The Moroccan who was jailed for putting up a fake profile of Prince Moulay Rashid has been freed. This is great news, and while it should have never gotten to this, better late than never. I suppose the king wanted to make sure the message got across that the royal family is a no-go area [...]

14 jours après l’arrestation de Fouad Mourtada, plusieurs sites de blogs marocains, réputés par leur grande influence au Maroc, sont en grève aujourd’hui, Mardi 19 février 2008, en solidarité avec Fouad et sa famille.

The arrest and brutal treatment of Fouad Mourtada, the young man who create a fake Facebook profile of Morocco’s Prince Moulay Rachid, is a sad testimony to the fact that things have not changed as much as the regime would like you to believe in Morocco. Here is the statement his supporters have put out:

Official [...]

The Winter 2008 issue of Bidoun, the Middle Eastern arts and culture magazine, has been out for a few weeks now. For some weird reason I can never access it directly from Egypt, it only works through a proxy like proxyfellow.com or hidemyass.com, but it’s worth the trouble to check out the striking cover (below) [...]

Moroccan Unrest Over Bread Price:
CASABLANCA, Morocco — Violent protests over the cost of bread prompted the Moroccan government to annul a 30 percent price hike linked to soaring global grain costs.
Protesters clashed with police, cars were torched and buildings damaged in the demonstrations Sunday in Sefrou, 120 miles east of the capital Rabat. Some 300 [...]

Yesterday Le Monde published a fascinating analysis of the recent Moroccan parliamentary elections. I am pasting the full article after the jump since I don’t think it’s available to non-subscribers, and will focus on a choice excerpt here:
En fait, c’est l’abstention sociologique - celle de la masse des marginalisés sociaux - qui s’est le plus [...]

(With apologies to Jean Baudrillard)
Little by little on Saturday the results of Morocco’s parliamentary elections leaked out. First, in the morning, we heard that the PJD still felt it would come first of 33 parties but would still get less than the 60-70 it expected, compared to the 43 it had in the exiting parliament. [...]

A quick note on this before more tomorrow (I don’t have much time and net access today): Ahmed Reda Benchemsi, publisher and editor-in-chief of the Moroccan weeklies TelQuel and Nichane, was arrested briefly over the weekend and charged on Monday with insulting Morocco’s King Mohammed VI. The reason? An editorial in TelQuel and Nichane criticizing [...]

This is a nicely written story about the role of public bakeries in traditional Moroccan life — it made my mouth water at the thought of the tasty bread I grew up with. But it was slightly ruined for me towards the end with the author’s dinner at Mohammed Benaissa, the hapless and reportedly quite [...]

Below, a clipping from a French-langauge Moroccan paper showing an article on the annual Hajj lottery next to an ad for vodka. Details at Laila Lalami’s blog.

Why is YouTube blocked in Morocco? I remember seeing some nice historical archive of Hassan II on there, but nothing too compromising on King Muhammad VI. That’s the only political reason I could think of, as well the many critical videos on the Western Sahara. If YouTube is indeed being blocking by Morocco’s main ISP, [...]

Jason Burke, author of “Al-Qaeda: Casting a Shadow of Terror”, has a long Magazine piece in today’s Observer. It’s pretty much your standard Morocco at a crossroads between modernity and tradition piece of the kind that gets written all the time by foreign journos, even if it does contain a decent and eclectic selection of [...]

Laila Lalami has a nice post about the opening of the Rif Cinematheque in Tangiers, which is perhaps Morocco’s first art house cinema. I visited the Rif while it was still being renovated last summer and spent time with the couple behind it, Moroccan photographer Yto Barrada and her American husband Sean Gullette (the main [...]

Bakchich has an article explaining how the ministry of interior is rigging Morocco’s electoral map to favor rural areas, where the moderate Islamist PJD has made little inroads, to contain the success polls have been predicting since last year. In a sense, this is ethnic electioneering, with the mostly Berber / tribal countryside long loyal [...]

A very nice post by Laila Lalami on the landmark Moroccan intellectual magazines Lamalif and Souffles.

The NYT discovers Moroccan honey. Skip the boilerplate travel-writing imagery and take heed, Moroccan honey is great. Especially if spread on a buttered gheif (the much better Moroccan equivalent of Egyptian feteer.)
Well, that’s my culinary nationalism post of the day done. Also, one of the most beautiful books you could ever read on Fez, or [...]

Abou Bakr Jamai, editor of Morocco’s only truly independent publication, Le Journal Hebdo, has an interesting post on his WaPo blog about the biggest political controversy of the moment in Morocco: polls that indicate the Islamist PJD party is set to come about 30% ahead of the next party in next year’s parliamentary election.
When first [...]

The Economist Intelligence Unit has released an index of democracies [PDF] in which it ranks full democracies, flawed democracies, “hybrid systems” and authoritarian regimes. Egypt and Morocco are both at the same rank (115) in the last category — here’s Moroccan blogger Larbi’s take on it — while the US, UK, France or Japan don’t [...]

While feeling a little bad about it, I am secretly pleased about Royal Air Maroc’s decision — as reported by the BBC — to ban its employees from praying on company time. On the one hand, it’s obviously rather insensitive to people’s religious beliefs and stigmatizes religion as something suspicious and preferable to avoid. It’s [...]

If you read French, go immediately check out Bakchich, an excellent webzine/blog about sub-Saharan Africa, the Maghreb and the Middle East (but it’s especially good on the Maghreb and Muslim Africa.) They have a handsomely designed PDF magazine (a kind of Canard Enchainé or Private Eye for the region) as well as a blog, and [...]