MER Article Editor's Picks (Spring 2001) Ahmad, Eqbal. Confronting Empire: Interviews with David Barsamian (Boston: South End Press, 2000). Akash, Munir and Moore, Daniel, eds. Mahmoud Darwish: The Adam of Two Edens (Syracuse, NY: Jusoor/Syracuse University Press, 2000). Al-Ali, Nadje. Secularism, Gender and the State in the Middle East: (Author not identified) • 1 min read
MER Article Economic Reform in Egypt Texts Reviewed Ray Bush, Economic Crisis and the Politics of Reform in Egypt (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1999). Nicholas S. Hopkins and Kirsten Westergaard, eds. Directions of Change in Rural Egypt (Cairo: American University in Cairo Press, 1998). Marsha Pripstein Posusney, Labor and the State i Agnieszska Paczynska • 5 min read
MER Article "This Time I Choose When to Leave" Fatna El Bouih was born July 10, 1955, in Benahmed, a village in Settat province. In 1971, she received a boarder's scholarship to Casablanca's prestigious girls' high school, Lycée Chawqi, and became active in the national union of high school students (Syndicat National des Elèves). Arrested the f Susan Slyomovics • 4 min read
MER Article Sahrawi Demonstrations Within two months of the death of King Hassan II and the enthronement of his eldest son, King Mohammed VI in July 1999, a series of demonstrations erupted in the Western Sahara. This territory has been administered by the Kingdom of Morocco since 1976, though Morocco’s claim of sovereignty in the We John Damis • 9 min read
MER Article From Madrasa to Maison d'hote There’s a Moroccan expression similar to the English expression “the apple never falls far from the tree.” In Morocco, it’s phrased as a rhetorical question: “Where does wood come from? From the tree.” A year and a half after King Mohammed VI’s ascension to the throne, many Moroccans are wondering j Geoffrey D. Porter • 10 min read
MER Article Networks of Discontent in Northern Morocco What are kingdoms but gangs of criminals on a large scale? What are criminal gangs but petty kingdoms? A gang is a group of men under the command of a leader, bound by a compact of association, in which the plunder is divided according to an agreed convention. If this villainy wins so many recruits James Ketterer • 13 min read
MER Article Risking the Strait Men who had never wanted anything very much saw the flare of want in the eyes of the migrants. And the men of the towns and of the soft suburban country gathered to defend themselves; and they reassured themselves that they were good and the invaders bad, as a man Gregory White • 12 min read
MER Article Democratization Without Democracy When King Mohammed VI succeeded the late Hassan II in the summer of 1999, expectations soared. The young king’s investiture seemed to be the final step in a series of political changes that would set Morocco on the road to democracy. Along with a new bicameral legislature and an Catherine Sweet • 13 min read
MER Article A Truth Commission for Morocco The grim names Moroccans assign to the post-independence years -- in Arabic, zaman al-rusas and al-sanawat al-sawda, in French les anneés de plomb and les années noires or in English “the years of lead” and “the black years” -- evoke an era of grayness and lead bullets, fear and repression. During Susan Slyomovics • 10 min read
