Avuncular American

2011 to 2012: Another TALIM Transition

To our usual languages in the little "card" above, we wanted to add a New Year's greeting in Tamazight, also known as Amazigh or Berber.  But we couldn't find it in tifinagh, the Berber alphabet.

The world's most complete list of holiday greetings has just included (with our prompting) an entry for the language spoken by millions of Moroccans, Algerians, and other people in the Maghreb.  Thanks to Omniglot, here it is, Happy New Year in transliterated Tamazight:

Asgwas amegas!

For all of our readers, and to the people who have supported TALIM with their financial contributions over the past twelve months, our heartfelt thanks.  To those who contributed their time, or shared their archives with us, thank you so much.

Likewise, to all those who used our research library, who introduced friends and family to this national treasure, or who addressed our audiences of interested citizens and fellow specialists, all our best wishes for 2012.

To our neighbors, including the women of the $10,000 a year TALIM/FTAM literacy program, we say "Kul aam wa intum bikheer."

The new year will be, to say the least, challenging.  In a climate of budget cuts, even small change but big impact programs like the $25K annual AIMS Maghribi Grants are ending.  The trick will to be to plumb new sources of funding, explore new areas of endeavor for this two-century old site.

So from all of us pictured below, Happy New Year.  If you haven't been able to visit the Legation in 2011, we hope that you can join us in 2012.  There are lots of events, exhibits, conferences, and activities in store.

Gerald Loftus

Read All About It: Legation & the Press

For the last couple of months, settle into a Royal Air Maroc airplane seat, reach for the inflight magazine, and you'll see the cover story - the Museums of Tangier.  Featuring, along with our friends the Kasbah Museum, the Tangier American Legation (TALIM) museum.

We are thrilled that RAM, with its six million passengers per year, has featured us in their current cover story.

Another biggie: not only has the 10th edition of Lonely Planet Morocco included a nice para on the Legation and its museum, but we have a whole boxed interview too.

And to think that "local knowledge" at the time of the interview was based on all of a few weeks in Tangier...  Lonely Planet is read by hundreds of thousands of loyal travelers - and we trust that a few more of them will make their way to our door thanks to the great publicity.

Gerald Loftus

A Bridge Over Morocco's Colonial Past

Our little Christmas road trip wound up yesterday.  We left 8th century Moulay Idriss (photo above, nestled in the hills framed by Roman Volubilis) and struck almost due north, through Ouezzane and into the Rif Mountains.

Ouezzane, perhaps best known here through the family of the Cherif of Ouezzane and his turn-of-the-century (19th-20th) "British Bride of Tangier" Emily Keene, was one of the northern outposts of the French during their Protectorate, which began almost 100 years ago in 1912.

As did the Spanish Protectorate, separated from the French by a couple of rivers, including the Loukkos.  Below, a photo from a great collection of Fifties-era photos by several French soldiers, on the site "3/12ème RCA Maroc - historique du 3ème escadron du 12ème R.C.A. (Régiment Chasseurs d'Afrique)."

The caption on the RCA Maroc site reads "May 1956 - the Rif - Pont du Loukkos, customs post with Spanish Morocco on the road to Tangier.  The bridge was never completed."

Well, perhaps not in the time of the French Protectorate, which was to come to a close a mere six months later upon Morocco's independence in November 1956.  The bridge has since been finished, as we can attest from our crossing it yesterday.

But back in 1956, the same "3/12ème RCA" site has another photo of a kepi-wearing French soldier in front of a sign at the outskirts of Ouezzane.  The sign reads "ZONE D'INSECURITE" and tells drivers that it's forbidden to drive north at night.  The soldier is part of a platoon that sweeps the road and escorts civilian vehicles to the next post.

Fast forward to 2011.  The Lonely Planet Morocco guidebook tells us that the

Rif is home to the largest acreage of cannabis cultivation in the world, an estimated 1340 sq km, or 42% of global production.  Cultivation has expanded rapidly since the 1980s, in part due to increasing European demand.  The cannabis trade is now the region's main economic activity, involving an estimated 800,000 people, and probably Morocco's main source of foreign currency...

Elsewhere, Lonely Planet warns travelers of the "notorious reputation" points east of Dardara, where we had a great lunch to top off our trip through the Rif.

This is an area (Issaguen and Ketama) beyond the law.  People will wonder what you are doing here, and naturally assume you are buying hashish.  There is nowhere to turn if you get into trouble, and little to hold anyone back who wants same.  Travellers are strongly advised to pass through and not spend the night here.

So, we skirted the most iffy part of the Rif, but even our lunchtime stop in Dardara is considered a key checkpoint for drug traffic control.  As recently as December 16 a gendarme shot his superior officer there, in a case still under investigation (TelQuel Magazine).  The same magazine carried a full investigative report on Rif drug trafficking in a 2004 cover story, where it mentions that Dardara checkpoint:

Dardara roundabout, the most sought-after post by the region's gendarmes, is a veritable gold mine.  The most telling illustration is from a saying in the region: "a gendarme at Dardara is worth seven ministers."

With stakes that high, perhaps the shootout should come as no surprise.

Back in 1956, the nighttime prohibition on the Ouezzane-Chefchaouen road was for travelers' own good.  It sounds like the Pont du Loukkos, though it may have never seen much customs traffic in the French-Spanish Protectorate days, certainly gets a lot of nighttime drive-by traffic of another sort.  Best to be off these roads by dark anyway - for more reasons than one!

Gerald Loftus

Moroccan Christmas in a Holy Town: Moulay Idriss

Bordj Nord in fog, Christmas Eve Fez, 2011

"Christmas in Fez!" was already taken as the title to a blog post by another American last year.  In any case, for us it was Christmas Eve in Fez, and Christmas day at the Roman ruins of Volubilis, then on to Moulay Idriss, a sacred destination.

Above, at the beautifully-restored 16th century borj or fortress, the CMHM (Commission Marocaine d'Histoire Militaire) has established the Musée des Armes, an impressive collection of weapons used over the centuries.  One of the surprises: Fez produced the famous Martini-Henry rifle in the late 19th century.  The museum is free of any jingoism, which would have been a temptation in a country that suffered domination by not only French but also Spanish overlords.

Earlier, we had visited the Musée Najjarine of wooden arts and handicrafts.  Both museums were very professionally curated, and well-attended by both foreign and Moroccan visitors.  Note to self: both charge admission fees (20 dirhams or more than 2 euros for the latter).  We'll start doing the same later this year at the Legation museum.

The cold fog that descended on Fez on Christmas eve reminded us of another exotic locale more than two decades ago, when we spent Christmas on a South African mountaintop, above the clouds.  Then, we were warmed by a coal fire in our thatched hut; last night, it was a Butagaz heater in our cedar-beamed room, but it glowed red hot.

Christmas eve dinner was in one of Fez's many medina riads (guest houses), a lovely garden home called le Jardin des Biehn (after owners Mr. & Mrs. Biehn, pronounced Bean).  An antidote to overstuffing on turkey and fixins' - we had a largely fish dinner.  It was very warm and homey, with the Biehn's grandchildren providing plenty of action.

Today, at the lovely Dar Attajalli where we were staying, it was an enclosed rooftop breakfast in newly-sunny Fez, accompanied by a table top mini-Santa dancing to Bobby Helms' 1957 classic Jingle Bell Rock.  Clio, the German-born owner, and Naïm, the chef, even saw to it that guests had another Christmas touch in the French tradition, a bûche de Noël.

And so, on to Volubilis, in all its December 25 mid-winter glory.

Volubilis, nestled on a plateau above Meknès and at the foot of the sacred hill town of Moulay Idriss, lay forgotten for centuries until "discovered" by 19th century French diplomat Charles Tissot.  It is in one of the loveliest settings imaginable, its green fields a reminder of why North Africa was the granary of the Roman Empire.

Thankfully we are able to stay in Moulay Idriss beyond 3:00 PM (Edith Wharton had to get out of town by then in 1919; since 2005 it's been open to non-Muslims).  Which is very nice on this Christmas day, since the Prophet's great grandson Moulay Idriss, fleeing internal strife in Mecca back in the 8th century, was given refuge in Volubilis by Latin-speaking Christian Berbers, just down in the valley from the town that Muslim Moroccans later named after him.

Kamran Pasha, writing in Huffington Post, tells the story of yet another early Muslim-Christian encounter, "How the Story of Christmas Saved Islam."  It was at the outset of Islam, and the Christians were Abyssinian (Ethiopian).

In 615 [A.D., in pre-Muslim Mecca], persecution of the Muslims had become a life-and-death matter... And the Arab chieftains were coming together to proclaim a ban of trade with the Muslims, prohibiting citizens of Mecca from providing food and medicine to members of the new movement.

Facing the very real possibility of extinction, a small group of Muslims led by the Prophet's daughter Ruqayya and his son-in-law Uthman, escaped Meccan patrols and managed to get to the Red Sea, where they fled to Abyssinia by boat. They sought the protection of the Negus, the Christian king who had a reputation for justice.

Kamran Pasha goes on to recount how the Muslims' recitation of the Quranic story of Christmas so moved Negus that he provided them refuge.

So, with memories of these happy encounters between religions that have often had rocky relations in later years, we head off to our Christmas dinner: chicken tajine.  Merry Christmas!

Gerald Loftus

TALIM On the Digital Map

I know the print in the above image is a bit small (click on picture to enlarge in a pop-up screen).  But what it represents is this: during a long three-week period, ending on 12 December, we had almost no "hits" on TALIM Director's Blog because jinns had taken it over.

Our URL, or, in plain English, "www.talimblog.org," had disappeared.  We resolved that glitch, and now we're back - and how!

What that large spike on the right represents are some 210 hits yesterday, when our "Skydiving in a Hijab" post got picked up by various Facebook pages.  The wonders of social networking, or just plain old networking.

As we head towards 2012, one of our major IT and PR goals is to revamp our lovely, but rather text-heavy, Legation.org website.  We hope to keep what is good, and to make it more representative of what we do, in so many areas: research center, museum, National Historic Landmark, center for teaching Arabic, etc.

Stay tuned, and have a happy holiday season.

Gerald Loftus

Skydiving In a Hijab: the Wonders of Exchange Programs

You never know what those International Visitor Leadership Program (IVLP) people will get up to.  At Saturday's gathering in Mdiq (a northern Moroccan seaside town between Tetouan and Ceuta) of alumni from the US Embassy's various scholarship and visitor programs, the introductions were supposed to address the question "what do you miss most about your experience in the US?"

Most of the returned visitors and scholars (there were a number of former Fulbright grantees as well) recalled a favorite American mentor, or maybe a guilty addiction to cinnamon buns.

But one young woman, sedately dressed in her hijab and long caftan, recalled her time in Kansas, and especially her skydiving adventure.  General pandemonium at the mental image of her jumping out of a plane into the Kansas sky.  Her immediate neighbor, another hard-charging hijab-wearing young midwife, said of our skydiver - "she's crazy."

So much for breaking stereotypes.  But that's the beauty of the US Government's exchange programs.  What happens when you send a teacher from Tangier to Kane, Pennsylvania, "The Black Cherry Capital of the World?"  Well, she comes back with unforgettable memories of her welcome in Small Town USA, and the American kids come to have a better understanding of the world, and why their French teacher was from Morocco and not Marseille.

What else do those exhange visitors do?  They paint portraits of Barack Obama.

Mohammed Said El Moujahid not only imagined President Obama in Tetouan, but he presented his work to the US Embassy and received the thanks of Secretary of State Hilary Clinton in return.  Had I stayed for the entire day, I would have come back with even more anecdotes.  But that is not the point of this post.

The purpose of the meeting was to encourage alumni to network, and to join ready-made networks like the Moroccan-American Friendship Foundation (MAFF, not to be confused with the MFAA, the Moroccan Fulbright Alumni Association, or the Moroccan American Circle, which also fosters mutual ties between citizens).

The State Department has initiated a major effort to tie together past participants in its myriad exchange programs, simply called State Alumni (there is also specific Moroccan Facebook page for State alumni).

On the alumni side of Americans who have experienced Morocco, there's the CLS Arabic "Alumni Ambassador" program.  Here's the profile and interview with a recent graduate of our 2011 Tangier CLS session.

We're glad to see a concerted effort to capture the experiences of this diverse group of people and encourage them to network.  Yesterday's exchange visitors - as we've seen with a number of heads of state and other world figures - are tomorrow's leaders.

Gerald Loftus

The Last of the Maghribi Grantees?

Algerian scholars Amina Leghima and Lila Chabane, 2011 AIMS Maghribi Grantees at TALIM's Ambassador Joseph Verner Reed Library

I hope not; I hope this is not the end of a small, effective scholarship program.  I hope that someone in a position to do something - say a senior US Government Executive Branch official - will connect "A" (the Arab Spring and consequent US engagement with civil society) with "B" (budget slashes in the wrong places, garnering ludicrous "savings") and decide that something has gone horribly wrong.

But as I wrote last month, one of the most effective "bang for buck" ($25,000 for 10 scholars) programs that the US Government has going on in North Africa, birthplace of the Arab Spring, is ending on December 31.

So the two women in our photo, Algerian Maghribi Grantees doing their research in Morocco, may be the last.  What a pity.  Their work is typical of the kind that the AIMS grants have funded over the last ten years.  Amina Leghima is here to compare the automobile parts supply industry in her native Algeria to that of Morocco.

Think that an obscure topic with little impact on the United States?  Tangier, with its huge new Renault factory in its last stages of completion, is a major center for car and car component export to Europe.  There are several American firms here, with which we have put our scholar in touch.  For Tangier is a major manufacturing and shipping hub, not only for the European market, but increasingly, with the port of Tangier-Med, for the entire Asian-Atlantic transshipping market.

Likewise for Lila Chabane, who is studying urban transport systems in Algeria and Morocco.  We've put her in touch with a network of architects and urban planners, just like we did last year for another Algerian researcher in urban environmental planning.

Sure, we also get scholars delving into what non-academics may term "obscure" topics, but that's not the point.  The importance of the AIMS Maghribi Grant program is that it fosters intra-Maghrib academic research, under the auspices of TALIM, CEMA, and CEMAT, respectively the three American Institute for Maghrib Studies centers in Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia.

The incipient end of the Maghribi Grantee program - short of some munificence from an unexpected source - comes at a particularly bad time, and not just because it sends confusing signals about the solidity of the American commitment to Maghribi interaction.

It also comes during the best year yet for Moroccan scholarly interest in the program.  In recent years, while Morocco had been by far the preferred destination for Algerian and Tunisian (and the few Libyan and Mauritanian scholars who obtained grants), relatively few Moroccans applied for the grants.

In 2011, perhaps in part by our getting the word out, but possibly because they were inspired by events east of Oujda, Moroccan applications skyrocketed.

Sorry to curb your enthusiasm, my Moroccan charges, but you'll have to wait and see.  Which is what I am doing: when will the lightbulb click on in Washington D.C.?  When will someone see that, after all, the United States Government can find $25,000 to make ten scholars - and their universities, and their Ministries of Education, and their host insitutions - happy?

$25,000 amidst the billions and trillions? Sure, we can.

Gerald Loftus

A Poem Entitled TALIM

Lucy Melbourne, American writer on Morocco, Fulbright scholar, and comparitive literature professor has done us a singular honor, with the publication of her poem "TALIM" in MLM - Le Magazine Littéraire du Maroc.  It's in the Autumn 2011 issue.

As Lucy says, it's further proof that English has become a language of literature in Morocco.  It's already important in other areas of socieity.

Though she had sent us the text, we embargoed it until she shared it with an audience of Moroccans and expats, students and adults, at Friday's reading at the Legation.  The text is at the end of this post.

An accomplished writer, Lucy is also a fun storyteller, and all enjoyed her story "Passport," which, though it takes place when she once neglected to bring her passport with her on a prior trip to Tangier from Rabat, is also a story of a child's impressions of the diplomatic life, via this tangible, magical booklet called "passport-passeport" (Lucy, as a child, equated passport with moving from Philadelphia to Baghdad to wherever else her Foreign Service father's career led the family).

In Morocco, where Lucy spends sizable chunks out of every year, she has organized a sort of literary lionesses club, a salon where women from the arts and literature, Moroccan and expat, can gather and compare notes and offer mutual support.  This has blossomed into the forthcoming publication of Kaleidescope, a cross-cultural collaboration between three American and three Moroccan women, artists, photographers, and writers.

Lucy's reading at TALIM - her second in a year - cost the US Government $0.00.  But her low-key, in-the-field work with her informal but highly innovative group of Moroccans and Americans is the kind of thing that not only builds goodwill, but also leaves a lasting mark.

And with that, we leave you TALIM - to our knowledge, the only poem dedicated to an institution named after an idea: education.

Gerald Loftus

- - - - - - - - - - -

TALIM* 

No.  It must know

itself

such beauty,

not live

bodily

fodder for the

refuse of these

teeming streets

 

No—

              The fine lines of

              artists, the paint,

              the clouded reflections

              in very old mirrors

              edged with gilt and

              tumescent flowers;

 

              The piano and the oud

              in silent rooms;

 

              The library with

              luminous tooled

              leather;

 

              And the miniature

              contained nature

              of Jasmine bowing

              to an alabaster

              fountain

 

*the acronym TALIM means education in Arabic

The Modernist Tangier American Consulate General

1961... Fifty years ago, a modernist architectural edifice in "New Tangier" replaces the Gift of the Sultan.

[T]he Tangier Legation was an exception.  Before 1821, and for a long while after, the United States owned no property abroad...

[In the 1950s and 60s] Projects such as Tangier... designed by young "stars" such as Hugh Stubbins, created lasting landmarks...

Jane C. Loeffler, The Architecture of Diplomacy: Building America's Embassies (Revised 2nd Edition, 2011)

Dr. Loeffler appropriately starts the first chapter of her fascinating story of American diplomatic buildings with the very first one, the Tangier American Legation.  But she provides a wealth of detail about the building that is our subject today: the modernist structure that 50 years ago, in the fall of 1961, became the American Consulate General in Tangier.

Alas, the "lasting landmark" that Stubbins designed served a mere quarter century before the United States decided that it no longer needed a Consulate General in Tangier.  Happily, our Gift of the Sultan, the Tangier American Legation, has had a fuller life - we are 190 this year, and already thinking about our bicentennial.

A new building for the Legation had often been talked about, as far back as a century ago in 1911, when the business lobby the American Embassy Association called attention to the state of the Tangier Legation building in its publication American Embassies, Legations, and Consulates Mean Better Foreign Business: An Argument in Pictures and Paragraphs.

But Moroccan independence came in 1956 with the historic building still in the medina, the legacy of Sultan Moulay Slimane since 1821.  The Legation building continued for another five years as the US Consulate General, then morphed to its new life in 1961 with the opening of the Stubbins structure.

Hugh Stubbins, one of Jane Loeffler's "star" American architects, was an Eero Saarinen contemporary, and went on to design a number of landmarks.  Writes Loeffler:

In Tangier... Hugh Stubbins employed screens mainly to create an animated architecture.  Stubbins has compared the Tangier screen to one he designed soon after for the Loeb Drama Center in Cambridge, Massachusetts.  His idea, he says, was to provide some daytime privacy and to allow the building to glow from within at night.

Though the Stubbins buildings, sold when the US decided to close the Consulate, still stand, the distinctive screens on the office building have given way to a monolithic facade, added by the current occupants, the Moroccan Ministry of the Interior and its Tangier Wilaya Council.  The removal of the modernist screens was decried by the Moroccan architectural community, to no avail.

The aerial photo below, from the 1960s when the building probably still smelled of fresh cement, shows empty fields surrounding the site.  Today, it is the center of an upscale residential neighborhood, though the trademark security wall surrounding the property is much as it would have been in its heyday as an American Consulate General. 

Times change, as do diplomatic priorities.  By the 1980s, it was no longer deemed necessary to maintain an American consular presence in the city which had been Morocco's diplomatic gateway to the world, and the site of an American diplomatic or consular representation since the 1790s.  The Consul General's residence (photo above, left) is now the headquarters of the Association of Mediterranean Ombudsmen.

- - - - - - - -

Thanks to Jane Loeffler and Ken Rogers, who was US Consul General in Tangier 1980-85, for photos and illustrations.

Gerald Loftus

Valentino's Ghost: Hollywood & TV Imagine Arabs

This post first appeared in TALIM Director's Blog.

You have to be dedicated, or perhaps suffering jet lag, to get up to watch Michael Singh's excellent documentary at 08:00 on a Sunday morning.  The time was a function of the setting: this was the annual conference of MESA, the Middle East Studies Association, and Valentino's Ghost was making a debut showing.

It's all good fun, at least at the outset.  Rudolf Valentino dashing off to conquer some blond.  Rudy was good for several sequels, that stallion-mounted Sheik of Hollywood imagination.

Singh proceeds from silent film to talkies, so we then have lots of Beau Geste French Foreign Legion desert shots, this time of Bad Arabs being mown down by heroic white Legionnaires, usually in defense of those same damsels that Valentino made swoon a decade or so before.  But it's all oldies, and good fun.

Then we have the more complex portrayal of Arabs in David Lean's classic Lawrence of Arabia.  Hard to fault this almost perfect film, though the focus of the Arab revolt against the Ottoman Turks is mostly on T.E. Lawrence, the great white hope of the hopelessly "little people, silly people" as the British officer calls the disputatious Arabs.

It was still possible in the 1962 film to portray Arabs as noble (think Omar Sharif).  A decade later, after the 1972 Munich Olympic massacre, and the images in film and on video are almost entirely negative.  And it's this image which still informs - if one can use such a term - most coverage, both fictional and news, of the Arab world.  From Bullfrog Films, the distributor:

Valentino's Ghost takes viewers on a chronological journey through more than a century of images of Muslims, Arabs and Islam in the U.S. media, from the early 20th-century fantasies of romantic sheiks to today's damaging stereotypes as evil fanatics. Through interviews with Robert Fisk, Niall Ferguson, and John Mearsheimer amongst others, the film shows the way in which the changing image of Arabs and Muslims has mirrored America's political agenda in the Middle East.

But chronology would be boring, and so Singh gives us themes.  "The Arab as Indian" (as in Cowboys & Indians), the Arab as devious cheater, etc.  All the stuff of what any other ethnic or religious group would have long ago succeeded in banning from Hollywood.

Michael Singh has apparently made his film with PBS in mind.  Such an important subject does deserve an audience beyond specialist Middle East studies showings.  He feels that it is urgent:

Even our educated American colleagues appreciate orientation on the subject, partly because our subject has never been shown on television: PBS has broadcast films examining media images of Blacks, Jews and Asians, but not Arabs or Muslims. We contend that this lack of knowledge has contributed to widespread ignorance, stereotyping, fear and hatred of those of Middle Eastern heritage or the Muslim faith, including American citizens, and has also bolstered public support for a long line of fictions about the Middle East.

Last year, in India Abroad, Singh voiced doubts that PBS would go through with his film:

One PBS executive has told me personally that he will do everything he can to prevent the film's broadcast.  He has not even seen the film, but realizes that the politics as discussed in the film, especially about our relationship with Israel, is like nitroglycerin.  I think PBS is afraid of angering audiences who, unlike network audiences, directly donate money that is critical for PBS's survival.

If that is the case, then maybe you too will have to wait until some classroom near you shows it... at 8:00 in the morning.  Not-ready-for-prime-time, the US-Israel relationship and the skewing it does to American views of Arabs?