I just attended a very interesting lecture at the D.C. Rotary Club by Dr. Shadi Hamid, an author and senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, on the interplay between Islam and politics. His thesis is that Islam is “exceptional” owing to a fusion of religious and political consciousness. He attributes this in part to the fact that the Prophet was not only a religious leader but an early head of state. In addition, he posits that Muslims subscribe to the belief that the Qu’ran is the words of God transmitted directly without human authorship or mediation, and that this gives the scripture unique moral and political authority.
Dr. Hamid thinks that it is a mistake to overlook the religious motivation of Islamist organizations from the Muslim Brotherhood to even the Islamic State on the supposition that religion is simply a pretext for power politics. He also suggests that Islamist organizations do not distinguish between religion and politics; a split between them is not cognizable within their religious worldview, since the aim of both is salvation.
Dr. Hamid believes that, for good or ill, those who believe that Islam will go through “Reformation” and secularization analogous to the Reformation in the West are mistaken. However, he does believe that Islamist and secular parties can advance their diametrically opposed agendas through peaceful political means in a state such as Tunisia’s fragile democracy, although he worries that corruption and lack of Western economic support may yet undermine the Tunisian experiment. He is also not optimistic that the monarchy in Morocco will be willling to relinquish power in order to promote constitutional government.
Dr. Hamid acknowledges the role that Western power politics play in the discrediting and undermining of democratic institutions in the Middle East, but he also argues that the role of the West in shaping the Middle East should not obscure the role that religion plays in Muslim states.
For those interested, Dr. Hamid’s latest book is Islamic Exceptionalism: How the Struggle Over Islam Is Reshaping the World.
My friend Susan Davis recently traveled to Morocco on a cultural exchange tour sponsored by the United States Department of State. Ms. Davis — a poet and a broadcaster — recorded her candid impressions of the country in a series of dispatches home. What follows is a sample of her observations and photographs from her tour.
This morning I had a traditional Moroccan breakfast: fresh fruit, a mushroom omelet, a bowl of harira (a tomato based lentil soup that you squeeze lemon juice into) dates, a pastry of fried dough dipped in honey and covered with sesame seeds, three Moroccan pancakes served with butter and jam and several loaves of Moroccan bread which is shaped and used like pita but is made with barley flour and is doughy. Also, sweet black coffee and fresh orange juice.
He even brought his father out of retirement to return to the workshop and help teach. The last thing he said to me was, “if you send craftsmen to a desert island they will build a civilization. If you send engineers to a desert island they will starve to death because they can’t make tools, they can’t make a spoon.”
I was guest teaching a communications class in which the students were practicing their interview skills on me and these were the questions: (I’m not making this up.)
About the cat calling. I thought one of the upsides to traveling in my dotage, in modest clothes, with dark hair, in a country where people have already spoken to me in Arabic, Spanish and Italian, would be a cat call free experience. But no. So, how do I explain this (at least to myself?) I think that what happens in a country with a majority religion is that it forces those of us not in the majority religion into the position of irrefutable other. And that’s dehumanizing and easy to objectify. (Yes, every feminist publishing between 1978 and 1992 already said this, but I had to comb through my menopausal, jet lagged brain and rethink it anyway so now you have to listen as well.) After we checked into our hotel in Casablanca, Loubna went to meet a friend and I took a walk. I wore sunglasses so as to avoid eye contact and yet the kissing noises and the invasion of personal space were relentless. 
I ducked into a few shops, bought some postcards (but couldn’t find stamps,) resisted more coffee, decided against getting lost in the Medina and headed back to the hotel. Just before crossing the last street between me and air conditioned heaven, a young woman tapped me on the shoulder, and I was so balled up and tense and suspicious that I jumped, like in a cartoon and my “ Ah!!” was indeed audible. She smiled and handed me my hotel room keycard which had fallen out of my pocket when I took my phone out to use as a camera. I thanked her in English, Arabic and French. She then asked me, in French, if I spoke French, I said no, and then she said, in French, well, I don’t what she said, but I looked at her and said, “I should be careful, yes?” And she smiled and touched my hand and said “Oui!” and walked away. So that’s it for my good karma. Spent.
We tried to eat lunch in Mrirt, but I was too much of a spectacle, so we drove the two hours on the curvy mountain roads to a different small town, where I was also a spectacle but accompanied by fewer hoots and whistles and we found a place with tajine with meat and veggies and homemade bread. The landscape from Mrirt to Casablanca fades from bright green to dried mint, the cedars grow closer to the ground and there are lipstick red poppies for miles. I alternated between marveling at the small stone substance houses with old women hand thrashing wheat in front and holding back my nausea.
I recovered from the heat and the press of the Marrakech tourism tornado by finishing a novel on the roof of the Riad which is crowded with large planters spilling over with bougainvillea, chaise longues, shade umbrellas, hammocks and an orange and tabby cat who managed to follow the sun around the roof. I went out for dinner alone at a restaurant overlooking the square that has the Moroccan equivalent of a mariachi band playing vague covers of Harry Belafonte and Sinatra on traditional Moroccan instruments. The surreality of this was made hilarious by the vat of pink wine that came with my lamb tajine. 
Also, the many opportunities to make people’s night by taking their pictures — an older couple from France who never smiled once, a set of young couples from the Netherlands who wouldn’t stop smiling and a family from Germany who tipped up their plates of berber style dessert crepes to match their we-were-somewhere-foreign expressions. People either come for the chaos and embrace the diversity and color and constant motion (like the Dutch) or people get exhausted and offended and look for escape (the Indian couple) but no one feels neutral about Marrakech. It’s all up in your grill and you have to decide. Unless you manage a hammam and lamb tajine with pink wine in about 24 hours. Then you see the value of it all even as you feel the thundering waste and overcompensation.
The Barbary Macaque, unique to North Africa and most prevalent in Morocco, is in imminent danger of extinction, according to the