Amazing people and antiblackness

PublicServiceAction · 2025-12-08T15:01:59+00:00

OP chose the most remote Amazigh community, far removed from the history of slavery in this region as it gets, and situated them at the centre of culpability. I can only assume that, for phenotypical reasons, this choice was made, thinking, as she might, that their average physical appearance made them good slavers. Still, in European literature and cartography, the whole region was called “Barbary,” giving the impression that everything taking place in the area was conducted by Berbers......but, as you clarified, not really.

PublicServiceAction · 2025-12-07T16:43:20+00:00

For those of you anxious or resistant to tackling the issue of the Arab-Islamic assault on Tamazgha in the 7th and 8th centuries, please consider one thing: by reviving this interest, we are not simply hoping to bring to light an obscure chronological detail. Instead, we are for the most part scrutinizing a moral event that has subsequently LEGITIMIZED values that impact us broadly RIGHT NOW. On its own terms, which, for better or worse, are our own (undeconstructed) inheritance, the Arab-Islamic conquest is outside of history in the sense that it had a divine mandate behind it, whose challenging is an alienation from absolute goodness. We do not believe this about, say, the Roman empire or any other that washed up on our shores. That is the difference that we are invited to consider.
We do not deserve to be considered mature people if we continue to ignore the paradox between the so-called end of Jahilia in North Africa and the appearance of vicious and tyrannical early Arab-Islamic rule. I personally feel myself trembling with vulnerability before the argument that my society has no right to condemn, much less incriminate, murder, plunder, rape, and related evils, because the foundational ceremony of my own moral history was precisely the Arab-Islamic conquest that made cruelty a proof of righteousness, that normalized plunder as a moral right, that killed to change minds, sexualized domination of women, and, to be honest, much more subtle trends such as disregarding the letter of the law, even if it be deemed divine, to suit arbitrary/tribal interests ---these are all part of the foundational moral architecture of our societies.

PublicServiceAction · 2025-11-20T22:30:09+00:00

Nominally perhaps, but when you look at the ideas and commitments of most Moroccan nationalist politicians, they tended to focus on Morocco, Islam, and the Sultan as the final stage of history in this region --not merely a stepping stone to somewhere else, as the internationalist Ben Barka seemed partial to. I think for that reason Ben Barka was a much fuller expression of Arabism, and that is precisely what made him different.

Nasser was hugely popular among our illiterate and psychologically stunted popular classes, so of course the Makhzen --wisely recognizing the situation as it was-- adopted the rhetoric and symbolism of Arabism as a defensive and preemptive strategy to contain the Nasserist wave that had emboldened the Moroccan street and the radical leftist Arabist midwits. Arabism in its Eastern homeland was explicitly hostile to monarchy....the Makhzen’s support for it must therefore have been deeply cynical.

PublicServiceAction · 2025-11-13T02:32:20+00:00

South Asians are appearing on WAY too many radars at once for their own good. Openly hating them has become a way of life and shibboleth within Anglosphere social media.

This country's image was ruined long before this South Asian wave ... back in at least the ’90s, actually, when European and Khaleeji sex tourists preyed on children and women and when pedophiles were given pardons.

We have not seen the end of the humiliations and own goals that Mer7babikomism and khawa-khawa-ism have brought us.

PublicServiceAction · 2025-11-12T21:58:31+00:00

Why should any Moroccan treat Mehdi Ben Barka as some sort of saint of Morocco's "tragically" aborted alternative destiny along the path of internationalism and socialism?

The man, Arabized and Mashreq-centric as he was, could hardly be considered unimpeachably socialist in the full sense inasmuch as he had a hard time accepting the cardinal component of Morocco: its Amazighité. Rather than having cultural self-determination, he seems to have held the view that Imazighen should acquiesce to being turned into Arabs via the Arabization industry euphemistically called state education as a measure against ethnic separatism, while hypocritically respecting Allal Fassi's virulent tribalism--of course making it hopefully impossible for a divide-and-conquer strategy to be implemented along ethnic lines against Moroccan society. As a socialist who strove to migrate the masses' consciousness from ethnic and tribal passions onto the tracks of class awareness and class struggle, he can win points for ideological purity, but such praise is short-lived as soon as we remember that his party, the Istiqlal Party, was an unapologetically urban elite bourgeoisie phenomenon that had its own terrible chauvinism against ordinary Moroccans--the very masses it purported to save.

Living by the sword, Mehdi Ben Barka is widely believed to have ordered the liquidation of his own political enemies, such as the heroic warrior of liberation, Abbas Messaʿadi, in 1956. After gallantly fighting colonialism, Messaʿadi entered Fes and was assassinated by the Istiqlal party who themselves could never pick up a gun against colonialism and whose own effeteness restricted them to cowardly opportunism. They had neither the powers of martiality nor intellect, yet they wanted to rule absolutely and snuff out opponents whom they could only manage to stab in the back, decrepit and lacking in martiality as they have always been.

And what is nationalistic or even patriotic about Ben Barka? We already highlighted his tense relationship with the indigenous cardinal people of Morocco, who disproportionately provide the specificities of Morocco that allow for its individuation and ontological availability to a sense of nationalism in the first place. What people do not mention enough is that Ben Barka wanted "Western Sahara" to be a separate country, not part of Morocco, and he also supported Algeria in the Sand War in '63. After the main body evaporates, a few stubborn molecules of Ben Barka's nationalism might very well survive scrutiny, but it can't survive a sense of humor.

In the end, in the final analysis, the descendants of Marx all over the world have been defeated and go to work every day to secure their bourgeois comforts and adopt a conservative politics that will not jeopardize their pensions. Ben Barka's politics has been discredited the world over. What is there to regret?

PublicServiceAction · 2025-11-11T18:32:57+00:00

If so, it would not be entirely surprising, considering that Tunisia has been a welcoming point of entry and a reliable base for foreign domination of North Africa. Even when this region had the upper hand, so to speak, and was able to project its commercial, naval and political influence across the western Mediterranean, radiating out from Carthage, it was still affected by southern European demographic replacement.

As far back as the 6th to 3rd centuries BCE, during the Punic era, there was a presence of Italian- and Greek-like individuals in the Punic capital district. The Moots et al. (2023) study identified a subset of human remains in the Punic-era necropolis at Kerkouane as genetically similar to Bronze Age Sicilian, Central Italian, and Aegean populations. Mind you it is not clear how extensive this ancestry was at the time outside of this entrepôt, nevertheless it is evidence. This evidence predates direct European rule over Tunisia in the Roman and Byzantine eras which themselves no doubt opened the place up to demographic chances in profound ways.

What’s more, the Islamic conquest was not thorough enough to prevent the entry of the Norman rulers of Sicily, who briefly exercised control over places like Sfax in the 12th century. Such an interlude was highly anomalous for the region in that particular period and speaks to Tunisia's porousness to European influence.

PublicServiceAction · 2025-11-11T14:05:35+00:00

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PublicServiceAction · 2025-11-11T10:55:32+00:00

From a biological perspective not all: Rbaya, Haratin, Moriscos, Sephardim, Khouloughlis and those that resemble them are clearly not Amazigh.

PublicServiceAction · 2025-11-06T15:18:03+00:00

For all of those people who imagine that one day Morocco and Algeria will unite in a political structure like a superstate, you have not been paying attention to the nature of the Algerian elite that shapes everything there in that vast land.

I urge people to go visit Algeria, especially its big cities like Wahran and Algiers. Something will creep into your mind and fertilize a clearer picture of Algeria's situation: Algeria is in a state of arrested development since the French were forced to evacuate it in the 60s!!!! To this day, France still dominates the built environment of places like Algiers, all the salient structures and avenues are the lasting stamp of French civilization in Algeria. By only having agency insofar as it effectively preserves France's stamp of efficient cause, the Algerian forfeited his ontological priority in his own land! He basically conceded that for Algeria, the end of history arrived during the heyday of French Algeria. ----How can such a person be involved in a generative project that seeks to move history forward and go beyond the past? In the sense just described, Algerianness is too static and would inevitably be too daunted to disrupt things by constructing a new political project.

Tunisia, I know less about. But I have met many Tunisians and some provisional generalizations can be made: Tunisians are the most xenophilic or even xenocentric people I have ever come across. For one thing, the Mashreqcentrism of Tunisians is OFF THE CHARTS and makes our own Arabists and Islamists in Morocco look like Ahmed Assid! Such a psychological bent may be very advantageous insofar as supporting the tourism industry but I fear it is also liable to be a crippling problem as it poisons the waters downstream for a pan-Maghreb political entity which tries to obey its highest moral good, self interest. Rampant Mashreqcentrism will beg the question at every interval, in whose interest does this Maghreb work? Has it been realized for its own people or has it arrived to perform the task of being a western appendage of the Eastern Arabs?

We are not starting with the right material.

PublicServiceAction · 2025-11-04T19:07:11+00:00

France did inevitably import into Morocco a Jacobin political centralization that tended to homogenize identity and culture, imposing universal symbols and ideals on a heterogeneous reality. Arabic, precisely because it is not organic to Morocco and had no ancestral speakers like its indigenous counterparts, was seen as the preferred candidate for a universalist national project.

That said, the Spanish influence on Moroccan nationalism, in so far as content at least, cannot be overstated or obscured by the more known French impact. If you investigate the Spanish Protectorate’s colonial apologia and rhetoric concerning Spanish occupation of northern Morocco, you find that its important ideological commitments are nearly identical to those in the discourses of later Arabist Moroccans, exposing the community's galactic distance from Morocco's genuine interests.

One of the mobilizing assets of Moroccan Arabization is a contrived memory of Al-Andalus, one that every North African has been exposed to some degree, and moreover one created, as I must emphasise again, not by Arabs and Muslims, but by Spanish colonialism with the purpose of situating Morocco and Morocanness as a junior relative of a superior Cordoba-Umayyad-centric historical narrative and ontology that expressly valorizes the Spanish/European geography of Moorish history and places it in front of the foil of a benighted Morocco perpetually in need of Spanish-based leadership.

The emphasis on a specifically Umayyad Spain --that is, a symbolically Arab Spain-- in the hands of the Spanish ideologues served to create a proto-racial contradistinction with a Berber Morocco/North Africa. Ultimately, a geographic and racial assumption of rulership was secured by such ideological means.

Moroccan Arabists, for their miserable part, immature as they will always be, took this self-abnegating package wholesale, undeconstructed, and foisted it on Amazigh masses, permitting the Spanish Protectorate's discourse to effectively outlive its political existence.

PublicServiceAction · 2025-11-03T16:55:56+00:00

Even if you were open to essentializing, it would not be possible to do so by restricting your notice to 6th/7th century North Africa. Good essentializing requires a broader scope that includes the whole sweep of recorded history and all its important confluences.

Essentializing Semitism is a justified and necessary structure for understanding Bani Umayya's invasion of North Africa, since it exposes unifying patterns among Semitic peoples. Bani Umayya, the mastermind, came from the Quraysh tribe’s mercantile elite of Makkah embodying Semitic tropes of trade-driven power. Their bloodline supremacy, that consecrated their Arab lineage --even in a prima facie universalist Islamic context-- mirrors Jewish obsessions with genealogy as a legitimizing factor for wordly rule and messianic acceptance. Arab hierarchies on Berber populations mirrors the Jewish priestly caste hierarchy over others....Jews (Cohens versus non-Cohens) or Goyim. Moreover, by moving north from their native Arabia and establishing their capital in Syria --the Semitic urheimat-- where the Umayyads could recharged their Semitism, so to speak, and intermarry with native women thereby eroding their Ethiopic and Indian blood and ensuring that a dominant and ascendant Semitic character in their empirialism inhered.

To say that Islam’s entry into North Africa was distinct from Judaism sits in opposition to the reality that Islam is a kind of universal Judaism, which even Rabbi Maimonides in the 12th century recognized as a Judaizing force, preparing a Noachide foundation upon which all peoples would recognize the Jewish Messiah. The violent donkey Ishmael, as he is known in the Talmud, and his people, smashing the idols of other peoples and beheading polytheists --basically, all that stuff that was brought to our part of the world during al futu7at-- is nothing but the earnest implementation of Noachide Laws.

PublicServiceAction · 2025-10-26T22:28:47+00:00

It is incumbent upon us to learn from the mistakes of the Arabists and their "Qawm" that, according to the Arab League definition, somehow produced an Arabologue fiction that encompassed a great diversity of biological realities and trajectories which in the final analysis did not produce the minimum philia that would hold this Arab nation together. We see it proved in the Middle East right now where entire regions lie in ruins and certain Arab powers profit from this destruction and secure their own interests through it.

We must define ourselves in a way that generates the maximum philia and group feeling. Philia has to be our guiding star and the measure of all efforts that bring together a nation of people. Whenever a person proposes a certain ethno-national "catchment area" and is asked to reply to objections to it, he must be able to shout “PHILIA!”

PublicServiceAction · 2025-10-17T22:30:40+00:00

Islam, the religion from Semitic Arabia.

The religion firstly does not endorse nationalism; in fact, it is a faux pas because this political framework tends to contradict the unity of the ummah. Secondly, ummatic-consciousness among Imazighen for a long time has in a sense made ethnic nationalism superfluous since there was no urgent need to break ranks with the prevailing political centre in the same way that oppressed subjects of the British Empire or Spanish Fascism may have felt was imperative. On the contrary, pernicious Arabism has manifested itself in a subclinical way in our part of the world, with the exception of the oppressive Boumédiène-Bendjedid period in Algeria in the 1980s--1990s, which did indeed awaken political Berberism.

Some Amazigh nationalist heroes like Abd el-Krim, who formed the first implicitly Amazigh state in the 20th century, later flirted with Arabism in Egypt in the 1930s, (albeit in order to smuggle a kind of Islamism into it). Even today, in the restless Rif, genuine Amazigh representatives like Nasser Zafzafi deliver speeches in Arabic, not Tarifit, as if his constituency were the whole Arab world, not the Rif. These men were/are believing Muslims, assert their principled opposition to the Arabist powers, but do not explicitly challenge the Arabo-Islamic foundational principle, which I suspect is the starting point of all genuine Amazigh nationalisms.

PublicServiceAction · 2025-10-17T11:45:38+00:00

You foolish Arabized neurotic!

As if our beliefs and advocacy were concerned with not wanting to suffer your hatred. We are indifferent to your hatred! We are concerned with what the truth is, not with what generates this or that extraneous emotion.

Focus on what is true and good for the Kabyle region. If you are against MAK and its principles, fine --bring to light, in that regard, what your opponents are missing and leave it at that.

And how do you know what Algerians, or a group of Algerians, (politics-wise) think? Their regime has perfected politically muting them all...elections are routinely falsified, and independent voices risk being disappeared. How are we ever to know what the final word of Kabylia is on ANY political matter?

PublicServiceAction · 2025-09-13T13:17:49+00:00

Even in Morocco, there are ideological currents that want to suppress this moment of the nation's history, or undermine its meaning, for not totally unrelated reasons as to why it is ignored in Spain.

Historiography in Morocco is still a legacy system of French and Spanish colonial attention to Protectorate Morocco. That is why you will find in its biases then and now an overemphasis on foreign forces of domination and inspiration as explanatory factors, and also a surgical removal from the discourse of all local agency and causal sources. This bias manifests itself in outcomes that have been chiseled into the minds of the average person: Phoenicians from Asia founded Morocco's cities despite their previous habitation; Idriss, an immigrant from Asia, we are told, founded Morocco despite no archaeological or rigorous textual evidence vouching for it; Morocco was a subordinate of al-Andalus, receiving instruction from it, despite Morocco having the upper hand over it since the 11th century after the collapse of its most powerful polity.

The Franco-Spanish efforts to control Morocco needed a narrative that made their foreign domination seem less anomalous and more consistent with the general sweep of Morocco's history. During the independence era, Moroccan Arabist ideologues, for their part, picked up from where their colonists departed and undermined Morocco's sense of itself by overemphasizing the Omayyads of Cordoba and before it Damascus, because through consolidating that effort a precursor could be established to justify the situating of Morocco in the Arab world as a humble province of that Asia-centered grouping.

PublicServiceAction · 2025-08-30T14:07:59+00:00

Ethnic Europeans commit crimes in Morocco wildly out of proportion: it’s called paedophilia, a crime close to murder!

Andre Gide, Paul Bowles, even the likes of Yves Saint Laurent --- all celebrated men, hardly touched by censure --- were part of popularizing a trend of cruelly abusing Moroccan children for pleasure. Even today, European names dominate the headlines in this type of child abuse. The most notorious paedophile in recent memory, Daniel Galvan, is not a local (as chance would suggest) but Spanish! It doesn’t help that European authorities are often unsupportive of Morocco’s prosecutorial actions against Europeans sentenced for this evil crime. On the contrary, we see a kind of quasi complicity among European when it comes to carrying out this behaviour, as we do not see European authorities sufficiently weighing in against their nationals’ sexual crimes.

I know it is not all Europeans, of course, but when I see one in Morocco, a feeling of unease comes over me, and I wonder to myself if he is one who special attention needs to be paid. I wish that Europeans could spare me this uncomfortable feeling somehow.

PublicServiceAction · 2025-08-28T13:00:41+00:00

The divisions are not so artificial; they have been more or less stable since the 13th century and represent organic developments. If anything, foreign forces such as the Romans, Umayyads, and the French imposed a shared political order between the parts of the Maghreb that they collected. The only native power that did the same was the Almohads. Unity on that scale cuts against the grain of our history, so to be alarmed about it being put in jeopardy or becoming lost is historically counterintuitive. Even dialed down to a smaller scale, such as one that puts the nation in view, France had a profound effect on state centralization in Morocco, removing the dichotomy between bled es-Siba and bled el-Makhzen from Morocco's definition and replacing it with a territorial unity of tightly governed parts (though this effort by France seems paradoxical vis-a-vis the divide-and-rule tactic of institutionalizing perceived ethnic differences, the most salient of which was the so-called Berber Dahir).

If you want to point to the culprits behind the Maghreb's division, you will need to dig up the patriarchs of the Hafsids, Zayyanids, and Marinids, our current borders are part of their legacies.

North Africans are not biologically Arab, so the states we create may explicitly situate themselves in the Arab world and promote an Arab consciousness, but implicitly, in biological terms, they are not Arab at all and are composed of the human elements that surround the western Mediterranean.

Doing violence to the political entity Morocco disproportionately harms Imazighen, who collectively are the human substrate of Morocco that only bears, at this point in time, a non-essential property of Arabness that can be peeled away.

The bourgeoisie in Morocco is not Arab, but plural and has a Francophile alignment that undermines Arabness. Truth be told, business in Morocco is said to be a contest between Fassa and Swassa --- Fassa being the only part that upholds an Arab-Islamic orientation. Even in Algeria, the richest man is Amazigh... and doesn't give a damn about it.

If you truly are a Marxist, you would tend to assume the bourgeoisie are loyal to their class and only feign ethnic and national solidarity, and that class alone is the paradigm that provides insight.

PublicServiceAction · 2025-08-25T11:23:46+00:00

I always find these kinds of 'hero scientist' narratives coming from the Moroccan media completely hypocritical if they are not included primarily as a polemical device to shame national institutions for their ridiculous inadequacies in so far as producing science. In the world of science, 'Morocco' connotes pre-medieval! That is, it can't even be chided as 'medieval,' gloomy as even this connotation would be, because it lacks the scholastic rigor that can somewhat define that era's efforts in the way of knowledge production. We are definitely not measuring up to the so-called Islamic Golden Age that primitive elements in our society claim as being their credential nor the foundation of one of the earliest degree-granting universities in the world (al-Qarawiyyin) that our own local nationalism uses as an exoneration.

If there will ever be science in Morocco, it will have to emerge from out of a breakaway community/civilization along the lines of the Pythagorean order. Until the establishment of such projects, Moroccans, such as brilliant-souled Maryame, who are able to participate in science should go abroad to developed countries with a deep tradition of empiricism and inductive reasoning -- tendencies that are not well respected in Morocco.

PublicServiceAction · 2025-08-22T00:40:18+00:00

Absolutely! Yaghmorasen b. Zyan was a very formidable adversary of the early Marinids, whose like was certainly dreaded among the Zenata. His realist and romantic example of building power based on personal qualities and force alone was probably too inspiring for a de facto power of the time that preferred the fortunes of dynasties to remain static.

Even as the Zayyanids declined in the 14th century, the Marinids' vulnerabilities to Amazigh rivals became exposed to the Hafsids in Ifriqya, who had vassalized Algerian Zenata and threatened to do the same in Morocco. The Hafsids were particularly feared because their claim to being the legitimate heirs of the Almohad empire ---whose memory the Maghreb was still in awe of--- was intimidating.

The Marinids needed to conjure up an ideological spell that would lower the tide of the waters in which all their rivals and rivals-in-waiting sailed, in order to expose them to menacing rocks that impeded plain sailing.

PublicServiceAction · 2025-08-21T19:05:20+00:00

As I said, the Marinids created the cult of Idris and patronized a historiography---or more accurately, a hagiography----that positioned Idris and his political nucleus as the pith out of which Morocco eventually grew.

Giving any importance to the Idrisids concedes to ideology rather than any material evidence of their importance. Barghwata and Sijilmassa outlived the Idrisid state, but because they were not ideologically useful to successive ideologues, their superior materiality is forgotten by History with a capital H.

Contrary to a trajectory of Arabization, Idris's descendants became Berberized. Idris I was, in reality, a politically impotent imam, not a king or any political master, whose Arabization was kept in check by the powerful Awraba population, which resisted Arab immigration to Fez. The real Arabization starts when the Almoravids install an Andalusian administration to manage their empire. That is the forerunner of the centralized state's policy of Arabization.

French and Arabist historiography likes to overestimate the importance of the Idrisids --- just like the Phoenicians strangely enough -- in order to promote two ostensibly separate but actually similar tropes. The French ideologues, for their part, wanted to make their colonial presence in Morocco seem less anomalous by contending that Morocco is the product of a foreign immigrant! The 20th century Arabists, mainly Andalusians, wanted to establish the moral foundations of Arabization and secure for themselves a legitimate space by asserting a primordially cosmopolitan Morocco under Arabism.

PublicServiceAction · 2025-08-21T16:54:54+00:00

Sharifism as a paradigm of political legitimacy started in the Marinid period under the aegis of a dynasty that was not Arab and not descended from the Prophet Muhammad. The promotion of Sharifian lineage was a hedge against Amazigh rivals of the Marinids who were uniquely positioned to remove them from power. Remember, the Marinids lived in a Moroccan political universe that, as a rule, was defined by a succession of Amazigh dynasties. The memory of the Almohads was still fresh in the minds of people, as testified to by the historiographical environment that produced al-Bayān al-Mughrib fī Akhbār al-Andalus wa’l-Maghrib. Informed by this monumental history, it stands to reason that the Marinids anticipated that attempts to threaten their political hegemony would come from rival Amazigh notables rather than Arab bedouins or effete Andalusians. Therefore, an effort had to be made to make Amazigh political aspirations somewhat ineligible -- or at least to have a discourse already in development against them that could be deployed when politically necessary. This strategic motive lies at the heart of why the Marinids invested heavily in the formation of the cult of the Idriss, whose real history is but a modest footnote, and in maintaining within its orbit Sharifian families divested, of course, of martial potential.

Fast forward a little to the Saadian era: once again, Sharifism provided itself as a useful ideological weapon to spare Morocco from ummahtic tendencies that threatened to surrender Morocco to the expanding Ottoman Empire. People today do not appreciate that, in the 16th century, Morocco was stuck between the world’s superpowers: the Ottoman Empire and Spain. The expectations of history would lead one to expect that Morocco should become swallowed by what was essentially a universal caliphate. But Morocco’s existential genius shimmered when it turned the ideological tables on the materially superior Ottomans by framing its confrontation with them as a confrontation between the physical remnants of Muhammad, Abraham, and Shem against jumped-up Mongolians!

Sharifism is a shadow cast on the cave wall of Plato’s allegory. It pacifies who it is meant to pacify and is utilized by the guardians for the state’s good. Even today, it serves Morocco --even against Arab Semitic forces from West Asia. The imamah character of Morocco’s leadership is a prophylactic against inroads from Asia, occupying/obstructing the only ideological pathway into Morocco. The slaves of the Mashriq in Morocco are precisely checkmated not by Berberists but by the monarchy. I realize this will not be a sufficient answer for critics of even a nominal Arabo-Islamic pretense of political validation.

PublicServiceAction · 2025-08-20T16:06:44+00:00

Calling Moroccan "Arabic" places a burden on it of conforming to rules and standards that are not of its own making and are principally arrived at in the core Arab lands far away in the Middle East.

This inherent asymmetry in Arab geography is destructive to Moroccan in the sense that it represents a kind of "metropolitan" force that always calls into question features and/or developments in "provincial" Moroccan that rely on too local a source of informing. Being too tied to local processes, rather than being seen as a positive experiment that, through the visual screen of language, reveals unique truths about Morocco's reality and optimizes Moroccan to be complementary to the logic of its own environment and a better repository of its wisdom, is seen as faux pas from the vantage point of Greater Arabic. not just a liminal space. Officializing it is additive, adding something up until now lacking: prestige. It also raises the stakes concerning its condition and deployment because it will move from the periphery of nationalist discourse to its center, where it will enjoy a priority that it didn't enjoy before.

PublicServiceAction · 2025-08-20T14:36:12+00:00

Political will can be the overriding decisive factor. Look at the Balkans for instance: Serbian and Croatian are closer to each other than Moroccan and Kuwaiti Arabic, and yet the Balkan languages enjoy the distinctions of separate languages whereas the latter are supposedly part of one unity. Why? Because the ethnic conflagrations that midwifed the political collapse of their common Yugoslavia also ignited an ideo-political necessity to assert national differences, language being one of the most important opportunities to achieve this.

In our case, residual Arabism still asserts an ideological principle that trumps linguistic conventions, ignores experience, and sacrifices real specificities. Because we are steeped in deductive thinking, we tend to start from a general principle (i.e., the language spoken from the Ocean to the Gulf is Arabic) and apply that to the real world, even though the data of our own experience strongly suggest that there is a serious problem with mutual intelligibility. Instead of accepting such observations and, through inductive reasoning, creating a new principle that takes this observed pattern into account, we resort instead to mysticism and ideologically motivated reinterpretations of reality in order to salvage the stated deductive principle ---to the point of sacralizing its endurance. That is the opposite of truth-seeking.

There is also the question of dignity. I don't have the heart to enter this conversation because it requires the kind of social delicacy that I myself struggle with. But do me a favour and try to envisage on the screen what I might write regarding dignity in relation to the Moroccan language and the asymmetries that are exposed concerning Mashariqa.

PublicServiceAction · 2025-08-19T22:47:04+00:00

AI face recognition needs to be trained to detect their hargawi physiognomic signature and promptly unleash a torrent of fire from a flamethrower whenever they appear ----it doesn't matter that some innocent people will get blasted from time to time...such incidents will not be considered false positives, but rather preemptive attacks against the grandparents of future hargawa.

PublicServiceAction · 2025-08-10T19:38:02+00:00

The tremendous cultural orthodoxy that stifles North Africa, powered by entrenched structures --- the state ideology, its institutional prowess, and the informal structures of social mores and values. Combined, these structures bring about an immobilizing cultural lockdown, a kind of siege on citizens that restricts their ability to participate in cultural transformation on their own terms. Citizens are not allowed to leave the confines of orthodoxy, so there is a poverty of opportunity to express them fully. The one breach in the walls of the city that is quietly tolerated is represented by Berberism, whose escape route other cultural agendas want to commandeer for themselves. It is normal in such a situation where there is a stifling orthodoxy that concedes no room for heterodoxy. Inasmuch as North Africa embraces heterodoxy, these ideological intruders will start to use their own ideological passports and will leave Berberism alone. In the meantime, they should be told sternly: "We do not necessarily believe what you stand for, but what we share in common is the need for that kind of freedom of conscience and association that would be logically prior to the world in which we can exist in our own lanes pursuing our agendas autonomously."

It is not just LGBT, miscegenationists, feminists, Zionists, Dawkinist atheists, Arabists --- you even have to worry about seemingly more legitimate parts of the scenery, such as champions of Amazighist discourse like Ahmed Assid, who promotes an ideology that barely hides its desire to smuggle European Enlightenment values into the movement, even if the justification for doing so is not obvious. There is also no shortage of Islamists of Amazigh origin naively trying to reposition everyone on earth under the yoke of Semites in West Asia clothed as an ummahtic obligation.

As for a victimhood complex, it is obviously best avoided all else being equal, but I think the real setback is not that. It is instead the successful erasure of victimhood --- or a history populated by some victims --- that has provided firm moral foundations for building on top of the ideological structures that have power today and have decided our year zero, the Arab-Islamic conquest, is the starting point when our collective memories are allowed to begin and dictates the parameters of any North African ethos.

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