A handsome, new six-lane highway runs along the Moroccan coast, connecting the new Mohamed V airport and Casablanca. Mercedes Benzes shoot along like silver bullets, passing trucks so old that they, in most other countries, would be rusty remnants about to become archaeological artifacts in car cemeteries. Everything on wheels is stuffed to the gills with people and products.
But the superhighway, like all Moroccan roads, also displays the whole gamut of human activity. The shoulders of the highway are crowded with people moving by slow mule or slower ox cart, by women in djellabas and veils striding determinedly along, by men on bikes with other men, women, and children hanging on for dear life. There are fellahins napping under a shady tree, children is jeans or traditional garb with schoolbooks under arm, and sheepherders watching the whole passing parade with eyes that have seen it all and are no longer capable of surprise or excitement. Groups of men, women, and children are eating, sleeping, and chatting under makeshift lean-tos that make it appear as if they live there.
The strip of bustling highway is an apt symbol of Morocco, of the contradictions and tensions of a society where high-rises and power lunches coexist with a way of life that seems to have been arrested centuries ago. The two cultures are as hermetically sealed off from each other as if they were indeed separated by centuries. They are different tenses - clocks set to different times in the same present.
The same duality meets the eye in Moroccan cities like Marrakesh and Fez: there is the Medina Jedid, the new city, and the Medina, the old, traditional maze of a city cum market. The Medina Jedid is modeled after French cities, with broad boulevards and serious-looking buildings. The Medina is as old as Moroccan culture. Wandering in the maze, one can imagine what life must have been like at the time of the great Berber dynasties in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.
Cities are, of course, historical monuments to the people who built them. They are visible history. The same can be said of Moroccan social and cultural reality and institutions - they reflect the complexity of Moroccan history.
Moroccan history
Because of its strategic position on the map, controlling both the point where Africa and Europe are closest and the trans-Saharan trade routes, Morocco has always been considered a prize. The Phoenicians had ports along the costs of what today is Tunisia and Morocco, and the Roman Empire made Morocco its southernmost colony under the name of Mauritania, using the fertile northern plains as a bread and olive basket.
The heyday of Islamic expansion in the seventh and eighth centuries saw Arab Bedouin troops on horse back sweep the indigenous Berber religions aside and forge wholesale conversions to he new religion. Since then, Morocco has been a Muslim country. The Berbers took Islam deep into sub-Saharan Africa, Spain, and the southern parts of France.
After the Spanish reconquest, Moroccan rulers were content for centuries to keep the country sealed off from outside influences. However, in the nineteenth century, European expansionism
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