I just received the January-March 2014 Critical Muslim, a special issue
on the Maghreb. Robin Yassin-Kassab, who co-edits this essential
quarterly journal with Ziauddin Sardar, discusses the term in an article
titled “Dusklands”:
Morocco’s Arabic name, ‘al-Maghreb’, emerges from the root gh-r-b,
which denotes concepts including the west, distance, and alienation.
‘Ghareeb’ means strange. ‘Ightirab’ means living outside the Arab world,
whether in the west or the east. ‘Maghreb’ also means sunset, dusk, the
evening prayer, the time at which the daily fast is broken. Al-Maghreb
al-Arabi refers to the entire Arab west – Libya, Algeria, Tunisia,
Mauritania, the Western Sahara – but Morocco has no other name. It is
al-Maghreb al-Aqsa, the furthest west, the strangest.
The ancient Egyptians believed they spent the afterlife wandering ‘the
Western Lands’. William Burroughs, who lived in Tangier, wrote a novel
inspired by the notion. When I lived in Morocco, teaching English at the
turn of the century, a Syrian woman of my acquaintance used to play on
the word like this: la tustughreb, anta fil-maghreb or, Don’t be
shocked, you’re in Morocco! On this return visit I heard the same phrase
from the mouth of a Moroccan man in a train.
Who can possibly resist a journal that simultaneously calls itself
Muslim—albeit critical—and that refers to William Burroughs in the same
breath? I would not and neither should you.
http://louisproyect.org/2014/01/19/critical-muslim/
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