The Omnipresence of Palestine
With the change of plans, I figured that the visibility of Palestinian issue would be marginal. When I visited Morocco three months after 7 OCT 2023, I barely noticed that Moroccans were even aware of the massacres taking place in Gaza. Outside the sighting of an occasional keffiyeh (the traditional head covering worn by Palestinian men), there was almost no trace of local awareness of the Palestinian issue. This isn’t to say that I believe that Moroccans weren’t aware of what was going on in Gaza and concerned with the growing death toll, it just didn’t register in the same way that I had seen in countries like Egypt and Jordan. I personally chalked this up to Morocco’s more moderate stance on the Israeli-Palestinian issue than many other Arab states.
Speed Traps and Barbary Macaques
In my two trips to Morocco I’ve probably logged about 30 hours of driving; mostly between cities with a lot of kilometer to show for it. My reward for being an adventurous driver: four speeding tickets. I’ll admit to having a bit of a lead foot, but given I’ve only had one speeding ticket in the states in the past four years and only been pulled over twice, my experience in Morocco feels like it should be an aberration, but it likely isn’t because there are speed traps just about everywhere. I recently completed my first major road trip (see map below) across the Morocco and I probably saw one police checkpoint for just about every 1.5 hours of driving. At just about every checkpoint you see several dozen people pulled over being written up for speeding.
Maghrebi Adventures
Eighteen months ago I began planning for my first sabbatical as a professor. My original plans were to spend several months in Jordan refreshing my Arabic and immersing myself in Arabic. About a year ago, as tensions between Israel and Iran began ratcheting up, the prospects for studying in Jordan looked shaky and I pivoted to studying in Morocco. Throughout my education and professional career, the focus of my studies has been focused around the Mashriq, or the eastern portion of the Arabic-speaking world (Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, and the Gulf countries), and the study of the Maghreb (Tunisia, Morocco, Algeria) has been neglected. While I visited Tunisia in 2022 and Morocco in 2024, my knowledge of the country is still pretty limited and I’m really excited for the upcoming seven and a half weeks I’ll be spending in the region studying Arabic and Medieval Islamic history in Morocco and Spain.