The smell of mint tea. The chanting sound of the Muslim call to prayer wafting from mosques everywhere. The twang of traditional Andalusian music: There are many sense-memories that stick with me from my visit to Morocco as part of the University's first annual summer program there.
But there is one sight in particular that I will never forget from my stay in that charming country: the face of young King Mohammed VI. That's because His Majesty's visage, alarmingly large but inescapably beneficent, gazed impassively down at passersby from billboards at major intersections throughout Morocco. His photograph usually was surrounded by an arrangement of the fetching red-and-green Moroccan flag, which festooned the avenues of Rabat, the national capital and our weekday home, as well as highways up and down the Atlantic coast where the city is situated.
The reason for all the pomp, we Wahoos found out soon after our arrival, was that the country was preparing for a nationwide weekend of festivities to celebrate the marriage of its young and beloved monarch. (The decorations, it turned out, were for the most part not the work of a public propaganda agency, but rather the patriotic offerings of private companies and individuals.) The celebration was a belated one -- the baby-faced king and his bride, a dashing computer engineer, had married the previous spring but had postponed their public ceremony because of Israeli incursions into Palestine. But the wait didn't seem to have dulled the people's exuberance.
Crowds thronged the streets of Rabat for three days during the appointed mid-July weekend. They proceeded to the royal palace en masse to see the enthroned king and his wife, often bearing traditional wedding gifts of dates, sandalwood, and henna (a plant used to make temporary tattoos) on gift platters that looked like giant lampshades. Outside of town, on the beach road, flatbed trucks carried gaggles of shouting and singing children on their way to watch traditional contests of horsemanship and riflery known as "la fantasia." (Think of a reenactment of a cavalry charge, only with a scoring system indecipherable to foreigners.) Many people, though, merely walked about downtown aimlessly, as if the thrill of the whole affair lay -- and maybe it did -- simply in the show of solidarity and national pride represented by the act of gathering up one's family and pouring out into mild Moroccan night.
Moroccans all across the geographically diverse country celebrated in their own way. From the claustrophobic confines of the Medina (or old quarter) in the ancient royal city of Fes, to the isolated and arid Berber villages of the High Atlas mountains, to the comparatively lush fields of the Mediterranean coast, Moroccans gave enthusiastic voice to a sentiment that seems foreign to most Americans -- their affection for their royalty.
But there was perhaps another set of sentiments, more familiar to Americans, that underlay this nationwide happening: Moroccans' tightly-held sense of a unique national identity and destiny amid a fast-changing and uncertain world, a world of competing loyalties and values. Mohammed VI and his reign undeniably represent a daring set of responses to Morocco's wide open future, to the intractable problems of its past, and to the vexing questions of its national identity.
The acclamation of the king represented a show of support for democracy, egalitarianism and development within Morocco. Mohammed VI, the heir to the 350-year-old Alaouite dynasty, has devolved generous power to Parliament and worked to fight corruption, making the attempted military coups that plagued his father's reign a thing of the past. He has made himself more accessible than any previous king to the Moroccan people; he doesn't live in the royal palace, and he is known to drive himself around Rabat and to greet handicapped Moroccans who line up outside his residence. He has pushed hard for economic development of rural areas and increased literacy, though rural poverty stubbornly remains a problem. Mohammed VI also has come to represent changing roles for women: he has pushed through women's-rights legislation, even though one of the consequences of the open democracy he instituted is the need to compromise with fundamentalist Islamic parties. He was the first king to introduce his wife -- a Western-educated woman -- to the public, sparking national commentary on the changing status of women.
The outpouring of patriotic sentiment this summer should also be understood as a show of strength in the face of an escalating conflict with Spain, a conflict which, while we were in Morocco, sparked low-level military confrontation over a tiny island. Morocco's resentment of vestiges of European colonialism, its ambitious expansion into the Western Sahara, its somewhat hopeless desire to join the European Union, its pride at its longstanding friendly relations with the United States (amid pressures from fellow Arab countries to dissociate from the West) and worrisome illegal emigration into Europe all were implicated in the confrontation with its neighbor to the north. The nationwide newspapers would praise U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell for eventually mediating a solution to the crisis.
In sum, if there is one thing I learned about the Moroccans' worldview, it is that the nation is very aware of its unique place in the world and of its own cultural direction. In this time of rapid and surely confusing change in the country, national and international politics, cultural conflict and the search for religious identity all are bound up together in one national discourse that is on the tongues of many ordinary Moroccans. This summer's festivities surrounding Mohammed VI's marriage represented a celebration of a national solidarity that, despite conflicting political and cultural currents from both within and without, has remained vibrant and strong in Morocco.
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