His name is Gonzalo Fernández Parrilla, a professor of Arabic, Arab literature, and Islam; he has no Muslim lineage, though, but he is Spanish, and that is enough, as he…
Morocco
Zineb’s War on Islamic Fascism
In August 2011, in the midst of the Arab Spring, Zineb El Rhazoui, a young Moroccan-French woman, stood in a packed forum on human rights in the Arab world and…
Choosing Which Language to Live In
“I feel closer to an Arab from Morocco than to a Jew from Brooklyn or Boston.” My mother is a Moroccan Jew, born and bred in Tangier, where she also spent…
A Brief History of British Tangier
In my book Freedom and Orthodoxy I make it clear that the classical world order was radically altered by Christopher Columbus’ voyage to the continent that would later bear the…
Post-Hassanian Morocco
I remember, vividly, how unsettled I was when I learned of the sudden death of Morocco’s King Hassan II on a hot July day in 1999. Like many people around…
Sultanic Democracy
The 4th of July is the only holiday that means something to me, not only because I am an American citizen, but also because I live in the modern world,…
The Impossible Dreams of a Moroccan Prince
A few years ago, I wrote a review/commentary on The Road from Morocco, a thrilling account by Wafa Faith Hallam, a young, modern Moroccan woman who leads a truly quixotic…