Ourzazate
Moroccan Hollywood is about a 20-minute plane ride from Marrakesh southeast further into the interior,-17.7930542,6z/data=!4m2!3m1!1s0xd0b88619651c58d:0xd9d39381c42cffc3 of the country, and flying in I could see why it's preferable to go by air. The desert sands make it a trying drive, though of course the landscape is also why so many studios choose to shoot here in Ourzazate—which in Berber language means "place with no noise."
Still, the group I'm traveling with couldn't stop talking about the last "Game of Thrones" episode filmed here. Parts of Lawrence of Arabia were shot here, too, and other big name movies include The Man Who Would Be King, Inception, Black Hawk Down, American Sniper, as well as some crasser films, the mention of which makes the movie critics on the tour laugh—like The Mummy, and The Hills Have Eyes.
We went a little further into the desert to walk the set for Kingdom of Heaven, the Ridley Scott film about the Crusaders and the great Arab hero Saladin, who was actually a Kurd, fighting over Jerusalem. "One of those is the Crusader catapult and the other is the Arab catapult," said the guide, pointing at two enormous wooden contraptions in the sand. What did he mean by Arab? Like Nasserist? Baathist? Presumably he meant that one fired from inside the city and the other from without, for it was hard to tell the difference. As we approached the gates of medieval "Jerusalem," I warned a group of Moroccan journalists that entering the city before it was liberated would constitute "normalization." One of them laughed.
The reality is that many of the Moroccans I've spoken with this trip don't seem to make too much of their Arab identity, or the various Arab conflicts roiling the larger Middle East and North Africa region. For instance, the sectarianism that divides Sunnis and Shiites from the Levant to the Persian Gulf is lost on most Moroccans. The friend who brought me here is named Hussein who has a twin brother Hassan—named after Muhammad's grandsons who are major figures in Shia Islam, but these Moroccans are Sunni. Shiite dynasties like the Fatimids played an important role in early Moroccan history, but Ashura, a major Shia festival commemorating the death of Hussein at the hands of Sunni rivals, is very different here than it is in, say, Lebanon. Along the eastern Mediterranean, the youths draw their own blood with whips and swords as penance for not fighting alongside Hussein, but here instead of blood, the Moroccans splash water on each other. It seems the festival started with Moroccan Jews celebrating the exodus from Egypt—the water represents God's parting of the Red Sea to rescue his people, and then re-flooding the seabed to stop pharaoh.
Arabization, one Moroccan woman named Rita explained to me, is partly a political process. "People learn Arabic and French in school as languages of culture and civilization. My mother doesn't know either language, she speaks Berber, but it's better to say Amazigh because 'Berber' carries connotations of the uncultured, barbaric." She holds up three fingers and says this is an important symbol for the Amazigh—"it means free man, free land, free language."
Of course Moroccans weren't always as free to express their Amazigh identity—even if virtually every Moroccan shares it as well as an identity derived from the Arabs who invaded the region starting in the 7th century, leading to more than a millennium of intermarriage. It wasn't until the 2011 constitution that the Amazigh language, Tamazight, was officially recognized by the Moroccan government after a 98.5 percent majority voted in favor.
Arabness was always an important component of Moroccan identity—many Moroccans, like Syrians and Yemenis, like to say that their Arabic dialect is closest to classical Arabic—but it took on an a key political role in the post-colonial period. While the Moroccans didn't contribute as much to theories of Arab nationalism as, say, the Syrians and Iraqis did, Arabism served as a vital instrument making a multi-ethnic, multi-cultural country cohere after declaring independence in 1956. Outside actors, like North African neighbors post-independence Algeria and Nasserist Egypt, regularly sought to destabilize Morocco, partly out of their own interest and partly on behalf of the Soviet Union in a Cold War proxy fight. Morocco has always been pro-American—our oldest bilateral relations are with Morocco, the first country to recognize American independence in 1777. Algiers and pre-Camp David Cairo, however, were Soviet clients hiding behind the "non-aligned movement." It seems that Rabat perceived the best way to defend itself from Soviet-backed Arab nationalist intrigue and subversion was to put its Arab identity above all else.
In retrospect, it's easy to see the problems with that decision since asserting Arab identity inevitably tied Morocco to a number of Arab issues. For while it's true that most of the regional conflicts don't touch Morocco, many Moroccans have had a serious impact on some of those conflicts. There are thousands of Moroccan fighters partaking in the sectarian war that has engulfed Syria, Iraq, and Lebanon. Many come from Moroccan cities, even more come from Europe, like the cell responsible for the November 13 attacks in Paris.
In a sense, the European case is much harder to solve—and that's not just because the Moroccan intelligence services are good at penetrating and dismantling Islamist networks. Indeed, after France and Morocco cut intelligence cooperation in 2014 when Paris tried to arrest Rabat's visiting intelligence chief on human rights charges, ties were restored in January after the Charlie Hebdo and Hyper Cacher attacks. The Moroccan services supplied the intelligence that helped French authorities find Islamic State operative, and mastermind of last month's Paris attacks, Abdelhamid Abaaoud, in a Paris suburb.
European security officials are right to be worried about the foreign fighters returning from Syria and Iraq to European cities. The equally significant issue, a question those same officials seem to rarely ask is, why are they leaving Europe in the first place? Why are second and third generation Europeans of North African and Middle Eastern descent killing and dying in Syria and Iraq, for issues that should barely concern them? Europe seems not to have yet grasped that its main problem is in Europe, and not the Middle East.
French president Francois Hollande has enlisted his armed forces in the anti-ISIS coalition to conduct air strikes against ISIS targets in the organization's capital, Raqqa. After 140 people were slaughtered in the French capital, the government had to do something, but like the Obama administration's war against ISIS, Hollande's is a phony campaign. It will not stop ISIS and it will not bring peace to Europe.
Maybe it really was Islamic State terrorists who gave the orders to strike at Paris, and maybe the purpose really was to punish the infidels for their lifestyles.
What we know for sure is that the operatives were citizens of France and Belgium. But they were not really French or Belgian. For that matter, they were not really Arab either. Or anything. They are modernity's losers. They are the hollow men, and they're armed.