Word: arabism
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Morocco has been French only since 1912. Before that, for eleven centuries, it had been a free and sovereign state since the time when a dissident leader of the all-conquering Arabs declared his independence of faraway Baghdad in the 8th century. For centuries, rulers alternated between Arab dynasties and the indigenous Berbers. The empire waxed and waned but was never conquered. While medieval Europe fought and languished, the university of Fez gathered scholars from all over the known world. The Moorish empire reached into Spain, building aqueducts, huge irrigation systems, and the great Alhambra at Granada. The present Sultan...
...result, 875 Moroccan physicians are French, only 19 Moslem; there are 350 French lawyers, only 27 Moslem. The French lived in Morocco as in a good hotel, and luxurious apartment houses overlooked squalid bidonvilles where Arab laborers crowded into shacks roofed over with flattened gasoline tins...
Whenever the Sultan showed signs of obduracy. El Glaoui would summon Berber horsemen down from the hills to surround the Arab towns in ragged but menacing array. In 1951, Juin forced a showdown, demanding that the Sultan condemn the Istiqlal and fire all nationalists from the government. Berber horsemen headed for Rabat, and Juin had a plane waiting at the airport to carry Mohammed V to exile if he balked. Glumly, Mohammed V capitulated; he denounced "violence," but he refused to condemn the Istiqlal. To Juin, it was clear that Mohammed would have...
...best to discredit Mohammed, releasing a flood of stories of alleged collaboration with the Nazis, and hustled him even farther away, to Madagascar. Back in Morocco, anger swelled, and terrorism began. Trains were derailed, warehouses fired, boycotts of French goods organized. It became virtually a death sentence for an Arab to be caught smoking a French cigarette...
Nearly all of Morocco's problems stem from its relations with France, and Morocco's man of balances has the delicate task of steering between the intemperate demands of Arab nationalists and the soberer counsel of those who recognize that France still has a considerable hold on Morocco's purse strings. The dominant Moroccan political force, stoutly behind Mohammed V, is still the Istiqlal, a party whose leadership is largely intellectual, membership mostly trade unionist. But one of Mohammed's problems is how to balance its laicist modernists against the conservative religionists of the medinas...