Mrs Ravoon and la condition marocaine

Tahir Shah says somewhere that a souq is not a real souq unless it sells men’s underpants, and I’m sure he’s right. I spent this morning in Fes, wandering the medina on both sides of the oued, noting that on the Underpants Index the Andalus quarter, at least as far as its main streets go, is a good deal ‘more real’ than the Qairouyyine. Real life impinges quite forcibly too in the form of apricot-barrows (mishmish are coming into season) driven wildly downhill, screeching perilously to a halt at any sign of potential customers; and the all-season mules, laden with half-cured skins so smelly that one flattens oneself desperately to the wall well before the muleteer can shout “baalak.”

Very visible too is another thread in the texture of Moroccan souqs that fascinates me. Clothes shops are everywhere, and densely populated by mannequins. These mannequins are as various as humanity, with every tone of skin and every possible shape of nose. Some have sunglasses moulded onto their foreheads, some are smoothly featureless and bright green, or red,  like Spiderman. Others have robotic faces made of horizontal strips, like the cylinder-head of a motorcycle. Some are just torsos with coathanger-hooks for suspending them; others headless on pedestals; yet others half-men, backless like coffin-suits, existing only in their forward-facing aspect.

But for the most part they are old and chipped, faces from the past with dated hairstyles and sullen pouts. Even amongst these humanoid figures there are subtle hierarchies. At the top of the tree are a pair of ur-mannequins, the Adam and Eve of Moroccan couture, a battered teddy-boy and his moll. I suppose that several decades ago an enterprising manufacturer got hold of the moulds, perhaps from France, perhaps even from a departing French business, and churned out the mannequins in cheap plastic for several decades. They are everywhere. Once recognized, they become like the song that Italians call a canzoncina tormentone, the melody that you can’t get out of your head. I can’t walk down a street without spotting, nodding to, and sometimes counting these strangely familiar faces. In the museum at Essaouira there is a very ornate Jewish bridal gown in a glass case, a waterfall of sequins, brocade and ribbon, and standing before it a few months ago, I was suddenly startled to recognize Eve staring soulfully out at me through the narrow slot in the costume’s veil. It can feel a little like Mrs Ravoon, the ghastly heroine of the modern ballad who turns up in the last line of every verse (Facing the fens, I looked back at the shore / Where all had been empty a moment before, / And there by the light of the Lincolnshire moon / Immense on the marshes stood MRS RAVOON!’).

The male figure, Adam, is a slightly meagre, tousle-haired fellow with a jaunty brush-back and big, scared eyes. His wife, Eve, is a frightened-looking creature with her hair up and the same big eyes, her eyebrows applied selon gout in many different forms. The version here is datedly elegant, but she can be much sadder: I recently came across her in leather trousers and naked to the waist, an unappealing sight in faded white plastic which I forbore from sympathy to photograph, almost as though she were a real person. What they have in common, apart from a stylistic continuity, is an ineffable sadness, made more intense by the fact that the paint on these effigy men and women has worn thin and often been touched up by hand over the years. Their eyes, perhaps once sharp and luminous, have been clumsily repainted as though with smudged kohl, so that they seem bruised. Their eyebrows and even their cheekbones, once prominent, are often grazed, sometimes collapsed. They seem to be trying hard to keep up appearances, but fighting a losing battle against the more gamine figures of the 1960s and 70s, with their pageboy haircuts; the aggressively modern 1980-ish girlies with aviator glasses and Farah Fawcett-Major manes; and the glossy, faceless sci-fi beetles of today.

Once you’ve got the idiom clear in your mind, the family grows. Adam and Eve have a son (I think of him as Seth, which may betray a latent gnosticism). Seth is to be found only, as far as I have discovered, outside the lugubriously festive shops where circumcision costumes and related finery are sold. No wonder he looks pretty miserable too – a small figure, five or six years old, with the same bruised, reproachful, kohl-shadowed eyes staring out from under his gilded turban, as though he knows exactly what is about to happen to him and isn’t vastly enthusiastic about it.

These three strange figures from a plastic past seem to me a poignant metaphor of poor, urban Morocco. They are make-do creatures, repaired and repainted, going nowhere but hanging doggedly on, everywhere and nowhere, carrying their scars, keeping their chins up and exuding a huge existential sadness. Watching the world pass them by, but refusing to die. Gamely sporting clothes unimagined in their youth, as their life erodes and more modern figures steal the employment for which they no longer really have the energy, the looks or the aptitude. Modern Morocco has its red-beetle-faced mannequins, and its glamorous plastic models who populate the shopping-malls: I prefer Adam and Eve.

The observant among my readers will have noticed that the running headline picture on my blog is a line of three Adams who stand outside a shop on Avenue Hassan II, not far from my office, embodying for me la condition marocaine. They bravely change their clothes from time to time, and shift their positions a little, but they stand there, winter and summer, rain and shine, chins up, bruised eyes staring forwards, determined to hang on, to get by, to survive. I admire them, and all that they stand for.

Anyone among my readers who is quixotic enough to share my unusual compassion for mannequins is invited to send me pictures of Adam and Eve and Seth, and to venture tentative identifications of their daughter, whom I have seen, I believe, but not photographed.

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In Fes, too, an excellent lunch at Mike Richardson’s Café Clock, of camelburger and chips, followed by a truly magnificent scone. The ambience is excellent, Mine Host charming and the camel very interesting (as well as tasty). Mike spoke at an event on Employability (called #employability and q.v.) that the Council ran in Rabat last Friday, where he talked eloquently about his business, alongside four young Moroccan entrepreneurs, in what was a very inspiring start to our employability project.

Le Jeu Arabe

Walk along a Moroccan beach, and you often come upon groups of young men doing the most amazing acrobatics. One day last autumn on Salé beach I stood and watched in wonder as half a dozen youths, apparently under the eye of a coach, performed a series of huge running vaults, turning once, twice, even three times in the air. Their only equipment was a large red rubber ball three-quarters buried in the sand, which they used as a springboard. It set me thinking about how people with little in the way of material possessions seem able to glory so splendidly and utterly in their physical strength and agility, to make their art from muscles, courage, spectacular co-ordination and a red rubber ball.

Gradually it dawned on me that Moroccan acrobats are a rather special phenomenon. There turns out to be a veritable academic sub-industry in the study of Moroccan acrobatic troupes in American, British, German and other circuses (where they appeared from the mid-19th century). It takes only a few moments to compile a bibliography of a dozen and more learned articles on the subject. Much of it is rather laborious, solemn in its Orientalist analysis, po-faced in its dissection of occidental voyeurism. None of it really accounts for the glorious sight of young men performing feats of elastic athleticism, with superb confidence and grace, on a patch of sand. But they are linked by a well-rooted tradition of acrobatics that is a part of Moroccan history. The Orientalist discourse of the circus historians is mildly interesting: the reality, much more so.

Recently I came across a lovely book called Taoub (Senso Unico/Sirocco 2012), an illustrated study of one troupe of modern acrobats – Le Groupe Acrobatique de Tanger – which has broken into the international big time with a series of very innovative, syncretic productions called Taoub (2004), Chouf Ouchouf (2009) and now Azimuth, which premières in Marseilles later this year. The photographs are sumptuous and beguiling, the accounts by directors and impresarios very interesting; but what I find particularly intriguing is the last part of the book which examines the deeper history of acrobatics in the Mediterranean and in Morocco. No doubt there are more academic accounts, but these 40 or so pages begin to answer my unformulated question of where the boys with the red ball come from – just as much as the lovely account by Mohamed Hammich, father of the troupe, who begins the book by saying “My family comes from Sidi Ahmed Ou Moussa, and it’s there that my great-grandfather, Sidi Ahmed Idrissi, is buried.”

The Moroccan acrobatic tradition is old, and very particular to Morocco. For hundreds of years – since the middle of the 16^th century – acrobats have formed part of a tradition handed from master to pupil and father to son, that begins with Hammich’s forbear, Sidi Ahmed Ou Moussa, a fighting sufi in the al-Jazouli tradition, who brought Sufism to the Ante-Atlas, and died in 1564. Sidi Ahmed seems to have been responsible for fathering two parallel traditions, each somewhere between a guild and a tariqa: the first was of acrobats, the second was rma, a brotherhood of equally disciplined and hereditary archers.

Sidi Ahmed’s acrobats, who still sometimes invoke him before undertaking a difficult routine, wandered from fair to fair, moussem to moussem, giving displays that had a religious as well as a gymnastic meaning, demonstrating the baraka inherited through literal and spiritual descendance from Sidi Ahmed. The leader of a troupe is called, like the leader of a branch of a sufi tariqa, the moqaddam (“c’est ainsi que les acrobats appellent leur maitre”) and it seems clear that the devotional nature of the discipline was, at least until recent decades, integral to it. This combined physical and spiritual quality is comparable to many of the more physical sufi disciplines, like the sema or muqabeleh of the Mevlevi dervishes. One writer describes it as “une philosophie virile et militaire au sein des compagnies acrobatiques maghrebines.” Much of the repertoire can be seen as spiritually symbolic, the colonnes reaching towards heaven, the human pyramids and portées demonstrating mutual dependence in doing so – and in the latter case where often five men will be carried by one, demonstrating too the way in which the individual adept supports a much wider world.

With the spiritual discipline came training. Every acrobat of the Ou Moussa confrérie had to master the entire range of traditional moves, the “jeu Arabe,” requiring absolute obedience, unquestioning trust and long, demanding repetition beginning in childhood. Some of the original repertoire has apparently been lost in the syncretistic “jeu” that now takes in themes and practices from across Europe – there is probably no less discipline involved, but the link with the past, the historic and spiritual ancestry, has been attenuated and largely lost.

What is unique about Moroccan acrobatics? It seems that one feature is the fundamental place of the curve and the circle in the body movements, where other traditions are much more linear. The most basic move is called tinzga, or kcher when it is performed in the air, a circular movement that can be repeated in series and is also called ‘the Arab Wheel.’ The other specific characteristic of the Moroccan tradition is the prominence of pyramids and portées, the heaven-reaching human constructions that recall the spiritual ancestry of the art. (The book ends with a chart illustrating the basic moves and displays, a fascinating catalogue of the moves and figures that make up the Jeu Arabe.)

But it is also part of a wider tradition of wandering performers around the Mediterranean, both shores of which have their traditions of itinerant artists and performers. On the northern shore much of the disciplined spontaneity has been lost as small family troupes have given way to a circus that is ‘ministèredeculturalisé,’ formalised, nationalised. In Morocco on the other hand the older tradition survives, perhaps particularly on the beach, where the halaqi are “un hymne al la vie. Ils sont acrobats parce qu’ils sont vivants …” Indeed the Frenchman behind the first show, Taouba, writes of two ancient traditions coming together after a long separation, of the Mediterranean itself as a “place of pathways going from one country to another but not permanent,” which offer, for the moment, a fruitful re-encounter.

All of which reinforces my respect for the athletes with their red ball. Watch, for example this little film: it makes me regret my own misspent youth … to have been able to do even a hundredth of this would be magic. Much too late!

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A review by Andrew Hussey, in The Literary Review, which I found very interesting, of Algerian Chronicles by Albert Camus, edited by Alice Caplan & translated by Arthur Goldhammer (Belknap Press/Harvard University Press 224pp £16.95).

“The singular importance of Algerian Chronicles is that it brings together for the first time in English all of Camus’s writings on Algeria, ranging over his early journalism covering the famine in Kabyle in 1939 to his appeals for reason and justice in Algeria in 1958. Beautifully translated by Arthur Goldhammer, they reveal Camus not so much as a philosopher (or ‘ponderous metaphysician’ as Said called him) but as something like a French George Orwell. Certainly, in all these essays he demonstrates a most un-Parisian aversion for abstraction and a taste for the concrete detail that reveals the reality of a situation …” (read the review)

‘Une tendre noirceur’

“I once went to Morocco Mall, and stayed for an hour, dreaming in front of the big aquarium. I think the fishes in this great jar live better than we do in our pigsty,” says a boy from Douar Tqalia (‘Tripeville’) on the outskirts of Casablanca. Tqalia is a squalid bidonville on the edge of Casablanca, and the image of this lad, with his nose pressed to the glass, gazing at well-fed fish, came back to me yesterday as I read Mahi Binebine’s Horses of God, the English translation of Les Etoiles de Sidi Moumen. The novel is in the news, not only because Nabil Ayyouch’s film of the book, Les Chevaux de Dieu, is in the cinemas, but because the English translation, by Lulu Norman, has just won the PEN prize for translation.[1]

Sidi Moumen, where Binebine’s gang of wild kids grow up, is not too far from Douar Tqalia and shares all its awfulness, graphically described in the article quoted above (TelQuel 565). The two settlements play violent, gritty football against each other, the Stars of Sidi Moumen against the Eagles of Tqalia. The novel is the story of six boys growing up in a place where, as in either of these illegal douars, the streets are so narrow that the dead are carried upright to the cemetery, and the air is heavy with violence and abuse, the entrances guarded by police to stop the import of building materials for enlarging these festering piles of deprived humanity.

Lulu Norman’s is a glorious translation, mellifluent and convincing, once one accepts the unlikely articulacy of the uneducated narrator, who writes from his grave (or the Limbo beyond it), and explains his own eloquence rather perversely, “When I was alive I wouldn’t have been able to describe her as I can now. I wasn’t taught the words to convey the beauty of people and things, the sensuality and harmony that makes them so glorious.”  Binebine is an eloquent describer of these dreadful places, and in a recent interview (Diptyk, Feb/March 2013) explains why: “Since I was very small, I haven’t been able to bear injustice. I was born and grew up in a country that was chaotic and unjust. When I began to write and paint, I couldn’t do anything but recount our failings. To give a voice and a face to the little people who surrounded me, to tell of their joys, pains, difficulties of existence, but also their violence, their scams. A whole world marked with a tender wickedness, a grinning despair.”  In giving his narrator his lucid posthumous eloquence, Binebine is fulfilling that promise.

The Stars are a tightly knit little band, violent, tough and intermittently affectionate. They each have to take responsibility for their own ramshackle lives early, as they deal with imploded families, random aggression and extreme poverty. The poverty, the fragility of survival, is hauntingly described.  “The wheel turns so fast. Between little and nothing lie a few crumbs, blown away by the merest breath.” The boys scrape a living from the vast landfill site on the edge of Sidi Moumen, where they dig in the stinking rubbish to find things to sell, and where twice they bury the victims of their sudden, explosive violence.

At one level the story is a simple one, of how a small group like the Stars, scraping an existence at the bottom of life’s pile, make easy pickings for the recruiters of jihadi terrorism: the six kids end the story (and the narrator makes his transition to disillusioned posthumous storyteller) by strapping explosives to their bodies and blowing themselves up in the lobby of a Casablanca hotel. It is of course, loosely told, the story of the 2003 Casablanca bombings, many of whose perpetrators came from Sidi Moumen.

The dynamics are all too plausibly described, the way in which the jihadi recruiters insinuate themselves into the vacuum left by the erosion of normal family affections and innocent childhoods. The groomers become pseudo-parents themselves, supplying the attention, the emotion and some of the worldly goods, too, that Sidi Moumen has denied the boys. “The emir and his companions were simple people, who sometimes did us the honour of coming to visit, filling us with light and peace. Hamid was proud of me; I could see it in his eyes. Sometimes Abou Zoubeir himself would join us. And it was like a victory over our mediocre, small lives … No longer were we parasites, the dregs of humanity, less than nothing … Gone, the fatalism injected in our veins by our uneducated parents. We learned to stand shoulder to shoulder and flatly refuse the worm’s life to which we’d been condemned in perpetuity.”

The escalation towards the suicide attack in Casablanca is a parody of love. The emir and his myrmidons give martial arts lessons, apparently unconditionally, and with them appreciation; they make small gifts of carpet scraps and music for the boys’ shack on the edge of the landfill site; they treat them, or appear to treat them, as human beings, worthy of respect; they find them jobs, and sort out scrapes – some of them big scrapes, as when Nabil kills the motor-mechanic for whom he is working. The price is a complicit religiosity, into which they are readily enough drawn, and which gradually erects a glass wall between them and their families, their old lives.

Shortly before the final bombing, the boys are taken by minibus for the first holiday of their short lives, at the Dayt Aouar lake, north of Ifrane in the Middle Atlas. Like a good father, the emir teaches the boys the names of trees and watches them swim in the lake, so that “the time we spent in the mountains will always be one of the happiest memories of my short life.” And then of course he kills them, and they collaborate willingly in their own deaths, swept up in a current of love that they cannot resist, and a web of commitments that they don’t know how to escape.

All this is classic grooming technique. But what Binebine gives to the novel over and above this account of seduction, and what makes it remarkable, is the strange, perverse glaze of camaraderie and intermittent joy that he gives to the boys’ life before the fall. It is what he describes as  “une tendre noirceur … un désespoir souriant” – a recognition that there is joy even amongst the offal of daily life, despite fathers who beat you, deny your existence, belittle you, others boys who knife, cheat and steal from you, mothers who try, but fail you. In the slender interstices of misery, these boys do somehow make a life with its small loyalties and loves, its pride, its ésprit de corps, its achievements and its generosities.

It’s a magnificent achievement, to portray the sheer awfulness of life in Sidi Moumen, sparing little; and at the same time to leave the reader with a sense that humanity flickers and not infrequently sparkles beneath the muck. The narrator of the story manages both to explain with devastating honesty how dreadful life was, and to unfurl his bitter regret at leaving it for a handful of empty promises.

As for the easy-come-easy-go resignation that makes death contemplatable: “Sidi Moumen’s grim reaper was part of everyday life; she wasn’t as frightening as all that. People came and went, lived or died, without it making the slightest difference to our poverty. Families were so big that losing one or two of their number was no catastrophe. That’s how it was.”

And that, I suppose, is how it is, to this day, in Douar Tqalia and Sidi Moumen, the human dumps around Morocco’s big cities.

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[1] Mahi Binebine, The Horses of God, trans. Lulu Norman, Granta 2013

Alphabets, synecdoches and PC

I went last week to an evening lecture called Berber and Berbers: Basic Questions, Basic Answers, at NIMAR, the Dutch Institute in Rabat. It was given by Professor Harry Stroomer of Leiden, a descriptive linguist who has spent his life immersed in Berber language, oral history and ethnography. I went along with a sense of quite how little I know, and how much more I certainly should know, about this fundamental aspect of Morocco. So let me begin with the caution that these initial reflections are bound to be ingenuous, and that I shall do my best to learn more.

Prof Stroomer started with a list of the dozen most common questions he is asked about Berbers – and his answers to these revealed some fascinating information. For example, 60% of the population of Casablanca and just under 10% of that of Paris are berbèrophone; 80% of Dutch Moroccans are Berber, and of these 75% are Tarifit-speakers. He sketched out an intriguing history, and spelled out many misunderstandings which he has had gently to correct over the years. My favourite snippet of information was the discovery that although Berber languages are Semitic, and so unvowelled in writing, the Tifinagh alphabet used today has a one-for-one correspondence with the Latin, vowels and all, and you can transliterate with a single (perhaps metaphorical) tap on your keyboard: to and fro, to your heart’s content.

But as I listened, humming along in my head was the question, “Why does he keep referring to Berbers? Aren’t we supposed to use the word Amazigh?” I felt a little as I felt after years in Canada, when people in Britain referred to Eskimos – a sense that this isn’t the word that the Inuit, or in this case Berbers, like to use or hear used of themselves. Both are easily heard as pejorative, but they are also habitual and generally not used with pejorative intent. Just not quite PC.

No, said the good professor, Berber is the word for a people scattered across North Africa, with Berber languages spoken from Siwa to coastal Mauretania, and from Kabylie to Mali. Spoken in a relatively small number of areas, splashed across the map like ink-spots, this rich family of languages has some 20 million speakers, the largest number here in Morocco, where people who might identify themselves as Berbers probably constitute a small majority of the population.

But the professor’s underlying question seemed to me to be whether all these Berbers were really aware of a common identity before the 20th century, or whether Berberness – like Blackness – is an ideological construct created retrospectively: first by the French Protectorat, and then by the Amazigh movement. Which is where the word Amazigh and the name of the language, Tamazight, come in because they refer, really, to the people and tongue of the Middle Atlas, distinct from the Tashilhit of the south and the Tarifit of the north – let alone the languages spoken by Tuareg, Zenada, Kabyles or Beni Nefousa. The use of these Middle Atlas Berber descriptors for the whole kit and caboodle is a synecdoche, a figure of speech whereby a part comes to represent the whole – and it’s a synecdoche that Prof Stroomer clearly resists, in the gentlest possible way, feeling that identity risks being drowned in ideology.

He gave a clear and sympathetic account of the deprecation of Berber identity after Independence – the feeling that Berberness somehow undermined Arabness, and that Arabness was what Morocco was really about both in terms of pan-Arabism and of Islam. He talked of the euphemisms that had to be employed instead of Berber, and the tragic diffidence that was inculcated into Berbers so that many would fudge and obscure their own identities. He also talked of the post-Independence abolition of the chair of Berber at Rabat University, and said that however paradoxically, the Protectorat had been a positive period culturally in many ways for Morocco’s Berbers. It was the French who really began, in their imperialistic and directive way, the collectivisation of Berber language speakers into Berbers; and the conceptualisation of Morocco’s many Berber tongues as a single, albeit variegated, Berber language.

Clearly very sensitive to the real need for self-assertion by Berbers in Morocco, he nonetheless finds himself rather at odds with the ideologizing and myth-making that began among Berber exiles in Paris in the 1960s. He described with wry amusement the retrospective imagining of the history of a once extensive Berber nation overrun by Arabs more than a millennium ago; the invention of a flag; and the confection of a calendar. And he spoke too of the purposeful creation of a new language and an alphabet as tools of identity-building. It was clear that in his view the standard Tamazight that is being created today, avoiding the choice of a single dialect (as Florentine was to modern Italian) and building something novel, with eclectic choices and much resort to very foreign Tuareg vocabulary, is not (yet at least) a great success. “I know only two people in Morocco who can read and write it fluently,” he said sadly, implying that a great chance had been missed.

His enthusiasm for Tifinagh script is less than wholehearted. He described and illustrated the ancient ‘Libico-Berber’ script, noting that no one has ever managed to read a word of it and so there is no actual evidence therefore that it was used to write a Berber language; and the long tradition, particularly but not only in southwest Morocco, of Berber written in Arabic; and how this latter tradition was essentially ignored in the choice of a script which cuts Berber speakers off from the world, and from their own literacy. As a language that is no one’s mother tongue, “it runs the strong risk,” he said, “of reproducing exactly the diglossia that exists in Arabic” – that fatal division between the written and the spoken language that is the enemy of literacy.

It is a fascinating as well as an important discussion, and an interesting moment in Morocco’s cultural history. The foundation of IRCAM in 1992, and the inclusion of Berber/Tamazight in the Moroccan constitution of July 2011 as an official language, are important steps. It’s very clear (as I am constantly reminded) that to think and speak of Morocco simply as an Arab country is wrong: it has immensely strong and deep Berber roots, and acknowledgement of, and pride in, those is essential for a healthy future. In our small way at the British Council, we have tried to recognize this by starting to put up our signage in Tifinagh as well as in Arabic and French. But it also raises concerns. I reported a few months ago a Marrakchi waiter who told me pugnaciously as he delivered my coffee that  ”If that book you’re reading says Morocco is an Arab country, it’s a lie.” The opposite concerns are real too, and there are many non-Berber darija speakers who worry about Tamazight’s becoming a compulsory school subject for their already linguistically over-burdened children. A Rabat taxi-driver bent my ear on this subject for 20 minutes this very morning, to the point of (my) exhaustion.

To my mind this is a big, open question. Self-awareness and cultural pride are very important. But are they to be centrifugal or centripetal? The ideologization of this issue is probably inevitable. In Britain we have seen it in parts of the Welsh and Scottish nationalist movements, for whom the symbolic value of a minority language far outweighs its practical usefulness. It is an interesting contradiction for us in Britain to feel the real intensity of – for example – Scottish nationalism, with its deeply felt history of domination, exploitation and linguistic oppression (albeit sometimes wildly and self-indulgently exaggerated, as in Mel Gibson’s ridiculous Braveheart); and at the same time to note that the last three Prime Ministers of the United Kingdom, Blair, Brown and Cameron, are, in some sense at least, all Scots. But none of them (as far as I know) speak a word of Gaelic, and Blair and Cameron have no trace of Scottishness left visibly or audibly about them.

Years ago in Belgium, I asked a Flemish colleague how I should refer to his language. He thought for a moment, and then said “Well, I call it Flemish. But you should call it Dutch, because you’re foreign, and if you call it Flemish, you make it sound like a dialect, and that would be patronising.” And here in Morocco I guess it’s the same kind of situation. I just have to work out now what a foreigner who is not linguist, or ethnologist but a sympathetic observer should call it. Berber or Amazigh?

Here come the deontologists

“The good old-fashioned newspaper” says Maroc Hebdo this week, “on the terrace of a crémerie, between café crème and croissant, is finished. From now on, we must arrive with i-pads under our arms …” and there’s truth in this rather sad comment. For one thing I do find myself arriving most mornings at the Café Fine Brioche under my Rabat office for my coffee clutching my i-pad containing the day’s Guardian, and a weekly – the TLS, the London Review of Books, TelQuel or Maroc Hebdo – with not a real daily newspaper in sight.

So what? Well, the comment comes in the course of an interesting cover story in Maroc Hebdo this week about the press. Newspaper circulation bothers me (as regular readers know) because it is a dipstick in the tank of literacy: I quote from time to time the figure of 300,000 for the combined circulation of all Morocco’s dailies, and compare it querulously to the circulation of Algeria’s Al-Khabar (400,000 plus) or Egypt’s Al-Ahram (over a million). Hebdo‘s story allows a rather deeper and more nuanced look at the press’s problems – and they are no less depressing for being nuanced.

Abdellah Mansour, in Hebdo, describes this primary circulation problem as “le couplet analphabétisme-pouvoir d’achat,” and neither element in the couplet is getting better, at least not fast enough for sales alone to save a Moroccan newspaper. Illiteracy is only a part of the problem. The press is certainly trapped by low circulation: broadly speaking, sales account, at the very most, for 20% of income – but there are sobering figures here which put the particularly dire problems facing Morocco’s press in sharp relief. Fewer than 1% of Moroccans buy a newspaper at all, a total sale of “between 300,000 and 350,000 daily.” This compares with almost a million in Algeria, with its population roughly the same size as Morocco’s, and about 400,000 in Tunisia, population 10,000,000, well under a third of Morocco’s. Thirteen papers are sold in Morocco for every 1,000 Moroccans – the global average is 95 – and in this table Morocco comes 15th in the Arab world, beating only Mauretania, Yemen and Somalia, by a whisker.

Less familiar are some other rankings: 1.7 kg of newsprint consumed annually per Moroccan, against a world average of 20.3 kg (but where, I find myself asking, does the 1.7 kg actually go? Even that is a great deal of print for the average Moroccan who is said, anecdotally, to spend six minutes a year reading one page of print: it must be more like thick cardboard than paper, and at 1.7 kg per page that’s a GSM for wiping dinosaurs’ bottoms with). The Hebdo articles comment not only on Moroccans’ lack of purchasing power but on their expectation, where they do read, of reading free. Sharing and even renting newspapers is common, and in the street-level window of L’Opinion/Al-Massae below my office there is always the day’s edition taped to the back of the glass and attracting casual readers.

But if readers are the core problem (which stands to reason for reading-material), there are others almost as threatening to the newspaper business. Of these the collapse in advertising revenue is the next. In the twelve months between November 2011 and November 2012 total advertising revenues fell by 14.4%. This leaves the newspaper companies caught between the devil and the deep blue sea: minuscule readership income from kiosk and subscription sales; and plummeting advertising revenue. No wonder that 50% of all newspaper companies are in financial difficulty. Finally on the debit side, the three distribution companies, on whose meagre usefulness I commented recently in the context of book distribution, take 40% of cover-price.

It’s a nightmare. And newspapers generally stay alive through another, quite different, mechanism – state subsidy. This amounts, under the current agreement signed a month ago by the Minister of Communication, M Khalfi, and the owners, to MAD 65,000,000. This is just enough to keep most of the papers tenuously afloat, though there have been many closures. But it does create a dependence on government funding which seems less than entirely healthy. And it’s not all that generous: the subsidy represents only about a third of what the industry pays in tax. Newspapers are awfully vulnerable to the concerted withdrawal of advertising, a means of pressure and even quietus, that has been used against papers in the past. But anyway, to be beholden to the Ministry of Communication and the large commercial advertisers for survival will tend to introduce an element of caution: caution which can all too easily lead to blandness and tedium.

This is where Nadia Lamhaidi takes up the baton in the third article of the week’s ‘En Couverture’ special. She places Morocco’s newspaper problems in a global context – the rapid erosion of hard-copy sales by migration to on-line news is almost universal, and papers cutting and closing across the globe – but notes sadly that “many Moroccan papers have in the last few months had to resign themselves to shutting up shop, because in truth they have failed to find a workable business model.” Morocco’s has long been a press of diverse opinions – “as a matter of practice if not of principle” – and this is being rapidly eroded as newspapers close. She makes very clear that Morocco’s press has been amongst the most ‘plural’ in the region, and that this is very much at risk. But she notes too that many too many journalists are betraying professional standards – she uses that wonderfully opaque French word, déontologie, which has no direct English parallel – by failing to check facts and by letting the sloppier standards of Facebook and Twitter pull down the professional practice and ethics of newspaper journalists.

She prescribes a new emphasis on investigative journalism and a return to high standards of professionalism, a “journalisme soigné, où l’on prend le temps du prendre du recul par rapport à l’information, de la verifier, de la recouper. ” This seems rather a thumb-in-the-dyke approach to a much vaster and more intractable problem – after all, this elaborate regime of fact-checking and po-faced press ethics is very much an American phenomenon (and who would read the New York Times for fun?). But then, in England we too are facing up to the excesses of the gutter press with an approach which risks being reassuringly, or alarmingly (selon gout), deontological. In the end, if papers are to be read they have to be interesting, surprising and irreverent.

Just like (and I say this with a sigh of resignation) some of the perfectly ghastly but also perfectly necessary organs of the British press.

*

Meanwhile in TelQuel (you can see I’ve been on a flight this week – to London in fact for a small eye-operation, hence the review of the weeklies) there is a piece about Morocco’s museums and the new Fondation des Musées, headed by Mehdi Qotbi, which is taking over the running of the Ministry of Culture’s 13 museums. First fruit of this, visible to Rabatis, is the newly white-painted shell of the Museum of Modern Art at the top of Avenue Allel ben Abdellah. The ground was broken nine years ago, and for my entire time in Rabat it has been silent, not a workman or a cement bucket in motion – and suddenly it’s all go, with an opening promised by the end of 2013. This is excellent news. So too is the thorough survey of contents that the Fondation is undertaking, the determination to source private sector funding, the search for training for museum staff and the international links. Naturally, most of those links are with French institutions, so I note with discreet and quiet pleasure the role that Glasgow University’s Hunterian Museum is playing, with the British Council’s brokerage, in advising Rabat’s Université Mohammed V Agdal on the creation of its own Museum of Natural History.

Mancunian silver

Last week in Marrakech I bought a couple of interesting silver-plated objects – a sugar-box and tea-caddy made by Richard Wright of Manchester. Wright has, as all Moroccans know, given his name to the silver tea-tray, or rayt, and was also responsible for what must have been enormous exports of silver-plate from the 1830s onwards, perhaps well into the latter part of the century. Wright teapots are common enough, especially 1½ pint plain silver pots. I have also seen 2 pint versions of the same, and others with repoussé flower-decorations. There are much more elaborate 1½ pint (and perhaps larger) sharafia-work teapots with feet, lattice-work engraving and crowns on the lid.

My two boxes  are the first I have seen, though I don’t imagine they are enormously rare. It is clear that Richard Wright set out to supply the utensils for the budding tea-trade between England and Morocco. With tea-trays, caddies, sugar boxes and tea-pots he seems to have covered the field: I have also seen an incense-burner, and heard tell of a coffee-pot.

The interesting thing about Wright is that I can find no trace of him in Manchester or anywhere else in England. It is possible that his work came to be imitated in Morocco, and that later Wright pieces are local copies, perhaps made in Fes to capitalize on the popularity of the Wright brand. But the original Wright must have existed. Who was he? His mark appears in no directory of silver plate marks that I have consulted; and his name is absent from trade directories. English museum metalwork departments know nothing of him.

One possibility is that his was a confected identity created or taken over by Jewish or Muslim Moroccan traders in Manchester to brand exports to their home country. The dealer who sold to me in Marrakech last week told me that the sharafia work decoration was applied to silver put out to Jewish metalworkers (presumably in Manchester, though he had no idea of this). Many, perhaps most, Mancunian Moroccans were from Fes, the centre of the fine metal-working trade in Morocco, and later a major centre of tea-pot manufacture.

I’ve attached a few pictures. Do any of my readers have any idea about Richard Wright, or know anything about the silver-plate trade in Morocco? I’d be grateful for any references, anecdotes, photographs or other information. This is his mark, stamped on the base of his export items in English and Arabic:

For Whom the Book Tolls

I have spent the last few days talking to Moroccan academics, publishers and others about the book business; and it has been quite a revelation, if not quite so much of a surprise. As I have noted in this blog before, Morocco is not a great reading nation. With literacy running at 55% or so (and even this reflecting a much lower level of competence than is necessary to read a book), the potential reading public is limited. One publisher I spoke to suggested that the universe from which readers could be drawn at all is probably around 500,000 (at the very most) of the 35 million population – about 1.5%. Another pointed out the contrast between, on the one hand the circulation of Egypt’s flagship daily paper, Al-Ahram (1 million) and Algeria’s Al-Khabar (400,000); and on the other, the total circulation of all Morocco’s daily newspapers, about 300,000 (OJD circulation figures for Morocco). A third said that in his three decades in the business, his print runs for books had dropped from 6,000 or 7,000 to a maximum of 1,500: “On lit de moins en moins.”

In the old “Cairo writes, Beirut publishes and Baghdad reads” paradigm, Rabat and Casablanca don’t feature. Why not? Partly because Morocco is a linguistic patchwork in which spoken mother-tongues overlap not at all with written language. Literacy, whether in Arabic or French, is an intractable problem and the proverb I quoted above refers to Arabic, which relatively few Moroccans read with comfort on the scale of a book.

But at the same time it’s clear that Morocco is simply different from other ‘Arab’ countries in terms of its relationship with the printed text. It was the last major country in the region to see printing introduced, in 1865. Even then its staple, Qu’ran-printing, was characterized by two traditional letter-forms (qaf and fa) quite different to those used anywhere else in the Muslim world – and Moroccan Qu’rans still preserve this singularity.

Printing came on top of a strong oral tradition (visible today in the circles of eager listeners around story-tellers with their guembris, in the Fna at Marrakech or Place Assarag at Taroudannt) and an amazing capacity for memorization. I was struck, a year or so ago, when speaking to half a dozen traditionally educated students who the British Council, on behalf of the Moroccan government, had sent to Britain to study continental  philosophy: struck, not just by the fact that each of them was hafiz – that he knew the Qu’ran by heart – but that he had followed up what would alone be a prodigious feat of memory and devotion in any culture, by learning another seven or eight books of law, history and grammar in the same way. This tradition, still evidently alive, though the two universities that once taught it are shadows of their former selves, the Yusufiya at Marrakech gone, the Qairouyyine at Fes a sad victim of neglect and decay. It is probably unsurprising that there remains a strong (some would say overwhelming) element of rote-learning in much Moroccan education to this day.

So, what with one thing and another, and given their high cost relative to wages, books don’t fall on a fertile field. Almost all our interlocutors began by stressing that Morocco is not a nation of readers, and that hopes of changing this are thin. We heard that the only exception to this resistance is in Moroccan history, books on which sell like “des pains chocolats,” mostly in French, and mostly to non-academics. This appetite is clearly strong and perhaps not as systematically exploited as it might be: the history monthly Zamane, in its third year, has an astonishing tirage of 15,000 copies, the great majority of which seem to be being sold. Rabat University (UM5A)’s Faculté des Lettres sees reprinted titles on Moroccan history march out of the door in droves. And at Editions Tarik in Casablanca, Bichri Bennani, its charming proprietor, gave me a copy of his one best seller, Ahmed Marzouki’s Tazmamart Cellule 10, which over a decade has sold an astounding 60,000 copies in French, and is also published in Arabic.

I was left with the feeling that, apart from textbooks, which are a business all of their own, and occasional runaway bestsellers like Marzouki’s, the book business is hanging by a thread. Bookshops are very, very few and pretty dull. Distribution, if it can actually be said to happen at all, is run by a company that supplies newspaper kiosks which thus become pretty important distribution points even for academic titles. There is, to be sure, a market for glossy picture books, though these are essentially expensive coffee-table display items for the rich. But for books as vectors of knowledge and culture the outlook seems grim.

Our main focus this week was on academic publishing, because it is not only a carrier of knowledge, the central way of disseminating research, but also a barometer of the intellectual health of the academy. At the moment, in the Humanities and Social Sciences, the mercury is pretty low. As Mohammed Cherkaoui reported in 2009 (Enquête sur l’Evaluation du Système Nationale de Recherche dans la Domaine des Sciences Humaines et Sociales, Ministry of Education), some 55% of researchers in these fields have never published a word – and Morocco is the only country he knows where the ‘Matthieu Effect,’ the reliability of a researcher’s previous publication history in predicting future publication, doesn’t operate. Now of course there is a big exception to all this: there is significant publication by the top level of Moroccan H&SS academics, abroad. With PhDs from French, Spanish, Belgian universities, many of the stars simply expatriate their work. Some expatriate themselves too; others keep one foot in Morocco and one foot abroad; and yet others keep one eye on Paris from their desks in Tangier, Casablanca or Rabat. All this saps the domestic industry, whether we are talking about the knowledge industry as a whole, or the book industry itself.

But as Cherkaoui reports so lucidly, the problem is a much bigger one than that. The Facultés des Lettres are not in a very happy state. First, they are growing very, very fast as massification gathers pace, with no concomitant growth in resources to match the exploding intake of undergraduates. This means that teaching is an ever more overwhelming preoccupation, with proportions of 2-300 students per academic staff member not uncommon. In this climate there is no leisure for research, except for the superhumanly dedicated. There are also fewer and fewer incentives to publish outside professional areas, where most publication is anyway by non-academics. In the law, where growth is greatest, publication has increased dramatically: there have been big surges, in reaction to the Mudawana reform of 2004, and the new Highway Code of 2010, both of which stimulated huge secondary legal literature. But much of it has come from the pens of professionals – often men and women who left the academy under ‘DVD,’ or early retirement.

Academic publishing in the H&SS was the real focus of our enquiry – and I was travelling with Peter Davison of Cambridge University Press, who is also chairman of the Publishers’ Association International Committee. We came to see clearly a vicious circle that needs breaking – of stalling research, dwindling publication, failing distribution and minuscule sales.

This doesn’t mean that Moroccan scholars aren’t producing anything worth publishing: at the top end they most certainly are. But it reflects an acute constipation in the process of scholarly communication at anything other than this top level, and a very narrow interpretation too, in some quarters, of what scholarly communication really means. Where university publication is taking pace, it is a spending line in a university budget, and the physical production of a book all too often becomes an end in itself. Books sit in stores, or more often in professors’ cupboards. Assiduous professors walk them round bookshops and kiosks and leave them on depôt – sale-or-return – in twos and threes. Unassiduous professors keep them in the cupboards and give away occasional copies. For neither, though, is selling the books any more than a way of recouping a small part of the cost. And scholarly communication – the sharing of progress in the Republic of Letters – is not a high priority.

Such books as are handled by publishers and faculty printing operations shift half their year’s sales in the two days of the Casablanca Salon de Livre where departmental and university librarians rush around with their annual budgets and a mandate to spend up fully on whatever seems suitable. Rather like one of those awful competitions where the lucky winner has five minutes in a department store to load his or her trolley with whatever he can throw into it within the allocated time.

So, are we hopeless? No, not at all. The other side of the coin is the sheer enthusiasm from academics in certain facultés to find ways out of the double-bind they are in. Certainly there are those who are alarmed by the idea of submitting their work to the sort of peer review that would be a condition of a ‘real’ and revitalised academic publication for a wider market. But we sat at one faculty meeting where every department head said that as far as he or she was concerned it is the only possible way forward, and publicly committed to embracing it. Morocco has made much progress in the last decade with taking the STEM faculties down this road; now it must be the turn of the H&SS faculties

This means looking afresh at the actual business of publishing. The physical distribution of books in Morocco is probably a lost cause – not only because of its intrinsic failings, but because across the world more and more academic publishing is migrating onto the internet. Peter’s report, the conclusions of which I can’t foresee and shan’t pre-empt, will undoubtedly address this question, and I would be very surprised if at least one (and perhaps all) of the business scenarios he develops didn’t involve carefully organized e-publishing. This should be able to reach parts of the country, the region and the world which other methods don’t reach, giving a potential readership and an intellectual currency to Moroccan scholars that they have never had. As (and this is a predictive as, not a wishful if) more of the output moves into English over the next decade, this reach will grow.

In the end, no man is an island and the H&SS scholarly community of Morocco needs and deserves to become more firmly part of the Main, the global sea of knowledge. It must do so because it has a very great deal to offer in terms of its own work, past present and future; because it needs much stronger international intellectual collaboration to draw out its best; and above all because no nation that allows to lapse its capacity for intellectual and moral self-examination – which is what the humanities and social sciences are – can prosper.

Let them eat pencils

‘What is the role of the historian in society?’ asks the interviewer, in this week’s TelQuel, and Maati Monjib replies, “He studies it, understands it in order for it to transform itself, to change.”

Monjib is one of Morocco’s leading historians, an editor of the IRRHM’s monumental Histoire du Maroc, réactualisation et synthèse, recently published (or at least recently printed) in Rabat. He is also a ‘scientific adviser’ to Zamane, the excellent two-year old magazine of Moroccan history. His most famous work is his thesis, La monarchie marocaine et la lutte pour le pouvoir, and he has written an acclaimed biography of Ben Barka. He spent eighteen years outside Morocco (1982-2000) of which seven were at university in Senegal, where he enjoyed what he describes as a society “much more liberal than our own, a real democracy where people are prepared to listen to every point of view.”

His definition of the role of a historian and his focus on modern, often contemporary history, suggest why he has not always been allowed to feel comfortable in Morocco. The social sciences – amongst which historiography can for this purpose be numbered – are both vital to the intellectual and moral health of a society, and deeply suspect to any ruler who does not wish society “to transform itself, to change.” Autocratic rulers do not wish to see the endoskeleton of society laid bare, the raw mechanisms of power and patronage, the struggles for influence and control of resources explained. Obscurity and the sanction of tradition serve them well. In his TelQuel article Monjib talks of the marginalisation of historians in the 1970s, the tacit bargain between universities and the régime to sidestep research on the period after independence, the removal of ‘difficult’ historians from teaching roles and the attempts to take away even the title of historian from contemporary historians like Monjib. The contemporary historian is in this sense the conscience of society, its psycho-analyst and its Cassandra.

March is Professor Monjib’s month: he also has an article in Zamane, a substantial reflection on Hassan II’s fight against the intellectuals. It’s entitled Haro sur les intellectuels, which you might translate loosely as Open season on the Intellectuals. The pull-quote on the first page gives the flavour: “Hassan II considered the cultural modernisation of the country, especially through academia, as a danger to his regime. To guarantee the durability of his throne he made the control of the intelligentsia an affair of the state.” This article picks up where the other left off, and seems to me to be required reading for anyone wanting to understand the intellectual and educational condition of modern Morocco – which is to say the shaky foundations on which its present and future prosperity are built. And – because Morocco’s is still a far from hopeless situation – just what needs most urgently to be done to redress the omissions of more than half a century.

He explores the late King’s ambivalence towards intellectuals – his personal pleasure in his own reading and conversations in history and politics, and his youthful sympathies with the reformist nationalists – contrasting this with his growing suspicion of the tendency of liberal education to undermine the foundations of the monarchy. The Casablanca demonstrations of March 1965 and their suppression were a turning-point, when the king’s fascination definitively began to be outweighed by his scorn. As Monjib puts it, he seems from this point on “to sacrifice his own subjective preferences on the altar of his régime’s objective interests.”

After 1965, the haro turned to full cry. What Monjib makes clear is that this was part of a conscious strategy to base the monarchy in the countryside, to co-opt the rural populations at every level through tax exemptions and to bolster the traditional channels of religiosity and allegiance by subsidising moussems and zaouiyas. This meant ditching the urban intelligentsia, the “couches instruites et politicisées de la societé,” resisting the massification of education at all levels, and attacking subjects like philosophy and history in the universities. This process deliberately marginalised researchers like Monjib who investigated the structure of power and the history of the immediate post-independence years. The universities entered a period of back-pedalling and obscurantism as student numbers were held down to spare a saturated public service and avoid the corrosive graduate unemployment which by May 1968 was fanning the flames of student revolt in France. “If no one wants to till the soil, if we all become intellectuals, we shall have to eat pencils,” as the King put it.

If this had a destructive impact on Higher Education, it was also disastrous for the vast majority of the population who never saw the inside of a university but who depended on the Moroccan public school system for their education, skills, language and upward mobility.  Modern education had been a rallying cry for the nationalists, “a fundamental tool for the liberation of the nation and the individual.” At the King’s instance now, education was retraditionalised, with new emphasis on Islamic Studies and m’sid quranic schools, which latter Monjib quotes the Director of the Collège Royale as calling, in 1968, “one of the principal causes of our civilisational retardation.” Arabisation, in the botched form in which it was implemented across the public school system, was a disaster: in a box alongside the main article there is printed a long extract from comments made to Economia by Mohamed Chafik, the same Director of the Collège Royale, in which he calls it “a treason by a minority of the political class,” and draws a devastating analogy with Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. “One is tempted to believe,” he writes, “that they intended to create an impoverished Beta class of the masses, and a privileged Alpha class for themselves and their children.”

That’s quite a knot to untangle today. This weekend I was at an event for young policy analysts at Casablanca, and over coffee a serious young man said to me that in his view, education is not just one of the many policy questions facing Morocco, but the key question. I wondered if he was consciously echoing Mehdi Ben Barka, quoted by Monjib: “Education isn’t a fundamental question, it’s the fundamental question.” Or whether it’s just so obvious that any thinking person must come to the same conclusion.

Aporia with knobs on

It is hard to live in Morocco and not become at least a little obsessed by language. I was very taken by a recent article from Jeune Afrique sent to me by a friend in Washington. It’s by Youssef Ait Akdim, and it’s called Tamazight, darija, français? Le Maroc est “lost in translation.” Clearly preoccupied with the language issue too, Ait Akdim runs through the whole argument from the bizarre macaronic dialect that many Moroccans speak, and which he calls tamaghribit, through the political pressures that continue to distort language policy in Morocco by giving undue political and religious weight to fus7a, and the awful impact that failure to teach any language well has on the nation’s literacy.

The key to all this is the arabisation policy promoted vigorously by successive governments under the decisive pressure of Istiqlal, the grand old party of nationalism. The paradox of this policy is the fact that the arabisation of teaching has gone hand in hand with serious illiteracy. In Morocco, to summarise: the grinding to a halt of mass school inscription has allowed mother tongues – darija, the Amazigh languages – to survive in the private sphere. As far as school is concerned, this segmentation policy needs only one illustration: although public schooling is in Arabic up to baccalaureate level, and French is the first foreign language (with the number of hours assigned to it, and the quality of teaching, leaving a great deal to be desired), almost all instruction at Higher Education is in French, with the exception of Arabic literature, theology and some elements of law.

Calling this, as he may and I probably shouldn’t, cette hypocrisie, he explores the intense pressure that is put on parents to find ways to get their children past, rather than through, the national education system, so as to avoid their becoming disempowered and under-equipped students, linguistically incapable of a university course. He describes the stratagems for gaining linguistic advantage – the crèches to prepare for advantageous entry to French-speaking nursery school, leading inexorably on to cut-throat competition to get children into the lycées of the Mission Française, the gateways to privilege and power. And he quotes a communications executive as saying: Sadly, my generation takes as read the fact that the public school is a death-zone. I wouldn’t think for an instant of putting my daughter in one, even though I did my whole education in the public sector right up to my master’s degree.

Finally he looks at recent manifestations, the increasingly vocal promotion of Darija as an answer to diglossia-induced illiteracy, along with the risks it carries for isolation in the Arab world (Are Moroccans to be schizophrenic or isolated? – An aporia) and the growing challenge offered by Tamazight with its position under the 2011 constitution still being worked out. It’s quite a challenge: whatever the government, dominated as it is by two parties committed to l’arabité, the organic law (which will give solid shape to the constitution’s abstract commitments) is a royal priority.

I am surprised though by the implication (in the paragraph I quoted above) that the failure of literacy education has “allowed” mother-tongues to survive. This seems back-to-front in its apparent implication that a successful literacy programme would wipe them out. On the contrary, it is the failure to accommodate those mother tongues into Morocco’s written culture that guarantees the failure of literacy education.

The more I read and think about this, the more I suspect that there is a Gordian Knot waiting to be cut. It’s certainly true that Arabic is a vital part of the Moroccan past, and perhaps too of the Moroccan present (though remarkably few Moroccans are actually competent in it). But is it such an integral part of the future? The spoken languages, Darija and Tamazight, are vital to overcoming the punitive diglossia that cripples Morocco: until they are the first port of call in literacy-education, it must be that knowledge-accumulation and cultural capital-building are going nowhere, fast.

What’s more, with IRCAM and other NGOs working hard and effectively at refining a standard Tamazight language and orthography, supporting teacher-training and ‘valorising’ (that wonderful French word) the language – it is not inconceivable that literacy will make faster progress amongst Tamazight-speakers than amongst Darija-speakers. This would be an interesting development, and seriously undermine the curious view of M Benkirane, as quoted by Ait Akdim, that the Amazigh are simple people who pass their time in singing and dancing.

It is of course very good news that anyone is beginning to shift this sacred cow off the tracks, but there are dangers. Differentiated educational achievement is socially and politically divisive – one has only to look at the way unprecedented education brought to rural Jewish communities in the 1940s and 50s by the Alliance Israelite encouraged Jewish urban migration and the development of increasingly different employment prospects for Jewish and Muslim children, with all the alienation that came in its train.

Today’s is obviously a very different situation, but it is hugely important that Morocco as a whole, rather than a single language community within it, climb out of the linguistic bear-trap in which it finds itself today. The message doesn’t seem to be getting through very effectively.

Which is what Ait Akdim means by aporia – that state of confused, immobilised puzzlement that makes serious thought difficult and decisive action more so.

*

Talking of M Benkirane, I was struck today by a comment in Akbar El-Yom to the effect that he has recently been given the gift of a second great opportunity to shine internationally. This second gift was his being sent off to the enthronement in Rome of Pope Francis, as the royal representative. His first gift was being sent a few weeks ago to do the same at the inauguration of the Fes synagogue so painstakingly restored as a cultural centre by the German government. Tempting as it might be to read all this as gentle teasing of an Islamist minister for whom synagogues and basilicas are not natural habitats, it would no doubt be quite wrong. As Akbar el-Yom said, after all, M Benkirane as well as Pope Francis seemed to have enjoyed their brief conversation.

Smelly fish and flailing beards

In  Dubai for the British Council’s Going Global 2013 conference, I realize that I was last here in 1982 or ‘83. Dubai has changed in the intervening 30 years. I remember then sitting on a hot hotel terrace overlooking the Creek and thinking it all rather glitzy, but the extraordinary landscape of towers in the new city centre was still empty desert. It is so entirely sci-fi in appearance that you expect to see small gravity-defying pods whizzing to and fro between them, their pilots in spacefleet uniforms, as on Trantor, Coruscant or Gedi Prime. The towers are exuberantly different, wildly asymmetrical, topped with golf-balls and Big Ben facsimiles, absurd temples, knobs and lanterns. Over it all towers the immense Burj Khalifa, a great Babel-tower of glass, narrowing in stages to the raised digit that scrapes the sky. It is so tall that in Ramadan the fast is broken at slightly different times at different levels, the clink of cutlery on china progressing like a Mexican Wave from the ground to the 163^rd floor.

Going Global began with a reception below the Burj on a terrace by an artificial lake, with thousands of lights glittering on the water and a gigantic fountain playing. Wasteland until three or four years ago, it is now a lagoon of fairy lights, dominated by the Burj and the Dubai Mall. The conference is one of the British Council’s major events of the year, with 1,600 or so educationalists, vice-chancellors and ministers from all over the world gathering like ants on the sugar-pot in our Rabat kitchen. The conversation is interesting, new research is published, and the networking is frenetic.

I had with me three Moroccan university presidents and two deans – a very good delegation, all of whom made the most of the networking opportunities. One of them indeed – UM5A in Rabat – has a branch campus just up the road in Abu Dhabi where they teach theology, an odd intellectual hyperlink the length of the Arabic-speaking world accounted for by the shared Maliki rite of the two countries (Morocco provides many of the UAE’s judges). It was encouraging to see the appetite among a small but enthusiastic group of British institutions for links with Moroccan universities, not just in the humanities and social sciences, but also in engineering, energy, public health and other areas.  Morocco is ready to diversify its intellectual hinterland well beyond its increasingly constricting post-colonial francophone comfort-zone; and Britain, after a century of overlooking the Maghreb in a linguistic and cultural funk, is at last keen to tango.

After the conference I spent a day wandering in Dubai. Wandering in this context is a limited business, the larger roads often uncrossable except by occasional air-conditioned bridges, and only spasmodically equipped with pavements for pedestrians. I soon resorted to the metro, a sleek elevated train that whizzes along between the towers, built primarily for the foreign workforce rather than the Amiratis, of whom I saw few on the tube.

The signage is clearly designed in the abstract  by a contractor – the typography is clear, the positioning careful, but the signs seldom relate directly to one’s need actually to find anything. At each metro exit there is an excellent large-scale map of the area round the station on which are marked places of religious significance (pink spots), places of interest (blue spots) and retail opportunities (red spots). But none of the spots is blessed with a name, so mere utility is clearly not the purpose. More practical was a large sign forbidding the carrying of fish on the tube (which reminds me of an interview I once read with an Iqaluit taxi-driver who said that she didn’t allow Inuit customers to bring fermented walrus-meat aboard, because the smell lingers for weeks). Other signs forbade the spitting of paan, with gloriously graphic red splodges to illustrate exactly what must not be done.

I walked in the streets of old Dubai, and found myself in an Indian or Pakistani town where the language seemed to be either the wonderfully old-world English of the sub-continent, or a medley of tongues that I didn’t recognize at all. Tailoring and saris gave way as I walked to computers and record-players, vast trolleys of cardboard boxes being unloaded at almost every shop. When I went into a supermarket to buy a drink, the cans were not of Coke but of melon milk and aloe vera, mango and young coconut.

Baffled by the nameless coloured spots I walked happily at random for a couple of hours, reached no specific destinations and eventually went back on the metro to the Dubai Mall, to look at the enormous bookshop there. The mall itself is bizarre. It has no evident purpose at all except relieving you of money at an endless variety of shops, every one of them a high-end American or European brand. Amongst the Ermengildo Zegnas and Jimmy Choos, the Mandarina Ducks and Victoria’s Secrets, there seemed to be no Arabic names at all, a bizarre desert of imported labels. As for Kinokuniya (Singaporean), it is extraordinary, a 68,000 square foot showroom of books of every kind. There’s wide and apparently unrestricted coverage – a shelf of books on Israel, another on al-Qa’ida – and if there is a rather large, showy display of the oeuvre of the emirate’s ruler, one can’t begrudge that. More striking is the overwhelming dominance of cooking, fashion, interior décor and management: for a fleeting moment one has the feeling of half-closed eyes, quiet anomie, minds purring gently in neutral.

Four or five days don’t give one more than a sniff of a place, and to draw conclusions would be ridiculous. But I was very struck by the invisibility of the 15% of the population who are Amirati: what I saw was a population of Indians and Europeans, workers, expats and tourists, all making and spending money like crazy. I’m probably not typical in regarding Dubai as a totally inexplicable tourist destination, and the Dubai Mall as a frightful memento mori, to be avoided like the plague. (“Welcome to Everything: There’s nothing else on earth quite like Dubai Mall ….” Visit our branch on Gedi Prime.) Watching those who clearly felt otherwise made me think of owl-pellets, those little dry balls of mouse-bones and fluff that are left behind after an owl has digested all the edible parts of a small rodent.

So it was a great relief to be staying, after the conference was over, with British friends of 35 years in their charming and comfortable home in Jumeira (162 floors lower than the Burj), where the shelves were full of good books, the dog slept on the rug and we ate supper in the little courtyard while tortoises nibbled softly on peppers. Irresistible too, was the Arabic restaurant we visited, where the oriental waitresses were gloriously and mysteriously dressed in hennings, the pointy hats with pendant chiffon favoured by ladies attending late mediaeval tournaments. Or perhaps they were a vague stab at the lid of a Moroccan tajine?

We went on Friday to the Book Fair – the Emirates Airline Festival of Literature – an annual event that brought together a small galaxy of mainly British and Indian authors including Jeffery Archer and – more interestingly – William Dalrymple, Anthony Beevor, Artemis Cooper and Eugene Rogan.  It’s an impressive event, busy and cheerful, with good audiences and books selling like hot cakes, the temporary tills of Kinokuniya ringing merrily, the titles by Sheikh Mohammed stacked high here too though, unlike Jeffrey Archer, their author was not signing.

The first day of the Book Fair saw a panel on the crisis of the Arabic language, which I missed, being still preoccupied with Higher Education, but followed in the excellent local press. The panel reflected, passionately, on the way Arabic is suffering beside English in the UAE, as parents compete to equip their children with the global lingua franca. Speakers clearly felt that Arabic is not being given a fair chance – badly taught, for perfection rather than for communication, it is becoming a less attractive prospect for Amirati children. They said – as I heard the translator Leslie McLoughlin say a couple of days later – that the difficulty of learning Arabic is much exaggerated; and two speakers cited the British Council as an example of how to teach a language, simply and attractively, around the world.

I sympathize with the cri de coeur of Ali Abdulla al-Rais, Head of Printing and Holy Koran in the Dubai government, that by teaching an Amirati child English, and neglecting his Arabic “you are not building his future. You are uprooting him from his roots, and history. And people with no past can have no future.” Nearby, this week, there was also a spirited attempt at the Dubai Handicrafts Village, to reawaken interest in traditional children’s games, with much hopping in sandpits, throwing of oddly shaped objects, and playing of what appeared to be a local variant of draughts. It all looked rather fun.

But I wonder how easy it is to be an Amirati, to keep your roots in the ground, when you are part of a 15% minority in a sea of English-speakers, all living their separate lives among the towers of Gedi Prime. It’s hard enough to persuade English children to play hopscotch and spell in England, amid the competing attractions of Playstations and text-messaging: how much more so in Dubai, where there is a linguistic schizophrenia built into the fabric of this strange and wonderful place.

The other side of the same coin was well demonstrated by the comedy turn at the close of Going Global, a popular young entertainer called Wongho Chung. A Korean, born and brought up in Jordan where he attended local schools, he is fluent enough in Arabic to keep an Arab audience laughing at his torrent of puns and plays on regional accent. His jokes were mostly about the embarrassing double entendre of his name, his fluid identity, and the almost permanent double-take he lives as an apparent oriental who speaks Arabic, a Korean Arab, or an Arab Korean – with a Jordanian passport, a home in Dubai and a career in the Gulf. Dubai is supremely multicultural in one sense, but in another it seems quite tightly defined by assumptions about language, identity and the assumed roles associated with each.

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I read the local papers with interest, and there was much that was intriguing (would there was as good an English paper in Morocco – and may the North African Post soon become it). But one thing stays with me, nothing to do with the UAE at all, a report on the oafish clothing company which recently advertised on the internet (an automatic text-generating programme supposedly running amok) T-shirts with texts like KEEP CALM AND KILL HER, and KEEP CALM AND RAPE A LOT. Vile, particularly as the papers were full of real and horrific rape stories from India; but what struck me was the wonderfully revealing self-contradiction of the Australian owner who reacted thus: “I apologize for the offensive response this has created around the world.” Not.

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Finally, a small bellwether of cultural globalisation, in a report in the Gulf News of the whirlwind success of the Harlem Shake, and its role in fuelling violence in Tunisia. I see that the story that has run round the world’s press like … well, like the Harlem Shake. It all started, we read, with a video made by the students of Al-Menzah High School, in Tunis: “a single student dances to the song, quietly watched by others until the halfway point; then the video cuts to a whole slew of students, some in their underwear, some dressed as bearded Salafists, flailing around.” The Minister of Education has “announced an investigation of the school for allowing an ‘indecent’ video to be filmed on the premises.”

I’m not clear which element was indecent, the underpants or the beards, but we clearly have a cultural watershed here. There are copycat videos springing up across Tunisia, prompting sometimes violent attacks by religious conservatives, outraged demonstrations, po-faced declarations by public officials and police intervention. There was even a protest performance outside the Ministry on March 1st, and one Shaking student is recorded as saying that “We are here to express with our bodies our need for freedom and we do not want to live as our parents did before the revolution. They were not able to express themselves and their concerns.”

I think it must have been the beards, possible exacerbated by the flailing, that upset the Salafists. But in the week when four beard-wearing flailers have been arrested on suspicion of murdering Chokri Bensaid, one is tempted to reflect that when you’re in a hole it’s sometimes best to stop digging.