Moroccan Culture Quotes

My father used to say that stories are part of the most precious heritage of mankind.

Settling into a new country is like getting used to a new pair of shoes. At first they pinch a little, but you like the way they look, so you carry on. The longer you have them, the more comfortable they become. Until one day without realizing it you reach a glorious plateau. Wearing those shoes is like wearing no shoes at all. The more scuffed they get, the more you love them and the more you can't imagine life without them.

For my father there was no sharper way to understand a country than by listening to its stories.

At the dealership, I pulled out the sieve and toyed with it threateningly. When the salesman was ready for me, I held it up, told him I was not a tourist and demanded a large discount.

Every cuisine has its characteristic 'flavor principle,' Rozin contends, whether it is tomato-lemon-oregano in Greece; lime-chili in Mexico; onion-lard-paprika in Hungary, or, in Samin's Moroccan dish, cumin-coriander-cinnamon-ginger-onion-fruit. (And in America? Well, we do have Heinz ketchup, a flavor principle in a bottle that kids, or their parents, use to domesticate every imaginable kind of food. We also now have the familiar salty-umami taste of fast food, which I would guess is based on salt, soy oil, and MSG.

...he refused to consider the Moroccans' present culture, however decadent, an established fact, an existing thing. Instead, he seemed to believe that it was something accidentally left over from bygone centuries, now in a necessary state of transition, that the people needed temporary guidance in order to progress to some better condition.

Arabic language with them. This is when Morocco's Islamic

The young Moroccan-Dutch youth downloading English translations of Arabic texts from the Internet is also looking for a universal cause, severed from cultural and tribal specificities. The promised purity of modern Islamism, which is after all a revolutionary creed, has been disconnected from cultural tradition. That is why it appeals to those who feel displaced, in the suburbs of Paris no less than in Amsterdam. They are stuck between cultures they find equally alienating. The war between Ellian’s Enlightenment and Bouyeri’s jihad is not a straightforward clash between culture and universalism, but between two different visions of the universal, one radically secular, the other radically religious.

Authentic Moroccan heritage has a strong immunity to foreign cultures, so that it accepts openness without being affected by any external culture. We must sustain and consolidate this immunity in order to preserve our identity as Moroccans.

Ian began an affair with a deaf-mute albino Moroccan who apparently told him a lot about Arab beliefs and ideas; precisely because he was a deaf-mute he knew sign language. Ian was fascinated by the Arab way of life: he learned to speak a little Arabic and had a great respect for the culture, regarding it as superior to his own. But the affair was filled with friction and difficulties and there was one unpleasant incident when Ian was forced to suck the cock of a boyfriend of the deaf-mute when he didn’t want to. The Arabs called him “the Mad Woman”; they thought he was insane. Ian took to wandering in the countryside around the city, getting fucked by anyone he met. He was clearly going through some sort of breakdown. Burroughs later used the incident in the “End of the Line” section of Exterminator!: “The Arabs called I.S. the ‘Mad Woman.’ He was jeered at in the streets and very near such a complete breakdown as westerners in contact with Arabs habitually undergo in the novels of Mr. P.

In all countries ethnic diversity reduces trust. In Peruvian credit-sharing cooperatives, members default more often on loans when there is ethnic diversity among co-op members. Likewise, in Kenyan school districts, fundraising is easier in tribally homogenous areas. Dutch researchers found that immigrants to Holland were more likely to develop schizophrenia if they lived in mixed neighborhoods with Dutch people than if they lived in purely immigrant areas. Surinamese and Turks had twice the chance of getting schizophrenia if they had to deal with Dutch neighbors; for Moroccans, the likelihood quadrupled. Dora Costa of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Matthew Kahn of Tufts University analyzed 15 recent studies of the impact of diversity on social cohesion. They found that every study had “the same punch line: heterogeneity reduces civic engagement.” James Poterba of MIT has found that public spending on education falls as the percentage of elderly people without children rises. He notes, however, that the effect “is particularly large when the elderly residents and the school-age population are from different racial groups.” This unwillingness of taxpayers to fund public projects if the beneficiaries are from a different group is so consistent it has its own name—“the Florida effect”—from the fact that old, white Floridians are reluctant to pay taxes or vote for bond issues to support schools attended by blacks and Hispanics. Maine, Vermont, and West Virginia are the most racially homogeneous states, and spend the highest proportion of gross state product on public education. Most people believe charity begins with their own people. A study of begging in Moscow, for example, found that Russians are more likely to give money to fellow Russians than to Central Asians or others who do not look like them. Researchers in Australia have found that immigrants from countries racially and culturally similar to Australia—Britain, the United States, New Zealand, and South Africa—fit in and become involved in volunteer work at the same level as native-born Australians. Immigrants from non white countries volunteer at just over half that rate. At the same time, the more racially diverse the neighborhood in which immigrants live, the less likely native Australians themselves are to do volunteer work. Sydney has the most diversity of any Australian city—and also the lowest level of volunteerism. People want their efforts to benefit people like themselves. It has long been theorized that welfare programs are more generous in Europe because European countries have traditionally been more homogeneous than the United States, and that people are less resistant to paying for welfare if the beneficiaries are of the same race. Alberto Alesina and Edward Glaeser have used statistical regression techniques to conclude that about half the difference in welfare levels is explained by greater American diversity, and the other half by weaker leftist political parties. Americans are not stingy—they give more to charity than Europeans do—but they prefer to give to specific groups. Many Jews and blacks give largely or even exclusively to ethnic charities. There are no specifically white charities, but much church giving is essentially ethnic. Church congregations are usually homogeneous, which means that offerings for aid within the congregation stay within the ethnic group.