Yet 2 million mourners attended King Hassan’s funeral.
“I never even thought that I’d miss him,” a Moroccan woman told me, “but every day for a year after he died, I drove to his mausoleum and cried.”
One man in Rabat explained the psychology to me this way: “He was a really tough daddy. But he was daddy.”
In 2011, after a new constitution was adopted at the behest of both people and king, Morocco was officially transformed into a constitutional monarchy with a democratic parliament and separation of powers. The respected NGO Freedom House raised the country’s status from “not free” to “partly free.”
“The king hasn’t retired from the government,” said Nadia Bernoussi, a professor of constitutional law who helped draft the new constitution. “What changed is that the parliament has entered the government. Our intention was not to hobble the monarchy but to clearly set out the responsibilities for each branch of the government. Because the context we were working in was the Arab Spring that’s sweeping the region and all of its dangers. We didn’t want to hobble the monarchy. We looked to the monarchy to ensure the changes we were making wouldn’t get lost.”
The changes they made, including sweeping new rights for women, very well could have been lost. Elsewhere in the Arab world, they have been. Egypt was ruled by a calcified military dictatorship the first time I visited in 2005. When I returned during the period between the fall of Mubarak and the election of Morsi, Egypt was a partly free country. At times it felt completely free, a remarkable turnaround from just a few years before. But the new president’s power grab and his crude attempts at Islamization made Egypt progressively less free by the month. The army that removed him is no better. It’s the same institution that made the state a dictatorship when the self-styled Free Officers, led by Gamal Abdel Nasser, seized power in 1952.
In Morocco, Mohammad VI appointed the council that drafted the new constitution. He wanted representatives from across the political spectrum, but he also wanted a progressive modern document, so he excluded communists and radical Islamists from the process. He achieved liberal results with illiberal means. Such is the paradox of Morocco. Moroccan liberals are generally happy to have the results despite the process. In the Arab world, it seems, you can often get liberal results or liberal means, but not both.
I don’t know if Mohammad VI is enacting reforms because he genuinely wants to liberalize the country or because he wants to ride the wave of discontent rather than be swept away by it. I suspect it’s a little of both.
What’s left of the opposition doesn’t agree. A series of protests broke out on February 20, 2011, four months before Morocco adopted constitutional monarchy. The protests were not led by a single movement or party, nor were they particularly organized. They were politically diverse, geographically dispersed and often parochial. In that sense, February 20 was more of a phenomenon than a movement. Whatever we should call it, it was inspired by the mass demonstrations that brought down Egypt’s Mubarak and Tunisia’s Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali.
In Rabat, tens of thousands took to the streets, shouting “The people want to change the constitution” and “Down with autocracy.” They got at least some of what they wanted, and they got it in less than four months. But dozens of them are in prison. Opposition critics say the new constitution’s separation of powers is insufficient. They accuse the king of undermining it on the sly.
Whether or not these complaints are fair, all governments—democratic, partially democratic and autocratic—need opposition and critics. What nations usually don’t need is revolution.
* * *
Americans love revolution. Why shouldn’t we? Ours was among the most successful in history. It endures more than 200 years later and was not the result of gradual change. As Thomas Jefferson put it, “The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.”
The French Revolution followed ours, and Jefferson naturally swooned while it was happening. But it didn’t end well. Instead of enjoying the blessings of liberty, the French inflicted the Reign of Terror on themselves and later reverted to monarchy. But those lessons are lost to time for all but the most historically minded.
Thanks to the Russians, average Americans looked askance at revolution throughout much of the 20th century. The October Revolution of 1917 installed a totalitarian dictatorship that built a slave empire spanning most of two continents. Then it replicated itself, virus-like, by sponsoring similar revolutions all over the world, creating one ghastly police state after another. But Europe’s anticommunist revolutions in 1989 seemed to put everything right. Repressive regime after repressive regime fell to liberal dissidents like Lech Walesa in Poland and Vaclav Havel in Czechoslovakia.
The 1989 revolutions echoed the American Revolution in some ways, and they’re fresher in everyone’s minds than their botched predecessors. None of us who are old enough to have witnessed it can forget the fall of the Berlin Wall. Freedom was spreading again after the terrible communist detour. The tide of history washed tyrants away, as it should.
The Arab world seemed perfectly capable of replicating what Americans and Eastern Europeans had accomplished. During the Beirut Spring in 2005, the Lebanese evicted Syria’s smothering military occupation without firing a shot. The more or less free and fair elections that followed sent the liberal pacifist Fouad Siniora to the prime minister’s office. The model for Lebanon’s uprising was the revolutions in Eastern Europe. I know because I was there. Surely the same thing could happen in Cairo and Tunis and Tripoli and Damascus. Right?
Apparently not.
Tunisia’s revolution was mostly nonviolent and has been at least partly successful, but Egypt’s, Libya’s and especially Syria’s have been much darker affairs. The very name “Arab Spring” evokes the romantic image of the Prague Spring, but we should remember that the 1968 Czech uprising, like the 1956 Hungarian revolution before it, ultimately failed. Soviet troops rolled into Budapest and Prague and crushed both democratic movements under the treads of their tanks.
In celebrating the Arab Spring, too many failed to take into account what was unique about America in 1776, Eastern Europe in 1989 and Beirut in 2005. In all three cases, the people were resisting a tyrannical regime that was imposed from the outside: by the British Crown, Soviet Russia and Syria’s Arab Socialist Baath Party, respectively. These revolutions were produced by a more or less democratic political culture that already existed and was being suppressed by force from abroad.
Democratic political cultures aren’t created by revolutions. They are created in advance of revolutions and reach their maturity during the aftermath. Lebanon and Tunisia are doing better than Egypt, Libya and Syria because they already had partially democratic and pluralistic political cultures that were being suppressed. But Egypt has never known anything but authoritarian rule, and before rebel fighters lynched Qaddafi outside Tripoli, he treated Libya like a mad scientist’s laboratory for longer than I’d been alive.
America was an exceptional place in 1776. So was Eastern Europe in 1989 and, to a lesser extent, Lebanon in 2005.
So is Morocco. It’s not exceptional in the same way the American colonies and Eastern Europe were exceptional, but it is exceptional.
* * *
Morocco is doing better than most Arab countries because of its system of government, and it’s doing better than Arab monarchies because of its history.
That history is unique in large part thanks to geography. I drove from Rabat to Marrakech—a perfect city for tourists—and from there into the towering Atlas Mountains. Morocco is huge. It’s rugged and craggy. Much of it is green. Part of it is on the Mediterranean, but most is on the Atlantic.
It doesn’t look like anyplace in the Middle East and nothing like the culturally vacuous Persian Gulf emirates. It doesn’t look like a Mediterranean country or an African country. Morocco is just Morocco, separated from Europe, the Middle East and sub-Saharan Africa by water, mountai
ns and the hottest desert on earth. Over the centuries, its history and geography have sculpted a culture that’s partly Arab, partly Berber, partly European and even partly Jewish. Its government is so stable, it’s an anachronism.
The capital is 3,000 miles away from Mecca, the center of the Islamic world, while the city of Tangier is so close to Europe that you can see Spain across the Strait of Gibraltar. A fit enough person could swim there. The Spanish city of Ceuta on the north coast of Africa is actually contiguous with Morocco. It has been free of Muslim rule and either self-governing or Spanish for almost 600 years.
In the past, Morocco ruled parts of Spain. More recently, the Spanish ruled the southern provinces of Morocco, the contested region known today as the Western Sahara. And there is no doubt that the two countries have influenced each other. One of the more striking things about Spain’s southern region of Andalusia is how it looks and feels vaguely Moroccan, especially compared with Madrid. No one can visit Morocco without noticing that parts of it look and feel vaguely European, especially compared with the heartland of Arabia.
Moroccan culture is also influenced by sub-Saharan Africa and by Judaism, which has existed there for thousands of years. The new constitution defines Moroccan identity itself as partly Jewish.
What’s really striking about Morocco, however, is how much less Arab it is than other Arabic-speaking countries. That’s partly because nearly half the people aren’t even Arabs. They’re Berbers—or Amazigh, as they call themselves—an indigenous people who predated the 7th century Arab invasion by millennia. Morocco is a diverse and polyglot place, but its people have managed to create a coherent and unified culture that is rarely prone to the sectarian and ethnic violence that has torn other Middle Eastern countries apart.
But it’s not just the Europeans, Berbers, Jews and black Africans that make Morocco unique. It’s also the country’s distance from the Arabian Peninsula and the core of the Islamic world.
I met with Dr. Ahmed Abbadi, who holds a Ph.D. in Islamic studies from the University Qaddi Ayaad in Marrakech. Before 1995, he taught comparative history of religions and Islamic thought. Today he teaches sociology in a cooperation program with DePaul University in Chicago. He agrees that Morocco’s uniqueness is geographic in origin.
“Morocco used to be called the Far West before America was discovered,” he told me. “The Atlantic Ocean was known as the Sea of Darkness. We didn’t know if there was anything out there beyond it.”
Indeed, when I stood on the beach in Rabat, it felt strange to think that directly across the water lay not Turkey or Iran or Yemen or Pakistan but Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. From the United States, Morocco is closer than most of Europe. Baghdad is as far from Rabat as Canada’s Prince Edward Island.
“We’re separated from the center of the Middle East by great distances and great mountains,” Abbadi said. “Because we are so far away, we have time to analyze everything that comes out before it gets here. Everything emanating from the Middle East arrives on our shores in milder form. To quote Frank Sinatra, we did it our way.”
The ancient Phoenicians helped establish the rudiments of civilization in Morocco, but the early Moroccans resisted the Roman Empire. “We also resisted the Umayyads,” Abbadi said. “We resisted the Fatimids. We did not accept the Ottomans. We stood at the border of Morocco and Algeria and told the Ottomans no.”
Robert D. Kaplan, in his fascinating book The Revenge of Geography, notes that mountains are a conservative force. For good or bad, they block the spread of ideas. The Atlas Mountains are a powerful conservative force: not only do the snowcapped peaks slow the progress of ideas and culture coming from the Middle East, but they also create hyperlocal cultures within Morocco itself.
Port cities, moreover, are inherently liberal, and Morocco has lots of them. Because they are hubs for travel and trade, they provide access to foreign people, ideas and culture, and they do it safely because the sea protects them from ground invasion. Morocco’s port cities are all right next to Europe.
Morocco’s geography, then, is a blessing. Its port cities near Europe tend to bring good ideas in, and its mountains keep some of the Middle East’s worst ideas out.
Arab nationalists like to claim that the Arab world is a single nation cruelly divided by European imperialists, but this is a fantasy. The Arab world is coherent as a civilization, but like all civilizations, it’s splendidly diverse and tragically fractious. Not even Lebanon can hold itself together as a coherent nation, and it’s smaller in population than metropolitan Houston. So of course Morocco is different from other Arab countries. All Arab countries are different from other Arab countries.
When the Prophet Muhammad’s armies swept out of the Arabian Peninsula 13 centuries ago, they spread their religion and language, but they didn’t exterminate and replace indigenous populations. And the natives often influenced their conquerors as much as vice versa. In Egypt, Arabs became Egyptian even as most Egyptians eventually converted to Islam and learned Arabic. In Tunisia, the conquerors assimilated themselves and their religion into a highly advanced civilization that was Western in orientation. And in Morocco, they mixed with a Berber population linked to both sub-Saharan Africa and southern Europe. This is how it always goes for imperial expansionists. Mexico, for example, is to this day a fusion of European and Aztec cultures.
Religions also change as they spread. Christianity is practiced in strikingly different ways in Norway and Cuba. And both are very different from Christianity as practiced in Jerusalem, its birthplace. In the same way, Islam as practiced in Rabat is very different from how it’s practiced in Mecca. Like everything else in Morocco, it’s milder.
I asked Abbadi what he thinks of the term moderate Islam. Some Muslims don’t like it. Some non-Muslims think moderate Islam doesn’t exist. Even some Muslims insist that moderate Islam doesn’t exist.
“I prefer ‘ponderous and reflective’ Islam,” he said. “The word moderate per se doesn’t mean anything. Islam should be modern, teleological, clear, contextualized, realistic and feasible.”
“The reason I ask,” I said, “is because I want to know what you think about something Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan once said. Quote, ‘There is no moderate or immoderate Islam. Islam is Islam, and that’s it.’”
“That’s very dangerous,” Abbadi said. “Islam is not absolute. It is yoked to the human dimension. It is we humans who understand Islam. It is subjected to my reason, my way of understanding the world and my analysis. Religions encounter previous cultures, previous religions, previous visions and cosmologies. It merges with all of them. No religion falls from the sky onto bare ground.”
* * *
Moroccan journalist Abderrahman Aadaoui laughed when I asked him if he needs a license from the government to practice his profession. “Of course not,” he said, as if my question was bizarre. But journalists in plenty of Arab countries do need a license. They are heavily regulated by the dictators they write about. Not sufficiently toeing the party line? Say goodbye to your license and income, perhaps your family and home, and maybe even your life.
Aadaoui graduated with a degree in English literature from University Mohammad V in 1985, and he works today as the moderator of a weekly political show called Issues and Opinion on Moroccan TV.
I asked him about red lines in the media. Surely they must exist. All Arab countries have red lines. They aren’t the same everywhere, but they exist everywhere. And of course they exist in Morocco, as well.
The red lines are these: You can’t bang on the king. You can’t bang on Islam. And you can’t question the territorial integrity of Morocco—meaning you can’t say that the still-disputed Western Sahara region belongs to the Polisario, a communist guerrilla army backed by Fidel Castro and Muammar Qaddafi that tried to take over the region after the Spanish imperialists left.
Theoretically, Moroccan journalists can say whatever they want about anything else, including the parliament and the Arab-Israeli conf
lict.
“But Moroccans can even cross those lines now to an extent,” Aadaoui said. “They can write about the king and argue about Islam.”
“Can you say terrible things about the king?” I said.
He smiled and laughed. “Well, it depends,” he said. “What do you mean by terrible? You can talk about his fortune, his wealth. People are talking about that right now. You can talk about his personal life. There used to be a red line, a wall, that has been destroyed. The word wall is better than line. Like the Berlin Wall, every day someone takes another brick out of it.
“As far as liberty,” he continued, “Morocco has recently gone from zero percent to 95 percent. But we don’t have total freedom. Once in a while somebody goes to jail. And people ask, How come during the reign of Hassan II nobody went to jail? The reason is because no one wrote about anything controversial. Those were real red lines back in that day. No one had the right to write anything about the king except what was official, the things he was doing. Now people take the initiative and write about the king.”
Moroccan journalists do get arrested sometimes, and not only for crossing those red lines. For instance, in 2011, Rachid Niny, a controversial newspaper publisher, was jailed for a year for supposedly publishing “disinformation” about Morocco’s intelligence agency.
Because of incidents of that sort, and because of the red lines, Freedom House ranks Morocco’s press as “not free” even while listing Morocco as a “partly free” country.
Aadaoui thinks that’s grossly unfair.
“Freedom House,” he said, “is critical of Moroccan press freedom because they were expecting 100 percent freedom. They shouldn’t make judgments about the current era without taking into consideration what we had before. There was enormous oppression. We weren’t allowed to say one single word. I left during King Hassan’s reign. I went to the United States. And when I came back, Morocco was a different country. You had to have lived in the period before to enjoy what we have now.”
Tower of the Sun: Stories From the Middle East and North Africa Page 24