), which monitored and infiltrated the M20F. Lastly, the election of the PJD gave many activists the feeling of having been dispossessed by their movement. After one year, the 20 February Movement ceased to exist. 

Even if “uniting this historical bloc [the left and the Islamists] was not a new idea,” said Nizar Bennamate, a former member of the M20F coordination in Casablanca, it underlined its singularity. “It was a young movement, born on the internet, and for the first time the monarchy yielded to pressure coming from the street. The movement changed the country culturally,” he told MEE. The barrier of fear of the ruler broke down.

Even after the dissolution of the M20F, human rights campaigns lived on. In 2013, a political NGO that Bennamate is involved in, Anfass Democratique, which promotes democratic change, was created, while the formation of a student union for education reform, a group that Terass is apart of, also started in 2012.
For Hachlaf, what has changed since 2011 is that public opinion has gained considerable political weight, and that social media is now an important tool of pressure.

As a proof, he mentions #DanielGate, the case of a Spanish paedophile pardoned by the king in July 2013 which roused popular indignation. Thanks to calls on the internet, demonstrations were organised throughout the country against the royal decision – an unprecedented step.

The government responded to the protests by force, injuring several people, but the monarchy later recanted by dropping the pardon of Daniel Galvan, mentioning that the pardon was a terrible mistake.

For Terass, M20F has “revitalised the political debate in Morocco and snatched the right to protest and appropriate the public space”. Bennamate agrees, declaring that “it is now easier to demonstrate, criticise and contest. People are persevering in their mobilisations and get what they want.”

Indeed, even though M20F does not exist anymore, sectorial demands have multiplied. For instance, the beginning of 2016 has been marked by the mobilisation of teacher-interns against decrees that change their conditions of access to the profession in the public sector, and of unemployed nurses who demand new jobs. The state, however, responded to the demonstration by the teacher-interns on 7 January with the use of force.

Fares, involved in non-for-profit organisations in his neighbourhood in Sale, near the capital city, in 2009 joined the Alternative Movement for Individual Liberties (MALI), a precursor to the Facebook mobilisations in Morocco.

Five years after the demonstrations of 2011, he is pleased with the progresses created by the movement, although he also admits it has numerous weaknesses, including a lack of organisation or political vision. He remains convinced that civil society must be more prepared, and now works in the field of NGO capacity-building.

“We obtained the officialisation of the Amazigh [or Berber] language [in the new constitution] and the liberation of political prisoners [pardoned by the king in April 2011] that we were asking for. Those were symbolic victories, but we did not get the democracy that we wanted,” said Bennamate.

Hachlaf said: “The 20 February was an elitist movement which failed to get popular support. I later understood that we lacked creativity in our discourse.” He regrets the withdrawal of the Moroccan left, which in his opinion prevented any disruption in the balance of power between the two main parties: the centre-left Party of Authenticity and Modernity (PAM) and the PJD, which still rules the country.

As for Terass, she insists on the urgency of campaigning for issues that were not present enough in 2011, such as gender equality and climate change.
“I consider that our claims have not all been taken into account. While we were demanding social justice, we see on the contrary privatisations and the deterioration of the public service,” she said.

While the gains of the M20F, in particular a wider political opening and participation, are palpable, they remain fragile in a state where activists’ room for manoeuvre is left to the discretion of the authorities.
Sarah Larik is a freelance journalist. Based in Rabat, she covers Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia for several French and North African media. 
- See more at: http://www.middleeasteye.net/news/five-years-have-young-moroccans-snatched-their-rights-1019341305#sthash.OHY0Gvkk.dpuf
http://www.middleeasteye.net/news/five-years-have-young-moroccans-snatched-their-rights-1019341305
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Recipe of the Week: Moroccan sticky lamb ribs
9 Feb 2016 By Community Contributor

A sticky treat from Wilson's Kitchen's Andrew Faux

Sweet and tangy ribs with hints of Moroccan spices. Great served with couscous or a warm salad.

Serves two as a starter or one as a main dish. Lamb ribs are available from your local butcher or supermarket.
Andrew Faux from Wilson's Kitchen.

500g Lamb ribs
1 Garlic clove, chopped
1 Tsp Ground cumin
1 Tsp Ground coriander
1 Tsp Smoked paprika
½ Tsp Chilli flakes
½ Tsp Black pepper
½ Tsp Salt
½ Tsp Ground cinnamon
3 Tbsp Brown sugar
250 ml Cider vinegar

Set oven to 180c.
Cut the ribs if on a rack, to individual finger sized pieces and place in a 3-5cm deep baking tray.
Mix all the dry and wet ingredients together and smother the ribs ensuring you cover all surface areas.
Place in oven for 20 mins then turn it down to 130c and roast for one hour turning and basting twice.
For a more caramelised coating, after the oven roasting place the tray under a medium hot grill and turn two or three times.
http://world.einnews.com/article/311403526/Jjp8oaIhoAD_k_0U
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Reading the Koran: The Play of Cultural Intellectual and Ideological Tradition MENAFN - Morocco World News - 13/02/2016

It might be argued that historicising text comes to subjecting it to interpretation frameworks that preset values and reduce the forbearance of reading opportunities while amplifying the amplitude of subjective appreciation. However historicity being the value through which text acquires reliability validity and authenticity for a given community it is the 'natural' condition for text to be framed to up-hold the significance the sense and the orientation which human interrogation seeks to get out of it. Furthermore because text is a complex set up of signs symbolism figures of speech rhetorical functions and spatial and temporal relations none of which is stable it can yield sense only when the intentions underlying and motivating it which are stable at least during the time of its occurrence and the values it promotes which tend to be universal can be accessed through the unstable and the relative variables of history. Reading in this sense becomes the effort of reconstructing original meanings through the identification of original intentions and values with the instruments available and at the costs possible and establishing conceptual bridges between this reconstruction and the intellectual readiness and aptitude of a reader displaced in time and space.

While in English one pronoun 'you' which is genderless refers to singular dual and plural forms Arabic pronouns as used in the Koran are marked both as to gender and to number which they distinguish as singular dual and plural. Furthermore while in this form of the Arabic language the dual and the plural can refer invariably to a group of humans or a group made up of humans and non humans as is the case in the verse (qifa nabki min dhikra)’ literally “oh you two stop walking and let’s weep” which addresses a man and his camel linguistic constraints of other languages – including many current varieties of the Arabic language – prohibit addressing humans and non humans as one community regardless of their species. This one example will suffice to illustrate the imperative of the historical contextualization of text in general and of the religious text in particular.

Likewise repetition being a structural tradition in Arabic discourse it is an intrinsic part of the culture. As such it is both pursued intentionally and controlled for various reasons and occurs simply as any characteristic feature of the structure of Arabic discourse. This means that should economy for example be sought in Arabic discourse it would have to be found in other features such as the various forms of ellipsis. In no way should repetition be judged as undue redundancy. That would imply that an external norm is being applied to the Arabic text which would imply that this language should comply with the dictates of a community other than that of its speakers. In sociolinguistics this is referred to as linguistic hegemony.

Languages and cultures differ also at the conceptualization plane. One way they differ at this level is how they conceive of identity and therefore of what makes unity and multiplicity sameness and difference and how they name experience objects ideas creatures etc.. A good example is the concept of God in Islam. God is one but h ninety nine names many of which apparently contrary to others. Muslims will say what seems to be contrariness is but apparent and is actually necessary complementarity. The identity of God the One is complex and conciliates in a transcendental harmony contraries that would in other cases create a monster! In this case the multiplicity of names does not contradict the unity and the oneness of the named nor can it in any way suggest his multiplicity. They all refer to the same and one who would not be should any one of those names-dimensions not be. The same is true for the prophet. Names can be multiple but the named will be always one. An anecdote tells the story of a pre-Islamic man who has been called “dog” by a foe the man interjected “the dog is he who does not know one hundred names for the dog”. It is also reported that Arabs have scores of names for lion for camel for sand and for many other living creatures. While many counterarguments from anthropology and linguistics can be opposed to this analysis suggesting that this might be a universal feature of language what counts here is that how it is perceived by Arabs themselves and how they have intellectualized it and conceptualized it for their religious narrative. The multiplicity of names can also aim at creating exclusive characteristics or to bring a complex reality under the same and one being.

The Koran for instance establishes similarity and oneness of religions where many see and have seen difference multiplicity contrariness and opposition. All religions of the Book anterior to Islam are but one with it and all messages prior to it bear the same truth goes the aya: “The religion God has established for you is the same religion as that which He enjoined on Noah as it is also the same We enjoined on Abraham Moses and Jesus” (42:13). In fact this idea is repeated in the Koran several times with reference to other prophets and messengers. “We have revealed to you the same We sent to Noah and the Messengers after him; We revealed to Abraham Ishmael Isaac Jacob and the Tribes to Jesus Job Jonah Aaron and Solomon and to David We gave the Psalms” (4:163-164). It is therefore inferred that all the prophets are considered as Muslims in the Qur’an. (See 6:163; 7:143; 10:72 84 90; 27:31 38 42 91; 39:12; 46:15 etc.)

Muslim scholars have taken this concept further when they declared all exegesis is one despite apparent contradictions provided it is done by a true Muslim and an authentic faithful. Contradiction fades away and vanishes in the oneness of origin which in this case is adherence to Islam.
This idea of unity has grown to become central to Arab-Islamic thought and culture. In its most dramatic form it was forced to migrate to politics to prohibit the plurality of alternative ways of looking at the same problem reading and interpreting a text and of imagining a substitute to what makes good ruler or to one in power! But this aspect of the issue will have to be addressed elsewhere.
http://world.einnews.com/article/311641256/wDa9OK7lYLaAllxb===================================================================================

How Traveling To Morocco Helped Fuel My Writing.
Heather Demetrios

One of the coolest things about writing a story set in Morocco was that I had to go there to do research for the second book in my trilogy, Blood Passage. Poor me, right? I love to travel, but this trip was especially meaningful because the country is now so intrinsically linked to a story and characters I love. It was a surreal experience imagining my characters running through the souks of Marrakech and sleeping in the Sahara while I was doing those things myself.
My story is about jinn (genies, Djinn) and Morocco has a lot of jinn lore. It seemed like the perfect place to set my book. This was confirmed when my driver to the Sahara, Moustafa, told me personal stories of jinn sightings. What can I say? It’s a magical country. There was no way I could have done this authentically by simply reading and doing Internet research. When you travel to a new country, it gets in your bones. My favorite scenes of the book are set in places that were magical to me: the Sahara, riads (Moroccan guesthouses), the souks. I have a lot of favorite scenes that take place in a cave, too. For that, I traveled to Virginia, which, while I was in the cave, was just as exotic as Morocco.

One of the greatest advantages of travelling to the set of your novel is that, while there, the story will begin to take shape out of its natural surroundings. Before I went to Morocco, I was banging my head against my desk, stuck on the plot, the setting, the characters. It was a nightmare. But as soon as I got back from Morocco, the story flowed out of me. That’s not to say it was easy by any means, but the creative blocks had been eliminated. I think this is, in large part, due to the sensory details of Morocco. I could hear the call to prayer in Marrakech or the way the sand blows against a tent in the Sahara (you should put that on your bucket list: it is the single coolest thing I’ve ever done). I could smell the food, see the women who did henna in the Djemaa el-Fna, the main square in Marrakech. To me, Morocco had become a real, living breathing entity.

One of my mentors often talks about being in the moment when you’re writing. This basically means going deep into character and story, rather than just focusing on basic details or telling the reader information. For example, if you have a character crying you have to be her in that moment, feeling the depth of her pain. Then write it. We’ll call it method writing.

I could feel the coolness of Saharan sand at night as she brushed her fingers through it. I could taste the Moroccan mint tea with her and enjoy the elaborate tea ceremony accompanied with it. Whatever she did, I had done—with the exception of fighting magical creatures. I had to use my imagination for that.
By travelling to Morocco, I was better able to get into Nalia’s skin. I put my protagonist through hell in this book, which means I put myself through hell. Worth it. I think one of the reasons I was able to be in the trenches with her was that I knew physically where she was. I could feel the coolness of Saharan sand at night as she brushed her fingers through it. I could taste the Moroccan mint tea with her and enjoy the elaborate tea ceremony accompanied with it. Whatever she did, I had done—with the exception of fighting magical creatures. I had to use my imagination for that.

A final note: I think if you can’t travel to the place you’re writing about, you might want to consider not working on that story until you have the ability. (Unless, of course, you’re creating a made-up land — then you can only go there in your head). It’s about being authentic and honoring the culture your story is wrapped up in, whether that’s Morocco or Los Angeles or Timbuktu. But, even more, it gives the story a chance to be as good as it can be. There’s just something magical that happens when you put yourself where your characters are. Writing a book is a journey, both literally and figuratively. So grab your passport and laptop and get travelling— happy trails!
http://www.bustle.com/articles/144459-how-traveling-to-morocco-helped-fuel-my-writing
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Burping Camels, Berber Whiskey, and a Night in the Saharan Desert.
Thursday 25 February 2016 - morocco world news By Andrew Mines Rabat

On the back of a camel I wondered how the likes of Ibn Battuta and Leo Africanus, great travelers of their times, could manage weeks riding atop these uncomfortable creatures. Our trek lasted no more than an hour, and I was only too relieved to dismount that ill-padded hump. The camel behind me seemed to be suffering from indigestion, which he reminded me every so often by belching in the direction of my unhappy nose. Terribly impolite animals, camels, but they got the job done. With the setting sun to our backs accompanied by lights winds and moderate winter temperatures, we were fortunate to experience the Sahara in her gentlest of moods. Come summer she will be burning tourists to a crisp and sending legions of scorpions and snakes to clean up the leftovers.

Before long we arrived on a dune overlooking camp, and our guide left us watching the sunset while he led the camels to their resting spot. There was a snowboard standing upright in the sand, which we gladly borrowed to dune-surf as we waited for the last light of day. I nearly fell over into some camel dung going down, a lucky miss since the nearest shower was miles away. As the sun began to meet the horizon, a fantastic array of colors filled the sky. It is in this small window before the night that one remembers just how many different shades our world takes on, and for a brief moment poor and rich alike are equal in the face of this great treasure of the Earth.

Dusk relinquished its place to night, and while the path was still barely visible we made our way into camp, which was no more than a small collection of tents. Underneath the largest of them, the communal tent, our hosts treated us to “the finest Berber whiskey.” It was upon taking my first sip that I realized their joke, as my mouth tasted only traditional Moroccan mint tea. Thankfully, the tagine was actually tagine.

After dinner we gathered around the fire, a welcome warmth as the desert grew colder and colder around us. We were thirteen in total, including five cheerful Berbers who picked up the drums lying about them and started playing. The bass drum struck a simple rhythm, and the others followed in-time with their own variations until a complex beat was established, then they started singing. We all stood up and danced around the fire in a circle, and a few of us picked up our own drums and joined the beat, dancing round and round until we were too tired to continue.

When we all sat back down to catch our breath, it was the foreigners’ turn to try to create our own song. To describe the noise that ensued as music would be far too generous- give camels opposable thumbs and they could have played better. These Berbers had been playing with one another for years and on so many nights that they knew how to create something new on a whim. They understood one another through music just as well as they understood life in the desert. I found their bond endearing, and I thought of my brothers at home, thousands of miles away.

One of the Berbers unraveled his turban, which stretched long enough to allow all thirteen of us to grab on as he led our procession away from camp and up onto the dunes above. He stopped when the only visible light came from the stars above. The moon hovered low on the dark horizon, and soon I had witnessed for the first time a moonset. With the moon gone, the other lights of the night sky grew noticeably more distinct, and we gathered once more in a circle to lay silently looking up at space. I write “space” here intentionally because I feel there is an important difference in connotation between ‘space’ and ‘sky.’ ‘Sky’ has an air of limitation to it, neglecting what lies beyond the Earth’s local atmosphere, whereas ‘space,’ I feel, includes the immense reality outside our little planet, known and unknown. The latter seemed more fitting for this moment. One can see the sky in the city. One cannot see space in the city. Only far away from our own advanced societies can we see the beauty of space. I thought of all the unlucky souls who would never see a night like this, whether because of light pollution or smog, and I pitied their loss.

Gradually our party split off in different directions, most returning to the tents, but a few of us remained in the dunes. I decided to take off by myself for a while, and so I moved farther and farther away from camp into the dark. Cool winds swept halfheartedly across my face, seemingly sharing the laziness of the winter sun before springtime demanded more rigorous work from the both of them. One of the Berbers told me that by April he and his companions would be braving harsh sandstorms. Alone, I turned my gaze to the stars.

The first feeling to seize hold of me was fear. Not for my safety necessarily, as I knew the way back and the more harmful creatures of the night were burrowed deep to escape the cold. Rather, I felt the certain type of fear one experiences during moments of solitude in the wild. I had not been so alone in a long time, but once I reacquainted myself with the feeling and overcame my fear, I was free to enjoy my thoughts and the quiet peace of the desert.

Of course, I marveled for some time at the sight above me. Accompanying my amazement was the humbling recognition of my own insignificance, but, like the feeling of being alone, once one overcomes this frightening reality a sense of freedom takes hold. Vanity is merely a cloak to protect against the coldness of reality; once one becomes adjusted to the cold, the cloak becomes unnecessary. I wondered if the same thoughts occupied the heads of my new Berber friends. Life in the desert leaves one plenty of time to spend alone, thinking.

At some point the concept of space travel crossed my mind. Amongst all those stars so far away, there has to be a little planet like ours out there. I reflected on how much mankind had achieved in the last fifty years alone, and I became excited about our future. My thoughts turned again to the Berbers, who were now probably fast asleep at camp, and I wondered if they were aware of space travel, of the fantasies in science fiction, of the potential in the stars above us. And if the answer was yes, I thought, did they even care? I wish I could have asked them, but language stood in my way, so I would have to let them keep their secrets.

Many other thoughts passed through my head that night, and when I felt ready I returned to camp, leaving them behind in the desert until I would inevitably stumble upon them at another time, in a different land. The luxury to spend so much time inside the mind, in silence, until one is ready to move on, this is a concept far displaced from where I come. It is only on just such adventures that I am able to quell the agitation I feel in not having enough time to think.
I do not believe, however, that life in the desert is for me. My Berber friends reminded me the value of simplicity, of humility, of silence, but even they escaped into their music, their laughter, and their finest Berber Whiskey. It may be that the desert, or, more broadly put, the wild, is simply my personal cure for city life. Funny, since the city was first a cure for desert life.

But alone or amongst friends, in the wild or in the city, camels will always be uncomfortable and smelly beasts.
https://www.moroccoworldnews.com/2016/02/180558/burping-camels-berber-whiskey-and-a-night-in-the-saharan-desert/
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Morocco's 'Spring' and the Failure of the Protest Movement
02/24/2016 Mohamed Daadaoui Professor of Political Science, Oklahoma City University. Author of Maghreblog at: www.maghreblog.com

Five Years after Morocco's "Spring" moment, the North African kingdom remains a carefully engineered political edifice where the regime is, for now, virtually uncontested. When the tsunami of the Arab uprisings reached Morocco on February 20, 2011, there was much jubilation and optimism as the February 20 protest movement launched massive demonstrations in Rabat against corruption, economic, and political stagnation.

The movement's undeniable feature was that it was born out of several tech savvy youth activists. Using the social media platforms Facebook, Twitter and YouTube, the activists released the movement's founding document calling for a democratic constitution, the recognition of Amazigh as an official language, and the release of prisoners of conscience. In the first protests in Rabat, an estimated 10,000 people took to the streets chanting: "Down with autocracy" and "The people want to change the constitution," and other slogans against the government, corruption and state television.

The February 20 movement channeled relative deprivation as a key element in framing its repertoires of contention. The protest movement called for sweeping constitutional changes, reducing the scope of monarchical powers, dissolving the parliament and sacking the government. Some protests even breached the so-called redlines, and called for a republican form of government, and an end to the long monarchical reign. The February 20 movement was initially successful in drawing several groups, and mobilizing a diverse lot of dissatisfied political groups in Morocco from radical leftist Marxists to the banned Islamist al-Adl wal Ihsane, which later withdrew from the coalition of the movement due to defections amidst the leadership of the movement, and state penetration of the movement, in what one activist termed as "the betrayal of the movement" by some key group leaders.

Unlike Tunisia's and Egypt's governments' tough stances against protesters, Morocco's monarchy, relying on its socio-cultural capital as a spiritual and temporal purveyor of change and stability, managed to slow the momentum of the protest movement of February 20, by offering a slate of constitutional and institutional reforms. These state strategies quickly closed that cycle of contention that the February 20 movement created in the initial massive demonstrations. The movement never took hold in majority rural areas of Morocco where there was a clear discursive disconnect between the youth's demands in the large urban cities of Rabat, Marrakech, and Casablanca, and rural towns I visited around the greater Marrakech area where absolutely no major protests took place formally or informally.

Constitutional reforms, though largely cosmetic, and the election of an Islamist-led coalition government interrupted the momentum and cycle of contention of the February 20 movement. However, it is the protest movement's lack of a contentious cultural frame that proved its most pronounced weakness vis-à-vis the regime's cultural capital. In addition to regime cosmetic constitutional changes, and limited legislative elections, which interrupted the February 20 protest movement cycle of contention, the beleaguered movement was also beset by superior regime cultural frames that effectively impeded the movement's success in its articulation of alternative narratives to the monarchy. Despite some slogans denouncing the monarchy as "rotten", and calling for the downfall of the regime of Mohammed VI, the protest movement did not manage to articulate a strong alternative discourse to that of the monarchy, especially in its traditional and religious appeal. The Moroccan monarchy is deeply rooted in society, in terms of both political culture and institutional reach. This, in turn, may be related to the depth of its perceived legitimacy, political manipulation, coercion, and patronage.

Regime monopoly over the religious sphere is also an added advantage that has inoculated the institution of the monarchy against challenges from opposition forces. The monarch is considered the protector of the faith; a royal prerogative codified in the Moroccan constitution and monitored by the state through the Ministry of Islamic Affairs, which supervises the mosques, religious institutions, and appoints imams. The monarchical interpretation of Islam dominates Morocco's political discourse and religious legitimacy is the basis of the power of the monarch. The centrality of the monarchy in the religious realm has led to the monarch's dominance of religious discourse.

Faced with a carefully crafted regime traditional-Modern institutional symbiosis, February 20 movement has largely been limited. The mistakes of Feb. 20th movement were also compounded by its lack of organization and coherent protest strategy. One early striking, but constant feature of the Feb. 20 movement, was its fragmented centrifugal leadership, and horizontal mobilization. Several of its members disagreed on the strategy and goals of contestation, while the withdrawal of the popular banned Islamist movement of al-'Adl dealt it a fatal blow.

The February 20 movement has largely failed as a transformational social movement capable of articulating an alternative discursive and coherent challenge to the regime. The movement's cycle of contention and cultural frames were nullified by state institutional, constitutional maneuvering, and by a superior regime cultural frame. Ideological fissures amplified the February 20 movement's weakness, lack of consistent contestation strategy, internal disorganization, state penetration, and co-optation. In many ways the monarchy's apparent "success" in weathering the tempest of the Arab revolts is also a function of the weakness, and manipulation of local protest movements. Despite the failure of the February 20th movement, it has managed a slight discursive silver lining as it has elevated the anti-regime narrative to include dissent in areas previously considered taboo by the state in Morocco.

Regime constitutional and institutional changes have failed to lift a prevalent trend of public cynicism. Nor have they ushered in a new era in Moroccan politics as many had anticipated. More alarmingly, the last three years have not brought about substantial improvements to the individual and group freedoms in Morocco. Public dissent of government is restricted, and freedom of the press has not been relaxed in regard to previous taboos and red lines, especially as the kingdom faces dire economic challenges, and a rapidly changing regional security climate.
Follow Mohamed Daadaoui on Twitter: www.twitter.com/maghreblog
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/mohamed-daadaoui/moroccos-spring-and-the-failure-of-the-protest-movement_b_9287158.html
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The Sheltering Sound
By Amanda Petrusich February 24, 2016

In a 1975 interview, the poet Daniel Halpern asked the author and composer Paul Bowles why he’d spent such a significant chunk of his life scrambling about the globe. I imagine Bowles’s speaking voice here as matter-of-fact, exegetic: “I’ve always wanted to get as far as possible from the place where I was born,” he answered (that place was Flushing, Queens, in 1910; he was the only child of a rancorous, unloving father and a meek, bookish mother). “Far both geographically and spiritually. To leave it behind. One belongs to the whole world, not just one part of it.”

What was Bowles darting around after for all those years? Travel invariably expands a person’s parameters, like air huffed into a balloon: there is an intellectual broadening, a widening of the precincts. But there’s a metaphysical utility to that kind of movement, too. Who among us has not left home expressly to find home, casting about for a place that feels like the right place, that isn’t necessarily the ancestral plot but, instead, is where a person feels whole, awake to something, realized?

Bowles first journeyed overseas in 1929, when he excused himself from the University of Virginia and procured a one-way ticket to Paris. Then, in the summer of 1931, at age twenty, he visited North Africa with his friend Aaron Copland, following a provocation from Gertrude Stein. In an unpublished conversation with the poet Ira Cohen—conducted in Morocco in 1965 and now held, with more of Bowles’s papers, in the rare-book and manuscript room at Columbia University—Bowles credits Stein exclusively with his decision to move to Tangier. “And so she told you … she said, ‘Go to Morocco,’ just like that?” Cohen asked. “Go to Tangier,” Bowles corrected. He relocated permanently in 1947, living fifty-two of his eighty-eight years there. He also travelled extensively in Latin America and the Far East. For a brief while, he owned and lived on a tiny island in the Indian Ocean, near Sri Lanka.

Tangier had long been a creative lodestone (Matisse travelled there to paint in 1912 and 1913), but by the nineteen-sixties it had reached a kind of oddball zenith. William S. Burroughs typed most of “Naked Lunch” in a motel room in Tangier; the Rolling Stones routinely posted up at El Minzah, an opulent hotel. Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg were fairly steady patrons of the Tangerinn, one of the city’s oldest, haziest pubs. Tennessee Williams was periodically spotted in the Petit Socco, thumbing a cigarette holder. Bowles would write and publish several novels, short stories, poems, and essays from his home in the upper Medina.

Although Bowles was something of a polymath, and flitted successfully between disciplines (in addition to writing books, he also worked as a composer, first of incidental music for the theatre and later of scores for documentary and art-house films), he’s still best remembered for “The Sheltering Sky,” from 1949, a novel beloved for its deep and echoing evocation of a certain kind of midcentury existential duress. It follows the grim travails of an American couple, Kit and Port Moresby, who, along with a friend, Tunner—Orientalists, all—depart for North Africa on an ill-plotted desert expedition. What happens to them next shakes the faith. I wonder if Bowles had been reading the Romanian philosopher Emil Cioran, a contemporary, who once asked, “Is it possible that existence is our exile and nothingness our home?” In an interview with Jay McInerney for Vanity Fair, in 1985, Bowles described the message of his fiction as “Everything gets worse.”

I sometimes think Bowles was attracted to the wildness and density of Tangier as a kind of psychic penance for what the critic Edmund White once called his “dandified distance.” He was, by all accounts, a bit of an emotional recluse. Allen Ginsberg described him as “a little mechanical or remote somewhere.” In a letter to the composer Ned Rorem, written shortly after Bowles’s (platonic) wife, the writer Jane Auer, died, Bowles expresses a nearly tragic stoicism. “What I want is not tranquility, as you put it, and not happiness—merely survival,” he wrote. “Life needn’t be pleasurable or amusing; it need only continue playing its program.” He existed adjacent to others, but he was never fully of them.

Tangier pushed him closer. Bowles’s instinctive reticence was constantly challenged by a culture in which, as White wrote, “few people prized privacy and conformism was more esteemed than individuality.” Bowles already had at least some sense of what truly activated a place, provided its dynamism, its pull. “With few exceptions, landscape alone is of insufficient interest to warrant the effort it takes to see it,” he wrote in the foreword to “Their Heads Are Green and Their Hands Are Blue,” a collection of travel pieces published in 1963. Mountains were mountains. Cathedrals: same. Even if Bowles resisted it, he understood that the self is elevated only in relation to another.

A romantic might go so far as to suggest that home is in fact an internal landscape, actualized via love alone: that a man finds his place only by finding his person or his people. For Bowles in the nineteen-fifties, I suspect that center was music. His people, musicians.

In 1957, Bowles addressed a panicked imploration to the Library of Congress. In March of the previous year, Morocco had regained its independence from France (soon after, Spain ceded most of its protectorate in the north), and he feared that the country’s folk art was at risk for eradication—that the modernizing forces of post-colonial cultural policy were encroaching, and fast. He described his quest as “a fight against time.”

Two years later, operating under the auspices of the Library of Congress and with a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation, Bowles recorded and preserved as many strains of indigenous Moroccan music as he could find. Eventually, the Library culled twenty-six of those pieces (he’d gathered at least two hundred and fifty) onto two long-playing records, and released them as a compilation titled “Music of Morocco.” Later this spring, Dust-to-Digital, a reissue label based in Atlanta, is reviving and expanding that release, packaging it in a handsome silkscreened box with liner notes by Philip Schuyler and an introduction by Lee Ranaldo, of Sonic Youth. It contains four CDs of music: two discs containing performances from the Highlands, and two discs sourced from the Lowlands.
Irresolvable questions of cultural imperialism have plagued professional folklorists for decades. They’re perhaps asked most aggressively of the white men who lugged recording machines around various backwaters, many in cahoots, in one way or another, with the Library of Congress, having appointed themselves responsible for making a material record of some of folk music’s many vernacular iterations. Should we ask those questions of Paul Bowles? By 1959, Bowles had been living in Tangier for twelve years. His work was motivated, as far as I can tell, by a deep and complicated need for this ancient, rhythmic music. On his recording trips, he was consistently being thwarted or misdirected by Moroccan bureaucrats, who found his project facile and offensive, although not in the ways that we might, in 2016, expect—the Moroccans didn’t feel as if they were being infiltrated or gawked at by an outsider, someone unschooled in the spiritual particulars of their indigenous music.

Rather, they were eager for Morocco to modernize; any Western attention paid to the country’s more “primitive” arts was a hindrance to that mission. At one point, Bowles was told that no recordings could be made in Morocco without express permission from the ministry of the interior. In his essay “The Rif, to Music,” Bowles writes of encountering a young official in Fez who said, “Why should I help you export a thing which we are trying to destroy? You are looking for tribal music. There are no more tribes. We have dissolved them. So the word means nothing. And there never was any tribal music anyway—only noise.”
Surely tribal musicians felt differently about the worth and breadth of their work, but that institutional resistance—which, in a backward way, does soften any portrayal of Bowles as a bumbling interloper, preserving a music that didn’t involve or evoke him—is significant. The Moroccan government’s disinterest in preserving a heritage it believed was a by-product of colonialism makes Bowles’s efforts seem even more private, particular, strange. It also aggravates already complex questions regarding which stories deserve telling, who deserves to tell them, and what it means when those stories are sustaining, in some essential and personal way, to their tellers.

Bowles took four recording trips around Morocco between 1959 and 1961. He was accompanied each time by his Ampex 601 reel-to-reel tape machine and two men: Mohammed Larbi Djilali, a fixer of sorts, and Christopher Wanklyn, a member of Tangier’s expat community, who was rather pithily summarized, by Bowles, as “a level-headed Canadian with a Volkswagen and all the time in the world.” The trio spent a lot of time smoking greasy, green hash—kif—pinched from Larbi’s bottomless pouch, and drinking either small cups of rosé or bottles of “piping hot Pepsi-Cola.”

Bowles had originally planned on driving his Jaguar Mark V convertible—a jowly, moneyed-looking thing that seems as if it should come with its own waxed mustache—but eventually acquiesced to travelling in Wanklyn’s Beetle, a better if hardly ideal choice for Morocco’s bouncy, unpaved roads. The weather was extreme—a hundred and forty degrees! Bowles declared in his notes, hysterically—and on at least one occasion, a sandstorm beached the Volkswagen, stranding the group in the mountains. There is a black-and-white photo of that particular breakdown—and the many local onlookers it drew—in the new release, with the terrific caption “Christopher Wanklyn’s Volkswagen attracts attention in the Anti-Atlas.”

The hash, of course, was important, an essential lubricant. In a June, 1968, letter to Cohen—in which he fretted, again, about properly defining or explaining the quality and tone of the music he’d recorded—Bowles wrote, “The nearest one of us can approach to such a subject is by the using the suggestibility supplied by kif … a self-induced trance at best, but useful for determining the hypnotic potential of a given musical element. Even so, conclusions are bound to be of a purely theoretical nature, like all measurement of subjective experience. The rest, of course, is out [of] the mouths of Moroccans.”

Bowles was intent on capturing everything (“Every major musical genre to be found within the country,” is how he explained his purview in “The Rif, to Music”), but seemed especially keen on locating pockets of old, unadulterated sound—the remote villages in the mountains and high plateaus where a Neolithic musical tradition had persisted unchanged, despite the injection of Arabic, European, and Sub-Saharan influences to North Africa. He describes that sound as “a highly percussive art with complicated juxtapositions of rhythms, limited scalar range (often of no more than three adjacent tones), and a unique manner of vocalizing.” It is, he writes, a “purely autochthonous” practice.

That’s a serviceable definition, but it does little to relay what really drew Bowles toward these performances, which is also what draws so many of us to music: the temporary dissolution of the self and all the ecstasy inherent to that moment. Moroccan music varies dramatically by region, but much of it is highly and deliberately repetitive, inducing a kind of quick hypnosis. A listener has no choice but to dissolve into it. In his notes, Bowles wrote often about this—how native music was helpful “in effacing the boundaries between individual and group consciousness.” Music, then, became a way for Bowles to submit to human fellowship. It erased whatever staunchness or fear had kept him feeling apart. That idea seems central to understanding what pushed him so fervently toward this music, why he was so intent on saving it: for a person who was perpetually disconnected, it proffered a point of crucial, heady communion.

It also seems possible that music was Bowles’s primary medium for achieving any sense of intimacy with others. He was in a loving (if chaste) marriage for thirty-five years (he and Jane both preferred the company of their own gender, sexually), but his emotional commitments never expanded much beyond it. In 1988, he told the interviewers Catherine Warnow and Regina Weinreich, “I don’t know what a social life is … My social life is restricted to those who serve me and give me meals, and those who want to interview me.”

Judging by the books he left behind, Bowles was a nihilist at heart. His work is packed with delightful indicators of a gray and brutal worldview. In his novel “Let It Come Down,” from 1952, a woman says to her son, “Once you accept the fact that life isn’t fun, you’ll be much happier.” Every once in awhile, his readers are granted the briefest glimpses of light. In “The Spider’s House,” from 1955, Bowles wrote: “The only thing that makes life worth living is the possibility of experiencing now and then a perfect moment. And perhaps even more than that, it’s having the ability to recall such moments in their totality, to contemplate them like jewels.”

I like to think he thought of this music this way—a perfect, shared moment he could recall indefinitely, turning over his mind, deploying it as needed, a kind of spiritual salve. It’s not quite as personal, maybe, as the memories most of us find ourselves clinging to—a blissful weekend with a partner, say, or a family vacation—but it seemed to function comparably, soothing him just as well.

Bowles’s field notes to these recordings will be frustrating to anyone looking for a proper ethnography, as they are often speculative and occasionally wrong (they’ve been very gracefully annotated, corrected, and expanded in the new release). Part of this feels almost faultless. Some years later, Bowles admitted to Cohen his reluctance in trying to define or unpack Morocco’s complex musical traditions. “It’s impossible because it’s inexhaustible, even if the Moroccans would talk, which they won’t, those who really know anything,” he wrote. “And inexhaustible because the more one hears and learns, the more conscious one becomes of one’s ignorance, of the vast lacunae in one’s knowledge.”

Much like Harry Smith’s “Anthology of American Folk Music”—a curious multidisc compilation produced for Folkways Records in 1952, and still a defining, rallying document for fans of American vernacular music—the original “Music of Morocco” is idiosyncratic and without a clear organizing principle. I’m not sure it’s fair to say that it doesn’t have one—merely that it’s a personal narrative, obscured and potentially inscrutable to others.

I’ll admit, sheepishly, that this is part of what I find appealing about it: “Music of Morocco” is a more revealing portrait of both Bowles and his adopted home—his sense of his place in it, how it bolstered and nourished him—than almost anything he ever wrote. It is a fleeting peek inside an otherwise-locked box.

Those revelations require some parsing, and, on occasion, a critical eye. A performance from the Berber Highlands, “Second Aqlal”—sung and played by Moqaddem Mohammed ben Salem and an ensemble of seventeen men, and recorded in Zagora, a town in the Draa River valley—is a particularly poignant example. According to Bowles, each man in the ensemble carried a deff drum, “shaped like a fairly thick sandwich,” which was “being struck by the men on either side of him, while he in turn is hitting their drums, one with each hand.” Did this really happen? It sounds unlikely if not fully incredible. Yet, if we are reading “Music of Morocco” not as a historical document but as a personal one, does it matter? That Bowles saw the performance that way—as the product of one, many-handed organism, making one, multi-faceted sound—feels too important.

Bowles did seem to recognize the musical collection as oddly essential to his legacy—a big deal. In his correspondence from 1965, he repeatedly expressed concern that he be allowed to retain some sort of control over the Library of Congress release. He appeared frantic about some “unscrupulous people” who had got hold “of copy tapes for demonstration, and gone ahead to press records from them, not withstanding the bad quality, in order to get there first, as it were.”
“I don’t want any slip-ups of any kind,” he wrote to Cohen. They had been talking about one day producing their own compilation (they finally did, in 1988). “I want to be able to check on length and sequence of selections, and to correct copy on descriptive notes. In other words, I want every chance to make as good a record as is possible.”

I think Bowles would be deeply pleased by what Schuyler and Dust-to-Digital have done with his recordings, the way they’ve now been lovingly, responsibly repackaged. The music itself is frequently staggering: an eleven-minute recording Bowles made in Goulimine, a city in the southern lowlands, is one of the more beautiful examples I’ve heard of guedra, in which one male vocalist and a women’s chorus bang together on a twenty-eight-inch drum. It sounds, to me, like the story of time itself. Listening, I feel as if I am burrowing very deep into something. I start to know what Bowles meant about certain repetitive sounds being “the culmination of beauty,” a thing capable of thrusting a person into “a non-thinking state”—that blissful, elusive nowhere.

Still, the grandest point of closeness here is with Bowles himself, so long unknown, unknowable. Attempting to get nearer to a person by getting nearer to the things he or she cherishes is usually a thankless, humiliating path. But in seeing how Bowles experienced and loved Morocco—the parts of its native culture that reassured or completed him, the ways in which he fought to protect them, how it made him less lonesome—it is possible to understand something else about the ways in which we find and refashion home, elsewhere, outside ourselves, even when we thought home was impossible, even when we thought we’d likely lost it forever. How, in a moment—in a beat—it might appear again.
http://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/the-sheltering-sound-paul-bowless-attempt-to-save-moroccan-music
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