morocco

Food stall owners reach out with menus, calling out their dinner selections like midway prizes

The past is buried deep within the ground in Rabat, although the ancient walls in the old city are still standing, painted in electrifying variations of royal blue that make the winding roads look like streamlets or shallow ocean water.

A little imagination goes a long way in Fes.

Travelling, one accepts everything; indignation stays at home. One looks, one listens, one is roused to enthusiasm by the most dreadful things because they are new. Good travellers are heartless.

I wish she__ said something different, but patriarchy is as prevalent around the world as racism and xenophobia are. We can__ hide from it, not even here.

That still did not invalidate their purity in his eyes, so long as they continued to live the way they lived: sitting on the floor, eating with their fingers, cooking and sleeping first in one room, then in another, or in the vast patio with its fountains, or on the roof, leading the existence of nomads inside the beautiful shell which was the house. If he had felt that they were capable of discarding their utter preoccupation with the present, in order to consider the time not yet arrived, he would straightway have lost interest in them and condemned them as corrupt.

Come to think of it, maybe God is a He after all, because only a cruel force would create something this beautiful and make it inaccessible to most people.

Stenham had always taken it for granted that the dichotomy of belief and behavior was the cornerstone of the Moslem world. It was too deep to be called hypocrisy; it was merely custom. They said one thing and they did something else. They affirmed their adherence to Islam in formulated phrases, but they behaved as though they believed, and actually did believe, something quite different. Still, the unchanging profession of faith was there, and to him it was this eternal contradiction which made them Moslems. But Amar__ relationship to his religion was far more robust: he believed it possible to practice literally what the Koran enjoined him to profess. He kept the precepts constantly in his hand, and applied them on every occasion, at every moment. The fact that such a person as Amar could be produced by this society rather upset Stenham__ calculations. For Stenham, the exception invalidated the rule instead of proving it: if there were one Amar, there could be others. Then the Moroccans were not the known quantity he had thought they were, inexorably conditioned by the pressure of their own rigid society; his entire construction was false in consequence, because it was too simple and did not make allowances for individual variations.

Yes, but perhaps he did have something to do with it._ (In such arguments Stenham often found himself unexpectedly extolling the bourgeois virtues.) __f he was good himself, and worked hard____ever!_ cried Amar, his eyes blazing. __ou__e a Nazarene, a Christian. That__ why you talk that way. If you were a Moslem and said such things, you__ be killed or struck blind here, this minute. Christians have good hearts, but they don__ know anything. They think they can change what has been written. They__e afraid to die because they don__ understand what death is for. And if you__e afraid to die, then you don__ know what life is for. How can you live?

Decadence, decadence, he said to himself. They__e lost everything and gained nothing. The French had merely daubed on the finishing touches at the end of a process which had begun five hundred years ago, at least. Their intuitive moral desires coincided with the ideals embodied in the formulas of their religion, yet they could live in accordance neither with those deepest impulses nor with the precepts of the religion, because society came in between with all the pressure of its tradition. No one could afford to be honest or generous or merciful because every one of them distrusted all the others; often they had more confidence in a Christian they were meeting for the first time than in a Moslem they had known for years.

You know what politique is? It is the French word for a lie. Kdoub! Politique! When you hear the French say: our politique, you know they mean: our lies. And when you hear the Moslems, the Friends of Independence, say: our politique, you know they mean: our lies. All lies are sins. And so, which displeases Allah more, a lie told by a Nazarene, who doesn__ know the true faith from the false, or a lie told by a Moslem, who does?

If Aphrodite chills at home in Cyprus for most of the year, then Fez must be the goddess__ playground.

Individually, every grain of sand brushing against my hands represents a story, an experience, and a block for me to build upon for the next generation.

There's a little war in progress here. There won't be anything left of the place if it goes on at this rate." (But it's hard to feign innocence if you've eaten the apple, he reflected.) "And it looks to me as if it is going to go on, because the French aren't going to give in, and certainly the Arabs aren't, because they can't. They're fighting with their backs the the wall.""I thought maybe you meant you expected a new world war," he lied."That's the least of my worries. When that comes, we've had it. You can't sit around mooning about Judgement Day. That's just silly. Everybody who ever lived has always had his own private Judgment Day to face anyway, and he still has. As far as that goes, nothing's changed at all.

Although this was not a comforting point of view, he did not reject it, because it coincided with one of his basic beliefs: that a man must at all costs keep some part of himself outside and beyond life. If he should ever for an instant cease doubting, accept wholly the truth of what his senses conveyed to him, he would be dislodged from the solid ground to which he clung and swept along with the current, having lost all objective sense, totally involved with existence.

We look up to see if it is day or night. If stars burn cool and moon does shine, We take to smoke divine and wine.If breath of sun does belch its heat,we boil coffee and prepare to eat.

You have to hate them, you mean? You can__ decide: I will or I won__ hate them?__mar did not completely understand. __ut I hate them now,_ he explained. __he day Allah wants me to stop hating them, He__l change my heart.__he man was smiling, as if to himself. __f the world__ really like that, it__ very easy to be in it,_ he said.__t will never be easy to be in the world,_ Amar said firmly. __r tabi mabrhach. God doesn__ want it easy.

Every little thing makes a difference, whether you decide it yourself or whether it__ pure accident. So many people have had the whole course of their lives changed by something perfectly simple like, let__ say, crossing the street at one point instead of another.___es, yes, yes, I know,_ Stenham said with exaggerated weariness. __s far as I__ concerned that__ just as boring, and a lot more false, by the way. The point I__ trying to make is that he loves his world of Koranic law because it__ his, and at the same time he hates it because his intuition tells him it__ at the end of its rope. He can__ expect anything more from it. And our world, he hates that too, just on general principles, and yet it__ his only hope, the only way out__f there is one for him personally, which I doubt.