Category Archives: Morocco

An Orientalist Coverup: Imagine that…

Books You Should Read, Morocco, Orientalism, Orientalist Images, Photography


Cover of Milet’s book

In the Islamic Arts Museum in Qatar last December I bought a copy of a fascinating book of Orientalist Photographs by Éric Milet, who has worked as a tourist guide in Morocco for a number of years. The photographs, from both the 19th and 20th centuries, are accompanied by short vignettes. As Milet notes, “The ‘Oriental’ Maghreb was born in the darkrooms of Western photographers. A land of contrasts, revealed to the public at large by men and women who were delighted to have crossed to the ‘other side’ in their own lifetimes, constantly evoking the delights of this earthly paradise.” The book is well worth owning, not only to decorate your coffee table, but for easy, entertaining and informative reading.

As the author Malek Alloula has written, in his The Colonial Harem (1988), the ‘Oriental’ created by the photographer became “the oriental’ for the general public. The photographic lens is portrayed by Alloula as the structural enemy of the veil; capturing the image thus sought the removal of the veil and exposure of the female body as a voyeuristic object. Of course, the photographers who paid prostitutes to pose as “typical scenes” in the Maghreb were not the prudish Orientalist scholars, who would often render sexual argot in pseudo-scientific Latin (perhaps assuming that Victorian ladies did not know their Latin or at least that kind of vulgar Latin). But in the case of Milet’s book, the cover is a modern-day coverup that allows it to be sold in the likes of a bookstore of an Islamic Museum. The picture chosen for the cover has been altered so that the bare breast exposed by the photographer in this exquisite 1910 image (shown below) is lost in an arabesque and nipple-less swirl.


“Young Woman in Arab Costume, Algeria, 1910

The objectification of the female body, as shown by Alloula and many others, reinforced the image of the exotic and erotic harem girl open to the gaze of the European voyeur. True enough, although photographers of the time would expose the female body no matter what the nationality. Artistic nudes graced the major museums and were admired; the emerging visual realm of photographs quickly elided the erotic into the pornographic. But in the case of Milet’s book, undoubtedly due to the publisher rather than the author, there is a reversal, a kind of commercially smart prudery that removes the apparently offending body part, even though in so doing the very exposure for which such Orientalist photographs are critiqued is erased. It is not unlike sanitizing the Arabian Nights as children’s fairy tales.

In this case I am not suggesting we judge a book by its cover, but that we allow ourselves to be seduced into opening the book to see the range of images, some clearly bordering on the exploitative and others evincing a sensitivity usually reserved for poets.

Daniel Martin Varisco

Greek Lessons for the Arab Spring

"Arab Spring", Egypt, Libya, Morocco, Tunisia


by Anouar Majid, written for Juan Cole’s Informed Comment, February 15, 2012

As the Arab Spring enters its second year and the whiff of democratic possibilities hovers in the air of many an Arab nation, a question that continues to be left unanswered is whether an Islamist worldview and democracy can truly co-exist in this climate of heightened expectations.

Revolts in Tunisia, Egypt, and Tunisia, as well as reforms in Morocco, with their insistence on Islamic solutions, have brought to the fore the twin but clashing heritages of the Arab world. Most of this world is part of the Mediterranean, but it is, by the same token, light years away from what the Romans once called their mare nostrum–our sea. The birth of Islam in the seventh century placed an insurmountable wedge between the northern and southern shores of this ancient basin and propelled both sides toward very different historical trajectories. The Romans learned from the ancient Greeks and laid down the cultural foundations of what we nowadays call the West; the Muslims, with the exception of a brief period when they built on Greek science and adopted parts of Greek philosophy, sought refuge in theology. Christian Europe did that, too, but the re-introduction of Greek thought (thanks, partly, to the Moorish philosopher Averroes) loosened the grasp of the Church and Europe was able to rediscover the legacies of ancient Greece and Rome.

Muslims have yet to do that. Continue reading Greek Lessons for the Arab Spring →

Tabsir Redux: With Ratzel in North Africa

Anthropology/Sociology, Folklore and Proverbs, Lithographs, Morocco

One of the most important German geographers of the late 19th century was Friedrich Ratzel (1844-1904), whose three-volume Völkerkunde (Leipzig and Vienna, Bibliographisches Institut, 1890) is one of those encyclopedia cultural accounts that circulated just as the discipline of anthropology was getting off (in this case literally “on”) the ground. While now a text for curiosity rather than critical scholarship on peoples and cultures, Ratzel’s work is still a fascinating portrayal of cultures being colonized for both revealing the biases of the day and the then-contemporary illustrations of people and material culture. My university library recently divested itself of uncirculated books in storage and one of these was an 1890 edition of the third volume on “Die Kulturvölker der Alten und Neuen Welt.” Whether it was the eye-watering althochdeutsch script of the volume or the mere fact it was written in German, no student or professor at Hofstra ever checked this volume out.

In salvaging a third of Ratzel’s opus for a mere dollar, I could not help but be drawn to the illustrations, mostly lithographs but with a few beautiful color plates. Continue reading Tabsir Redux: With Ratzel in North Africa →

Orientalist Images #2

Morocco, Orientalist Images, Photography


Half of the painting for the inside cover of Richards Cyclopedia, by Edwin Winfield Hall


[With this post I continue a series dedicated to photographs in an “Orientalist” mode. In addition to Reading Orientalism, the title of my last book, the creation of an imagined Orient is very much a pictorial voyeuristic voyage. In this series I focus on Western images of the Middle East and North Africa, both those that perpetuate stereotypes and those that chip away at the bias. Readers of the blog are welcome to send in images they have found and want to share.]

I continue with an image from a 1933 edition of Richards Cyclopedia, with 24 volumes published in New York by J. A. Richards, Inc and edited by Ernest Hunter Wright and Mary Heritage Wright. This is an unusual encyclopedia, arranged by topics in a more or less arbitrary order but replete with images. The inside cover, half of which is shown above, is a collage of cultural references. Across the top one finds the beginnings of civilization (at least in the thinking of the time) in the ancient Egyptian pyramid and sphinx, with a towering medieval castle above and both a modern airplane and image of Saturn looking down on ancient Greece, where a beautiful half-naked Grecian standing odalisque butts up against a knight in shining armor. There are ships and covered wagons in this pictorial representation of manifest destiny. The part not shown is distinctively American progress, though with a Maharajah inexplicably riding an elephant in front of a giant oceanliner. Continue reading Orientalist Images #2 →

Malika Zarra sings in New York, April 12

Morocco, Music and Dance


La chanteuse marocaine Malika Zarra en concert à l’Appolo Theater de Harlem à New York

from aufait, April 2, 2011

La chanteuse marocaine, Malika Zarra, se produira ce week-end sur la scène du mythique Apollo Theater de Harlem (New York) en hommage posthume à la chanteuse sud-africaine Miriam Makeba, surnommée “Mama Africa” en raison de son combat contre l’apartheid, a-t-on appris vendredi auprès des organisateurs.

Baptisée le “Morocco’s Jazz Jewel” (Joyau Marocain du Jazz) par la chaîne américaine CNN, Malika Zarra donnera, vendredi et samedi soir, deux concerts en hommage à cette grande dame ayant inspiré la scène musicale africaine mais également internationale depuis les années cinquante.

L’auteur-compositeur-interprète marocaine, célèbre pour ses mélodies irrésistibles portées par une voix mezzo-soprano incomparable, sera accompagnée par la chanteuse Lorraine Klaasen, une légende incontestable de la musique sud-africaine, qui, à l’instar de Zarra, voue un grand respect pour “Mama Africa”. Continue reading Malika Zarra sings in New York, April 12 →

Faith Abundant

Gender and Sexuality, Literature, Morocco

by Anouar Majid, Tingis Redux, March 16, 2011

Many years ago, while sitting with a friend in a café in the Moroccan city of Tangier, I expressed my unfailing admiration for Mohamed Choukri, author of the acclaimed memoir For Bread Alone (al-khubz al-hafi) and its sequel Streetwise (the somewhat inexplicale translation of what should have been The Time of Error, or zamanu al-akhta’). I told my friend, a Ministry of Justice official on his way up to a judgeship, that what I liked most about Choukri was his literary courage (al jur’a al-adabiya). My friend, a conservative man with a classical education in Islamic Studies, dismissed such courage as mere silliness, the ranting of a down-and-out man seeking attention and literary fame. Our society, my friend pronounced, was light years away from appreciating such openness and candor. We trade in appearances, not in existential truths. We reward conformity and punish daring acts of individualism.

Things have changed since then, and Choukri is now universally acclaimed across Morocco and much of the Arab world. The die-hard Tangerian is long gone, too, as is my friend, who, one day, collapsed in Fez and never got up. Yet I now find myself asking the same question about the mesmerizing memoir of a Moroccan woman that kept me engrossed for two days straight. The more I read into Wafa Faith Hallam’s The Road from Morocco, the more I realized I was holding a book that—if all literary lights are not dimmed by convention—should become an instant classic. Continue reading Faith Abundant →

The Owl’s Cry

"Arab Spring", Animals, Morocco, Scholars


Marsh Owl, Morocco, Merja Zerga February 12th, 2006 © Daniele Occhiato

by Anoaur Majid, Tingis Redux, March 1, 2011

Now that the fever for freedom has seized the minds of Arabs and others across the world, the question of what exactly needs to be done is sure to be the next preoccupation. The list of demands is obvious across the board—end of corruption and abuse of power, free quality education and health care for all, the right to work (which is, by the way, a human right enshrined in the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights), a social order based on respect and dignity, and several other rights that may be specific to one community but not to others.

For example, the Moroccan magazine TelQuel recommends a secular constitution for Morocco that doesn’t make Islam the official religion of the state; the absolute end of polygamy and full rights for women; the ability to discuss the royal and military budgets; better wages, unemployment benefits and social security coverage; freedom of religion; freedom of the press; prison reform and the formal abolition of the death penalty; making the darija Morocco’s national language (something I called for years ago); and so on. TelQuel lists 50 items and the reader, I am sure, could add a whole lot more.

The thing to remember, however, is that meaningful sustained reform is going to take time. Some of these objectives could be implemented in short order, others may take at least a decade, and a number of projects could easily involve the work of generations. I like to tell people that Morocco will probably be the place of my dreams after I have left this world. I know many opportunities were wasted since 1956 (the year Morocco got its independence), but I also know that no one can bend the arc of time to suit a political agenda. Most change doesn’t happen overnight, and progress depends on the seeds we plant today. In any case, now that the people’s genie is out in the streets, one thing’s for sure: There is no going back to the status quo ante. Continue reading The Owl’s Cry →