A Moroccan Star is Born

By Anouar Majid

I am not sure whether I am saying this correctly, but reading Laila Lalami’s novel, Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits, feels as if literature has spoken directly to me for the first time in my life. This has been a reading experience like no other I remember having. I did enjoy quite a few novels by Moroccan writers in the past, but somehow, Moroccan fiction, in any language, has sounded to me as if it were a copy of some other literature, as if the sensibility than runs through its veins were somehow a simulacrum of another national or cultural experience. Even Mohamed Choukri, my compadre from Tangier, sounded somehow foreign, as if he were a Jean Genet in Moroccan clothing, living on the exotic edges of a society that I inhabited but which was decidedly out of reach.

more

The Internet Galaxy

By Anouar Majid

To round up my reflections on the computer age, I read Manuel Castells’s reflections on the impact of the Internet on our lives and the future of humanity itself. Castells’s book, The Internet Galaxy, first published in 2001, makes it clear that inasmuch as the Internet is a culture, it is one that is rooted in a particular social tradition. First came the “techno-meritocratic culture” with its academic underpinnings; then came the hackers who tweaked any number of applications to bring them to the public and keep innovation alive; and finally came the “Virtual Communitarians” with goals at odds with the entrepreneurs whose risk (like artists) is often their ideas and thus have little to lose in this “new economy,” the most “multi-ethnic and global than any entrepreneurial culture in history.” Relaxed in their personal styles, enjoying the indulgences of high consumer culture, “Internet entrepreneurs are, at the same time, artists and prophets and greedy, as they hide their social autism behind their technological prowess.”

more

Turkey

By Anouar Majid

On December 15th, 2005, I sat at the Mevlana Cultural Center in Konya, Turkey and raised my hand in prayer with the shaykh at the end of the sama’ ceremony, performed by what are known in the West as "whirling dervishes." Except for the occasional mention of Mawlana Rumi, the founder of the order; Shams al-Din Tabrizi, his mystical mentor; and the Prophet Mohammed, I didn’t understand much of what was being said. But my wife and I felt the sweetness of the Spirit and the power of a community bonded by faith. That moment of final prayer came after a member of the Mevlevi musical ensemble, a young mujawwid, had recited from the Qur’an with such mesmerizing power that I could almost see his angelic voice rise to heaven. Hundreds of spectators in the state-of-the-art auditorium listened and prayed intensely. Looking at them, I was reminded of the Sufi mantra that as long as a wali, shaykh, or qutb is in the community, God will spare the land and its people. It is fair to say that, for me and my wife, the sama’ event in Konya was one of the most powerful spiritual experiences we had ever had.

more

Secrets of the Bazaar

By Anouar Majid

There is a lot of talk lately about outsourcing and globalization as the sure recipes for a better world, but for years computer hackers in the netherworld of the virtual have been talking about another kind of sourcing, one that, ironically, seems to carry more promise than the overvalued tenet of globalization.  It’s called Open Source, a term that was invented in 1998 (the concept is much older), after Netscape had thrown in the towel to Microsoft's Internet Explorer and opened its formerly closed code for the hackers of the world (the term “hacker” is not to be confused with “cracker,” the bad guys of cyberspace).  Netscape's CEO, Jim Barksdale, had read Eric S. Raymond's seminal essay, “The Cathedral and the Bazaar,” in which the author had come to realize that proprietary closed-source computer programs were no match for Linux, the open, peer-reviewed, and free operating system unleashed by a young Finnish student named Linus Torvalds in 1991, and decided to switch allegiances. The rest is, well, the hackers’ relentless quest for freedom.

more