Arab News Blog

Street in Tangier, by Henry Ossawa Tanne, ca 1910

Tabsir Contributor Anouar Majid, will be giving two talks in Morocco in March. Details below:

“Todos somos moros: una invitación para un debate”
Conferencia de Anouar Majid

Fecha: 12-03-2012
Lugar: Salón de Actos. Fundación Instituto Euroárabe. Colegio de Niñas Nobles. C/ Cárcel Baja, 3.
Hora: 19:30

Anouar Majid, (Tánger, Marruecos), es director del Centro de Humanidades y director adjunto de Iniciativas Globales de la Universidad de New England, Portland, Maine, (EEUU). Reconocido analista del papel del islam en la edad de la globalización y de las conflictivas relaciones del islam con Occidente desde 1492. Autor de “We are all Moors: ending centuries of Crusades against Muslims and other minorities”,”A call for heresy:why dissent is vital for Islam and America”, “Freedom and Orthodoxy: Islam and difference in the post-Andalusian age”, “Si Yussef”(novela)…Ha sido descrito por el filósofo y profesor de la Universidad de Princeton, Cornel West, en su obra “Democracy matters”, como “uno de los escasos intelectuales islámicos de envergadura”. Dirige la revista norteamericana-marroquí de ideas y cultura TingisRedux y colabora asiduamente en el Washington Post, Chronicle of Higuer Education y otras publicaciones.

Su conferencia, que reflexiona a partir del lugar destacado que históricamente ocupa España en el clima de desconfianza secular entre árabes y occidentales, trata de demostrar que las claves de una transición democrática y de una política económica con la diversidad como lema en el mundo árabe e islámico deben ser halladas en los antiguos territorios de Al Andalus.

Understanding American-Muslim Relations
Professor Anouar Majid
American Legation, 8 rue d’Amérique, Tangier.
Friday, 16 March, 19:00

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For reference purposes: Morocco’s Le Matin gives us biographies of the members of the new Moroccan Cabinet. (In French. Will try to add an Arabic link if I see one.)

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See after the jump — we hope to produce something similar for Egypt’s elections. The organization that put this together is CAPDEMA.

Click the headline to read more

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“Morocco” and “SlutWalk”. Read the article for more. (Link was broken. Now fixed.)

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Saudi King is leaving for Morocco in a few days, my sources tell me.

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It's so embarassing to see that Morocco's defenders in Washington are neo-con fanatics like Rubin.
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Meet Morocco, the new Tunisia.
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A new report says that Facebook now has 15 million subscribers in the Arab world while all Arab newspapers — in Arabic, French and English combined — sell ony 14 million copies.

That link is to a BBC story. You can find the summary from Spot On Public Relations (a Dubai-based PR firm) here. The full report in PDF is here. (And yes, the PR firm is on Facebook.)

Some of their findings from their website:

— MENA’s top five Facebook country markets, Egypt, Morocco, Tunisia, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, account for 70% of all users in the region.

— 50% of MENA Facebook users have selected their primary language for using Facebook as English, with 25% preferring French and just 23% Arabic.

— Only 37% of Facebook users in MENA are female (compared with 56% in the USA and 52% in the UK). Only Bahrain and Lebanon Facebook communities approach gender equality with female users accounting for about 44% of total users.

— The GCC has five million Facebook users, which Saudi Arabia and the UAE representing 45% and 31% of that total respectively.

— North Africa has 7.7 million Facebook users, with Egypt accounting for 3.4 million users (or 44% of all North Africa users). Egypt has the largest Facebook community in MENA.

— Francophone countries Algeria, Morocco and Tunisia together account for 3.7 million French speaking Facebook users, equivalent to nearly 25% of all MENA users.

As the BBC report notes, the study doesn’t go into how many of these users are using Facebook: political activisim gets a lot of attention but presumably there’s a lot of the same kind of social chatter we see in the West; the Middle Easterners I’m linked to on Facebook seem all over the place in what they post.

And of course, if you equate the sale of one copy of a newspaper with its having one reader, you’ve never been in a Middle Eastern coffeehouse.

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