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…
Editorials
The Owl’s Cry
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…
Spain’s New Moriscos
There is much debate these days about Moroccan immigrants’ assimilation in Spain. Moroccan immigrants, both legal and illegal, estimated to be close to one million, make up the largest single…
Fabric of Our Identity
Not long ago, I came across a thought-provoking article by Jamal Boudouma about the history of Morocco’s flag and our national hymn. If you go back to Issue No. 262…
Fundamentalism Revisited
More than a story about a young, privileged Muslim man’s gradual drift into rebellion against U.S. policies in the Middle East, Mohsin Hamid’s recently published novel, The Reluctant Fundamentalist, is,…
Only Connect
In 1941, the Republican, anti-Communist publishing magnate, Henry Luce, son of American missionaries, member of Yale’s Skulls and Bones, the secretive organization dramatized in Robert de Niro’s 2006 film, The…
A Moroccan Star is Born
I am not sure whether I am saying this correctly, but reading Laila Lalami’s novel, Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits, feels as if literature has spoken directly to me for…
The Internet Galaxy
To round up my reflections on the computer age, I read Manuel Castells’s reflections on the impact of the Internet on our lives and the future of humanity itself. Castells’s…
Turkey
On December 15th, 2005, I sat at the Mevlana Cultural Center in Konya, Turkey and raised my hand in prayer with the shaykh at the end of the sama’ ceremony,…
Secrets of the Bazaar
There is a lot of talk lately about outsourcing and globalization as the sure recipes for a better world, but for years computer hackers in the netherworld of the virtual…