Soul Searching in Morocco

Les Sindbads marocains: Voyage dans le Maroc civique
(Moroccan Sinbads: Travels Through Civic Morocco)
By Fatima Mernissi
186 pages, Rabat: Marsam,
2004 (in French)

The Moroccan sociologist and author Fatima Mernissi has become famous for her books on the condition of women in the Arab world, and through her activities in defense of women’s rights. Stubborn and solitary in her intellectual endeavors, and impassioned by the untapped potential of Muslim women, she has produced several striking and erudite works, including Le harem politique Le Prophète et les femmes (The Political Harem: The Prophet and the Women) and Scheherazade Goes West: Different Cultures, Different Harems. Mernissi has a particular conception of the beauty of women and the suffering they endure, living under a male-imposed hierarchy where intimate relationships morph into power struggles that ultimately suppress female aspirations.

In her most recent work, Les Sindbads marocains: Voyage dans le Maroc civique (Moroccan Sinbads: A Voyage Through Civic Morocco), Mernissi invites her readers to move in a different direction, to undertake a unique sort of journey in her homeland. She tells us that we should not be content simply to accept the conventional portrait of regions that we think we know well, whether through extensive coverage in the mass media (typically linked to the question of terrorism), or through brief visits to destinations that purposefully fashion themselves as enticing to Western tourists. Instead, she encourages us to embark on a quest for self-discovery through a perpetual openness to the "other," to the "stranger." Her motivations are best expressed in a recent interview published in a Moroccan journal, where she commented ironically on the nature of her homeland’s relationship with the West: "Europeans, now more than ever, especially after September 11, truly have a great fear of being attacked by Arabs, and I say this to them: ‘Everybody is afraid! The Arabs are also afraid. Okay, let’s work together to set up a joint research project on fear!’"

Such whimsical pessimism notwithstanding, the most prominent emotion in Mernissi’s latest work is love — her profound love for Morocco. Moroccan Sinbads manages simultaneously to be a remarkable travel guide and a highly intelligent sociological survey of the Moroccan people, be they intellectuals or peasants, urban or rural dwellers, strident civil rights activists, or innovative artists. We find ourselves transported to the suburbs of Casablanca and Tangiers, to the mountains of the Rif, and the medina of Rabat. In her own manner, Mernissi exalts the "forgotten ones" of modernity, the social rejects, the outcasts who live on the margins of life, and who sometimes are actually able to appropriate modernity for their own benefit.

In doing so, she offers a response to another celebrated "tourist," the British anti-fascist intellectual George Orwell, who, in traveling to Marrakech in 1939, admitted that he could not understand "the Arabs of Morocco." Mernissi’s retort is that it was not so much language barriers that prevented contact as it was the weakness of the technological infrastructure of his time. Today, hundreds of thousands of Moroccans are linked among themselves and with the rest of the world through cell phones, satellite television, and the Internet. In the southern regions of Morocco, she has discovered a flowering of Internet cafes, where some young people, including the very poor, have already created their own Web sites.

Mernissi evokes a humble people who have never attracted media attention, "peaceable individuals who to be sure only dream of banal things, such as communicating with others, making a bit of money, and sharing simple pleasures in the evenings with those one loves." Mernissi describes the metamorphosis of isolated young people from the High Atlas Mountains of Morocco and from the desert regions into virtual "Sinbads," Information Age equivalents of the famed Arab sailor who embarked from the Iraqi city of Basra on seven adventures.

An entire worldview can be located in the sometimes bitter and angry, sometimes euphoric trajectories adopted by this young generation. As Mernissi explains this worldview, she reveals the political and economic underpinnings of Moroccan society. We see those who protect nature and those who create space for untrammeled communication, unimaginable until now; we see those who lead rural associations and those who perpetuate the heritage of the Berber alphabet. Mernissi recounts how some young people now aim to protect gazelles and bird species threatened with extinction, and to stop the degradation of prehistoric sites.

To read all these pages, to see the marvelous illustrations and the Arabic calligraphy, is to be immediately gripped by the warmth and depth of a culture that is never self-satisfied, never indulgent, and which contemplates with fascination the survival of such ancient myths as the Pillars of Hercules in the Straits of Gibraltar. Yet, in reading Mernissi, one is also confronted with an unusually acute analysis of a rapidly evolving society that demonstrates how Morocco, a country with no petroleum reserves, has wagered that a combination of civic initiative and the liberalization of telecommunications will move it forward.

Thus, contrary to the commonplace notion that all of Moroccan society is gripped by a passionate desire to flee northward to Europe, young Moroccans do not simply dream of emigrating. Mernissi underscores this point when she recounts the truly moving demonstration of patriotism last year, when millions of young Moroccans marched in the streets, waving the national flag, celebrating the strong showing of their country’s soccer team in the African Nations Cup. "That massive demonstration has been interpreted as a desperate cry launched by the young, so the adults would have confidence in them," she writes.

Remain in your homeland and transform it by opening up to the larger world — this is the lesson Mernissi ultimately offers her readers. No reader will soon forget the itinerary of this sociologist, enraptured by inaccessible mountains, by artists creating magnificent carpets, and by calligraphers in search of a magical abstraction.