BY: Nisreen Eadeh/Staff Writer The Community Relations Service of the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) has issued a list of twenty ways to prevent and respond to hate incidents against Arab Americans in schools. The report also applies to Muslim and Sikh students, who are often targeted for their religious head coverings. The DOJ released … Continued
By: Eugene Smith/Contributing Writer The Tragedy On Thursday night, thousands were gathered along the historic Promenade des Anglais in coastal Nice to celebrate Bastille Day, a national holiday symbolic of freedom and French unity. The fireworks had just ended and the festivities were beginning to calm. Other than a rainstorm on the horizon, it was … Continued
BY: Habeeb Salloum/Contributing Writer It was the sixth time I had travelled to Córdoba, the fabled city of Moorish Spain, yet it was as if I had entered it the first time. My heart throbbed as I walked its streets on my way to La Mezquita – six acres of architectural magic that was once … Continued
BY: Eugene Smith/Contributing Writer The Tragedy: On Thursday evening, the Dallas Police presided over a peaceful demonstration held by the local Black Lives Matter movement protesting the recent shootings of Alton Sterling and Philando Castile. The deaths of the two young men weighed heavily on the frustrated crowd as they marched chanting “enough is enough.” In a sign … Continued
BY: Nisreen Eadeh/Staff Writer America witnessed two more fatal shootings of black men by police officers this week – Philando Castile in Minnesota and Alton Sterling in Louisiana. Cities across America, big and small, demonstrated on the streets Thursday night, demanding an end to the unnecessary deaths of black men by white cops. The level … Continued
Courtesy of Bashar Masri and Rawabi. Monica Wang Forbes.com A fine slab of carved stone stands out against the wild rocks and shrubs scattered about the mountainous Palestinian landscape. It is a sign that reads “Rawabi,” meaning hills in Arabic, and it points to a narrow path up the slope. As the paved road winds … Continued
Middle Eastern brewers look to expand their market as the region starts to get a taste for better beers. Beer and barley have a long history in the Middle East, but drinking culture is not popular as it was in the era before Islam. But in Lebanon and Jordan, microbreweries have experienced spikes in popularity … Continued
BY: Nisreen Eadeh/Staff Writer The Church of the Epiphany rests between a café, a parking garage, and a pizza restaurant on G Street in Washington, DC. Only three blocks away from the White House, the church looks out of place in the District’s bustling and modern downtown area. Those who work in the many businesses, … Continued
Facial-recognition engineer Rana El Kaliouby, comic book icon Geoff Johns and Olympian Sadam Ali among 10 newly featured Every generation produces special individuals whose character, talent, vision, ambition and determination make them far from ordinary. For them, it’s about making a difference and leaving an enduring legacy. The Arab American National Museum (AANM) pays tribute … Continued
Press release: The Moroccan American Center for Policy (MACP)
First Lady Michelle Obama is in Morocco today and Wednesday to promote her Let Girls Learn initiative. Launched in March 2015, the initiative brings together the Department of State, the US Agency for International Development (USAID), the Peace Corps, the Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC), and other agencies and programs to help adolescent girls worldwide attain a quality education.
“It just makes sense for boys and girls to be educated and involved and empowered,” said the First Lady during a panel discussion held in Marrakesh, where she was joined by actresses and fellow women’s education activists Meryl Streep and Freida Pinto.
The visit — the first in North Africa for the Let Girls Learn initiative — brings new energy to several existing US-Morocco programs focused on girls’ education. Signed in November 2015, the second US-Morocco MCC compact includes the Education and Training Project, which prioritizes “delivering quality secondary education focused on the employability skills needed for the modern workforce,” and which will make a concerted effort “to ensure that the project results in equitable outcomes for both girls and boys and reduces social, gender, and regional inequalities.” Today, and in conjunction with the First Lady’s travels, the White House provided additional details on MCC’s $100 million investment in what it referred to as “a new model for secondary education in Morocco,” citing activities like “mentoring programs, internships, after-school clubs, upgrading bathrooms and changing rooms for girls,” and more.
In its 2013-2017 Country Development Cooperation Strategy for Morocco, USAID pledged to work with Morocco’s Ministry of Education “to develop gender-sensitive reading materials,” and “ensure gender equity in the delivery of training programs.”
Today, USAID announced a “new $400,000 investment to establish five new girls’ dormitories… which will be ready by the next school year,” and will allow girls living in rural areas to attend school.
The White House also announced that in the coming months, Morocco will become the Peace Corps’ 36th Let Girls Learn country, wherein “the Peace Corps will train incoming volunteers and community leaders to advance girls’ education and empowerment, and will work with local leaders to focus on girls’ development through a renewed focus on building critical skills for leadership and employment.”
“I am so proud that the US is working with the Moroccan Government to make these transformative new investments to educate and empower girls across Morocco — investments that will help these girls succeed in the workforce and fulfill their boundless promise,” said Mrs. Obama in a statement.
These programs build on decades of work that the Moroccan government and civil society groups have done on their own to improve the status and strengthen the rights of women in the country. In February 2004, Morocco officially adopted a new family code, one of the most progressive laws on women’s and family rights in the Arab world, that raised the age of marriage for girls from 15 to 18, provided women new rights in divorce, and gave wives joint responsibility for the family with their husbands. Article 31 of Morocco’s Constitution, adopted by referendum in 2011, requires the government to “facilitate the equal access of [female and male] citizens to conditions that permit their enjoyment of the right… to a modern, accessible education of quality.”
“The King has made women’s rights and education top priorities since day one, and significant progress has been made,” said former US Ambassador to Morocco Edward M. Gabriel. “With the US joining Morocco’s leadership in this regard — two longtime allies working together — progress on women’s education will accelerate all the more.”
The First Lady is accompanied in Morocco by her mother, Marian Robinson, as well as her daughters, Sasha and Malia Obama. Prior to Marrakesh, Mrs. Obama was in Liberia; she will next be traveling to Spain, the third and final destination of her Let Girls Learn tour.
The Moroccan American Center for Policy (MACP) is a non-profit organization whose principal mission is to inform opinion makers, government officials, and interested publics in the United States about political and social developments in Morocco and the role being played by the Kingdom of Morocco in broader strategic developments in North Africa, the Mediterranean, and the Middle East.
Source: www.marketwired.com
BY: Habeeb Salloum/Contributing Writer “The city of al-Zahra’ was one of the most splendid, most renowned, and most magnificent structures ever raised by man”. So wrote the great Arab scholar Ibn Khallikan when describing this Moorish dream city built by a king for the woman he loved. In its days … Continued
By SAM SACKS
Wall Street Journal
Early in Saleem Haddad’s “Guapa” (Other Press, 358 pages, $16.95), the novel’s narrator, Rasa, accompanies an American journalist to an interview with an opposition leader, acting as her interpreter. The setting is an unnamed Middle Eastern nation that could stand in for any of the countries convulsed during the Arab Spring. Rasa has taken part in the protests, but when he meets the opposition leader, a religious populist who wants to usher in a strict Islamic state, he’s flooded with doubts. For as well as being American-educated and reform-minded, Rasa is gay. “I joined the protests so that I would no longer have to wear a mask. What’s the point of risking your life to remove a mask only to have to wear a different one?”
“Guapa”—the title refers to a clandestine gay bar Rasa frequents—is about the furtive, outcast status of gay men in the Arab world. Mr. Haddad, who was born in Kuwait and lives in London, threads the book’s conflicts through both political and personal spheres. Just as Rasa is squeezed between Islamism and authoritarianism, his place in the household is thrown into doubt when his grandmother catches him sharing a bed with his lover. His fear of government reprisal is matched by his ingrained horror of violating the codes of eib, a word that loosely translates to “shame” and refers to Arabic societies’ strict rules of social conduct that deem homosexuality a perversion.
The spreading feeling that he has nowhere to turn for sanctuary outside the walls of Guapa lends a taut, controlled sense of panic to Rasa’s plight. Alas, this promising debut novelist doesn’t sustain it. A lengthy flashback to Rasa’s American education is hijacked by some postcolonial-studies boilerplate about otherness and agency. The book never recovers from the interruption, and its dramatic tension dissolves into a vapor of self-affirmation: “I’m done with your rules about what is eib and what isn’t. I have my own rules now.” What will happen to Rasa now that his mask has come off? We can only guess.
One answer is suggested by the life of Abdellah Taïa, a Moroccan writer who since 1998 has lived in Paris. In 2006, Mr. Taïa came out of the closet in a widely read newspaper interview. He was denounced by Moroccan officials, received death threats from angry readers and became further estranged from the family he had left when he emigrated. He is today an informal spokesperson for gay Arabs, and this reputation obscures the eerie originality of his stories.
“Infidels” (Seven Stories, 143 pages, $23.95), the third of his books to be translated into English, centers on Jallal, the teenaged son of a Moroccan prostitute whose own sexual initiation comes at the hands of men in bathhouses. This world is described in a succession of raw, polemical monologues spoken by Jallal and his relatives (all in a rough-and-ready translation from French by Alison Strayer). Jallal’s grandmother, who initiated the family trade, rages at the hypocrisy of being “damned, and so very much in demand.” The angriest voice is the boy’s: “For the tens of thousands of people around us, we deserve our pariah status, our grim fate, because we do nothing to change it, break out of it. Maman, one day you’ll be stoned to death by the very same people who creep to the house each night to ask for your forgiveness and a bit of pleasure.”
An outsider’s fury fuels Jallal’s coming of age, which takes him in exile to Egypt and then Belgium. There he meets and falls for Mahmoud, another disenchanted expat who introduces him to a mystical form of Islam based on ecstatic love and liberation. The planned endpoint of their febrile religious conversion? A suicide bombing in Casablanca.
Mr. Taïa unblinkingly recounts this folie à deux as it moves toward a “sublime explosion” designed “to make people see love. Through death. Through an extreme act.” Jallal’s testimony boils with resentment, self-loathing, vindictiveness and a flailing desire for personal salvation. “I understood that a huge sacrifice had to be made in order for the world to change,” he says, “for my heart to open and let in the light.” In view of the deadly attack in Orlando, Mr. Taïa’s unnerving portrait of self-radicalization feels all the more relevant.
Source: www.wsj.com
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