Little by little the camel goes into the couscous...

30 March 2011

The Call to Prayer: How Time Moves You in Morocco

The adhan, or call to prayer, is a unique facet of life in a Muslim country. In the Fes medina, where there's always a mosque around the corner, the adhan is unavoidable.

At home or in the streets at prayer time you hear a soft hum in the distance that crescendos steadily until a hearty "Allahu Akbar" blares from the nearest minaret. At first it is disarming, especially to Westerners unaccustomed to or unaware of prayer's central role in Islam. But after a few days or weeks, it, like everything else in Morocco, it assimilates into your life and you either respect it as an expression of Muslim piety, scorn it as an unwelcome early morning wake up call, or simply ignore it.

The call to prayer preludes each of the daily prayers that are included among the 'pillars' of Islam. There are five in total spread throughout the day: fajr occurs in the early morning before sunrise, dhuhur at midday, 'asr in the mid-afternoon, maghrib at sunset, and 'isha at night. The call is recited by a muezzin, literally an 'announcer', who traditionally would shout the adhan from the top of his mosque's minaret or in the streets. Today, most mosques are equipped with loud speakers.

In traditional Muslim societies, prayer times used to demarcate the different phases of the day. The phrase 'ba'd dhuhur' in classical Arabic translates to the English word 'afternoon', and literally means 'after dhuhur prayer'. In this sense, the 'afternoon' did not begin until dhuhur prayer was performed. The classical Arabic word for 'dinner' shares its root with 'isha, the last prayer of the day. Remnants of this influence on daily life can still be seen in the old medina. During the week, many shops close between dhuhur and 'asr prayers, and on Fridays, the Muslim holy day, a vast majority of businesses are closed as Moroccans take the afternoon off after their communal dhuhur prayers.

In many ways, this role of the adhan represents a different psychology about time, and our relationship to it. Last night at dinner my roommates, our guests and I had a conversation about the differences between religious time and the secular time. My roommate Chris explained how in the 19th century, governments in Europe began to use churches to signal the official beginnings and ends of the workday.

In that period, church bells were the most effective means of communicating information, especially in the agrarian countryside where farms and farmers were scattered over miles. Before these initiatives, churches used their bells for purely religious purposes, signaling religious holidays such as Christmas and Easter, as well as the hours for daily prayers. Much like prayer in Islam, Christian prayers determined the pace of daily life. By secularizing church bells, these governments not only stripped them of their sacred functions but also initiated a shift in the human relationship with time.

The key issue here is control.

Who controls time? In the religious sense, God controls it. When time is sacred, it cannot be controlled by people because then it ceases to be sacred. As a result, time is something we must obey. During Ramadan, Muslims cannot eat or drink between the pre-dawn (fajr) and sunset (maghrib) prayers. Because Islam uses a lunar calendar, this means that some years Ramadan falls during winter, and others it falls in the summer. The length of the Ramadan fast may be longer or shorter from year to year, but the rules do not change.

By secularizing time, people gained control over it. A day's length was standardized; the length of an eight hour work day does not change depending on the season. To regulate something is to control it. People now 'made' time instead of yielding to it.

I think we can see the influence of these points of view when we compare cultural conceptions of time in Morocco and the United States. In Morocco, time is view neither as rigid nor controllable. People arrive at their appointments when they arrive. Shops open when they open and close when they close. This morning I asked my dairy guy when he will have cheese. He said, "we'll have it when the cheese guys make it."

In the United States, and other Western countries, most people view time differently. Because we control time we possess it, and so we can 'make use' of it. If you do not 'make use' of 'your' time then you are 'wasting it.' We emphasize punctuality as well, so that we don't 'waste' the time of our friends or colleagues. If we are busy we can always 'make' time to see someone. And we mustn't let time 'slip away.'

At dinner, one of our guests asked Chris and I if we thought the adhan would ever change to announce secular time just as church bells had changed two centuries ago. We both said no. As Chris pointed out, it's easier to appropriate an object like a bell and change it's purpose than it is to change the purpose of a whole class of people. Additionally, I said that I didn't think such a shift could be justified in a Muslim context.

Thinking more broadly, the secularization of time has broad cosmological implications. If man controls time then he, to some extent, controls the universe. Or he at least considers the universe to be controllable (I think contemporary views about science's potential to tame nature are sufficient evidence of this point). To a Muslim, God controls the universe, and anything otherwise is unacceptable. That's not to say that Islam and rationalism are mutually exclusive, but rationalism to the point of replacing God with man is.

I can't imagine the Fes medina without the traditional adhan. If it were to change, and the blaring "Allahu Akbar" were to change to a cacophonous "It's now 12:00pm", it would lose all of it's meaning. What was once a rich symbol of Morocco's religious heritage and maintenance of tradition, would, essentially, become a talking clock.

16 March 2011

Don't go to school unless you want to get beat up

Monday, I published a blog post where I lamented the current strike at my university. At the end of the it, I agreed with the notion that 'people' (read: some Moroccans) don't take school seriously, that this was just an instance of political grandstanding to masquerade the strikers' desire to shirk their studies.

While it is true that some of the Riffaqis and Ikhwanis, and even more of their supporters, are looking for a way to avoid their responsibilities as students, it is unfair to cast their motivations as entirely trivial. These strikes are taken very seriously. Organizers use intimidation to keep students out of class. I witnessed this last October. Fights are common. Strikers also threaten violence against students who challenge their motives and tactics.

Last night I witnessed this exchange* on a Facebook group created by my university students:
Ahmed: tomorrow you must back to study ...

Mohammed: really !!!

Ahmed: yes. we have to talk with the strikers and tell them we want to study

Mohammed: who said? i have just heard that classes will start next week.

Ahmed: yes, that is why.

Mohammed: but we will just waste time with that fucking people there. we should be patient this year.

Ahmed: we are going trough hell!

Mohammed: yeah !!! but what shall we do this is Morocco

Ahmed: no, no

Mohammed: yes !! mate. this is Morocco everywhere u go u will find same drama

Ahmed: the strike yes, but not in the time of studying. we need our right yes but there are some duties

Mohammed: what duties are you talking about?

Ahmed: tomorrow i will go to tha fucking university and i will tell them to stop that that's enough. lets us start the semester, there is time for doing this out of study. Our duties?studying and geting very good mark and trying to produce some thing for our beloved country

Mohammed: u cant' do it only by urself we need all students attend but unfortunately u can't collect them all
we have over 300 students in our class and when u want to talk about problems which they suffer from u will find just 5 students or maybe just 2
so i advise u bro to keep away

Ahmed: thx

Mohammed: cuz if they saw u only who speaks about that they will do something bad to you
. plzzzz don't speak alone

Ahmed: ok thx, brother



Mohammed: i still remember last time when you talked during the class at infor... 
fortunately you found support for ur words then



Ahmed: yes , i did



Mohammed: if you go tomorrow and they are not brave students like you, u will find urself out of university

I mentioned the strike to a colleague of mine today. He told me: "You are witnessing a crumbling system." The causes of such are varied and disparate. You can't blame the Ministry of Education. Some universities are more functional than others. The educational reforms are good and well-intended, but so far exist only on paper. You can't blame individual administrations either; the system they're asked to implement is a far-fetched ideal. To compound an already complex problem, the day-to-day operations of the university are impeded by the student unions. Yet, they are only asking for what the law promises them.

In the middle of these competing interests are the students. What if I never teach again this semester? The government and administrations would blame the student unions. The student unions would blame the government and administrations. Would they recognize the damage they caused by setting students back? How do you make up a lost semester?

For over a decade, Morocco has struggled to improve it's higher education system. What will the results of these efforts be? A generation of young minds lost, their futures forfeited for what? A brighter but more distant future? How will this lost generation participate in it?

Previously, I labeled Morocco's higher education system as dysfunctional. But now, after seeing how it schemes to subvert even the best students' desire to study, I can only call it a disaster.

*Edited for content and to preserve the anonymity of the conversation's participants

14 March 2011

Back to school (almost)

This morning I returned to the university to begin the Spring semester. Last night I was busy preparing my notes, trying to tap into the teaching mojo I built up in the Fall. It's been a long time since my last class. I last taught on December 21st, 2010,  and this wasn't a 'true' class, I only listened to students deliver oral presentations. I delivered my last lecture the first week of December. So this morning, on my way to campus, I was a little nervous. It's amazing how much we can forget after three months.

To a certain extent, my nerves got the best of me. My lecture was rigid, I found myself explaining information that I could have evoked from my students, the questions I asked were poorly worded, either too obvious or too abstract. I could sense my struggles, so I reverted to my natural defense mechanism: sarcasm. The only problem is that sarcasm doesn't work with first year university students with only a few semesters of English study under their belts. So with every joke that fell flat I grew increasingly anxious. The notes I had prepared evaded my memory, and I just kept stumbling along, worried about how I would fill the remaining 2.5 hours of class.

Thankfully, I was saved. 45 minutes into my lecture, my class welcomed some very special visitors. My good friends, the Riffaqis (the Comrades, or the Socialist Students Union), had returned to liberate my students from their oppressed states.

The moment they walked in I knew what they wanted. I let their leader speak to my class. My students listened attentively to him explain the purpose behind the protests and demonstrations. But they kept their notebooks open, pens at the ready. They seemed bored by a speech they've probably heard dozens of times. For a moment, I felt like they wanted him to shut up quickly so we could get back to class. And then he said the magic words (which I didn't understand), flicked his wrist, and my students, smiles beaming, packed up their bags and left class. I guess they didn't want to study after all.

---

Morocco has not been immune to the unrest affecting the entire Middle East and North Africa region. February 20th was the nation's 'day of anger', and many Moroccans took to the streets in protest of government corruption and socioeconomic stagnation. To be true, these demonstrations were much smaller and less energetic than those that initiated the revolutions in Egypt, Tunisia and Libya, and there has been little unrest since February 20th. Nonetheless, the concerns voiced by Moroccans on that day are legitimate, so much so that King Mohammed VI delivered an historic speech last week initiating major political and social reforms, including a "deep revision" of the constitution and a reduction of his executive powers.

What does this have to do with the university? Moroccan universities, like those in most countries, are centers of political activism. Two student groups, the Ikhwanis (Islamists) and the Riffaqis, dominate campuses all across the country, organizing protests and demonstrations whenever they see fit. These are not "student groups" like the chess club or the dance team, they are more like labor unions of old. Violence is common (there was a knife fight between the Ikhwanis and Riffaqis during final exams at my university) and it's not uncommon for the government to call in their Pinkertons (aka the police) to break up prolonged student strikes

There is no doubt these student groups have been anxiously awaiting their opportunity to capitalize on the February 20th protests. Starting a general strike on the first day of the new term sends one message to the Ministry of Education: promises are great, but we want what is ours now.

I knew the strike was coming. Yesterday I met with a student who told me I shouldn't get too excited to teach this week. But I didn't want to believe it. For all intents and purposes, I've been on a three month vacation. At this point in the year, I've spent more time out of school than in, and maybe that will continue. And while vacation is nice, that's not why I'm here. I'm here to try my damnedest to be an English teacher. I also crave the routine. It feels good to wake up in the morning with a sense of purpose, to go to class and return with a sense of accomplishment, however minor it may be. For now, I must wait to get back to that.

As I left the university this morning, a friend of mine passed a long a pearl of wisdom he heard from one of his teachers. It describes the school year in Morocco: "In Morocco, the school year is comprised of vacation which is cut off my intermittent time in class." When I described what happened this morning to a different friend of mine, she quipped, "who doesn't want a day off?"

From what I've seen so far this year, I can't help but agree.