Vacation in Morocco a pleasant eye-opener
It started with a movie I saw 40-some years ago, an old movie even then. Humphrey Bogart and Paul Henreid and Ingrid Bergman were trying to get out of Casablanca. Sydney Greenstreet was enjoying tea, sporting a fez, and playing the benign villain. The Nazis were, of course, anything but benign.
I bought the poster, I memorized too many of the lines, and at the beginning of this month I dragged my roommate to Morocco for our wedding anniversary.
It turns out Casablanca doesn’t look like a Warner Bros. set. It’s a sprawling modern city. And the fabled Rick’s, where Sam played “As Time Goes By,” is a relatively new establishment that caters to tourists.
But the rest of Morocco exceeds expectations, no matter how romantic.
Morocco is a country whose bones show through the landscape. The snow-capped Atlas Mountains separate the Atlantic and Mediterranean coasts from the southeastern Sahara desert, a place so blank on maps that 300 years ago they might have included the warning that “here be Djinns.”
But the landscape pales in comparison with the people, an admixture of Berbers and Arabs influenced by four decades of French occupation. Almost all of them are Muslims. And every single one we’ve met and talked to has been hospitable and friendly.
We’ve chatted with farmers about irrigation, shoeing horses and the best way to store hay. We’ve haggled with shopkeepers over trinkets, and I was even offered 10,000 camels for my roommate, an amount I didn’t have time to properly consider before she yanked me on to the next stall.
But the lesson is that people are people. And people worry about the same kinds of things everywhere, whether they live in Morocco or Montana: their kids, their jobs, their family’s future. And people are, by and large, decent, something news headlines sometimes make it easy to forget.
Soon after our arrival in Morocco a Russian airliner en route from Sharm el Sheikh, Egypt, to Saint Petersburg crashed in the Sinai Peninsula. Our brief exposure to news since then made it seem likely that the crash was the work of Muslim extremists. The Muslims we’ve talked to in Morocco are as worried about that possibility as we are and every bit as unsympathetic to radical Islam. As one of our Moroccan guides (a Muslim) put it, extremists like ISIS practice “Islam a la carte”: They pick and chose and then combine sections of the Koran to justify almost any atrocity.
If you’re an extremist, an a la carte approach to your holy book has practical advantages. You can prohibit, as ISIS wants to, sitting in chairs (bad because chairs are a western invention), shoes with heels (another Western custom) or pop music (Western again) while using your laptop or cellphone to set off an improvised explosive device.
If you’re an extremist you’re unconstrained by any need to be consistent. You don’t need to consider the whole book or the whole picture, only those parts that reinforce your views.
Our views about Muslim countries tend to be formed by the evening news. But it sometimes loses context, particularly when it dumps an entire people or country into the ISIS sewer.
Muslim Morocco, for example, was the first country to recognize the United States as an independent nation in 1777. And the Moroccan-American Treaty of Friendship ratified in 1787 is our oldest unbroken treaty.
We’ve had a great time in Morocco but are ready to get home. While I’ve learned a lot about the country and about Islam, I’m left with two questions: How much better would “Casablanca” have been if it had been filmed here in Morocco instead of a Warner Bros. lot in California? And how much, exactly, are 10,000 camels worth?
Source: www.jhnewsandguide.com