Berkley Center

There is a mosque in the center of my university. Quite honestly, if it weren’t for its tall minaret and a few head scarves among my classmates, I might forget that I am going to school in a Muslim country, at least when I am on campus. My campus, modeled after the American university system, is an anomaly in this region. It is an isolated mountaintop crossroads of American culture and Islamic tradition. Though no one will admit it outright, I garner that most of the students here are from the upper echelon of Moroccan society. There is an ambivalent attitude here towards Islam. This is not what I was expecting, but perhaps I should have been. The fact that a country is 99 percent Muslim on paper really says nothing of the diversity of attitudes, beliefs, and practices of its people.

Some students drink alcohol here, though Islam forbids it. Others did not fast during Ramadan but kept up appearances and had their American roommates bring back food for them to eat behind closed doors. My roommate, on the other hand, prays five times a day and reads her Qur'an each night. One of my Moroccan classmates told me he thinks Bush is a strong, valuable international leader. “If he didn’t stop Iraq,” he asked. “Who would have?” Others have told me they admire President Ahmadinejad of Iran for his religious conviction and strong political hand. There is no cookie-cutter system of belief here despite Moroccans’ common faith. I've also encountered complexities with regard to the Israeli- Palestinian issue. “Don’t worry,” my Moroccan friend told me when she heard I was Jewish. “Here in Morocco we differentiate between Jews and Israelis. Jews are an important part of our community and have been for a long time. Israelis though...Well, we sympathize with our Muslim brothers. The Israelis took their homeland away from them.”

For all this diversity of beliefs and opinions, there remains a clear limit to just how far one can deviate. For my international communication class I am researching censorship of the Moroccan press for moral and religious reasons. In Morocco, there are three red lines that the press cannot cross: the monarchy, the Western Sahara, and Islam. Any criticism or straying from official positions on these three issues can, and in fact has, saddled journalists and editors with crippling fines, suspended their press licenses, and even landed a few of them in jail. Recently, an editor and journalist of the Arabic weekly Nichane were fined and given a three-year suspended jail sentence for publishing an article entitled “Jokes: How Moroccans Laugh at Religion, Sex, and Politics.” The article recounted common jokes circulating in Morocco. The weekly was pulled from newsstands and condemned for publishing material that undermined Islam and breached social taboos.

This schism between what is permissible publicly and officially and what remains behind closed doors reflects patterns I see among my classmates. This society seems to me to be caught between liberalization and, to a certain degree, secularism on the one hand and conservative Islamic values on the other. My campus echoes the liberalization—the girls in tight jeans, the American pop blasting from dorm windows, Desperate Housewives with Arabic subtitles on TVs, and aspirations of many students to attain their master's degree in the United States.

Outside my campus, however, is another Morocco. Nearly all women cover their heads. Pictures of the king adorn billboards. The call to prayer is heard five times a day loud and clear. I step into this on the weekends when I travel and on Mondays I return to the other one—the evidence of this transformation. I can’t tell which force will win out in the long run, tradition or globalization and this new cultural hybridity. Already I can see a compromise forming here on campus where Moroccan students somehow reconcile the two in their lives. During the weeks, they speak English in class, dress in the latest fashions, and watch the latest American sitcoms, but they still relate to the Morocco outside the campus gates. Islam is still central to their lives. I wonder, though, whether this generation of globalized, hybridized youth will change the religious and social climate in this country. I doubt whether a year here will bring me an answer.