| Buzás Ernő |
We've spoken to a Moroccan student about his experiences at home, getting used to Romania and his opinion on the Charlie Hebdo massacre. We also asked him to help us understand the Islamic and Arabic world better.
– What can you tell us about yourself?
– My name is Mounir. I’m from Morocco, where I was born and lived most of my life. I came to Romania for studies. I consider myself an atheist, a freethinker and a humanist.
– Did you suffer any discrimination where you come from because of your atheism, considering Morocco is an Islamic country?
– Well, there’s surely a certain level of discrimination against those who don’t subscribe to the official religion of the country, which is Sunni Islam, or follow a different denomination (Shia Islam or Ahmadi Islam for example). The law does not prohibit atheism or conversion to another religion on its own, but article 220 of the Moroccan penal code criminalizes “seducing a Muslim into abandoning his faith”. This law could be easily used to limit freedom of speech, for those who left Islam to another religion or to no religion. In practice, it’s more complicated though, and while there are people who have been prosecuted as a consequence of their conversion to another religion - there was a guy named Jamaa Ait Bakrim, a Christian convert, for example, sentenced to 15 years of imprisonment in 2005 for proselytism, there are also Moroccans who declared their non-Islamic views on International TV channels but were not officially prosecuted in any way, like Imadeddine Habib. Some of them however, have been the target of hate campaigns, and even physical attacks, and had to flee the country to avoid the worst. You can check the case ofKacem El Ghazzali, a good friend of mine, who got asylum in Switzerland. There’s a lot more I can say about this; for instance, there are many other laws which limit the freedoms of those who leave Islam, and maybe we could talk about those things in detail in another conversation; but to summarize, while Moroccan society may be considered as relatively tolerant, compared to countries like Saudi Arabia or Iran for example, both Moroccan authorities and Moroccan society assume that anyone not born in the recognized Jewish minority must be a Muslim, and must be subjected to the laws of the country which are inspired from Islam.
– How many in Morocco do you think have left Islam?
– It’s hard to tell. Questions of religion are not included in the national census, and no serious study has been done to estimate the percentage of those who have renounced Islam in Morocco. Some reports say that there could be thousands to tens of thousands who have converted to Christianity in secret. As for unbelievers - atheists or agnostics or deists or whatever they like to call themselves, their number must be substantially larger in my opinion. Recently there was this ridiculous article in Arabic that was shared widely on Facebook, and claimed to be based on a real scientific study, which estimated that there were exactly 325 atheists in Morocco! It was like the joke of the season in Moroccan atheist circles, and as some commenters said “they must have left out a few zeros”! Some people have three times that number of Moroccan atheists in their Facebook friend list alone, not to mention Moroccan atheist or secular groups which sometimes reach several thousand members or more, and those are just the people who are most active and engaged in the community. I would say the total number would be like 100.000 to 1 million of unbelievers, in a population of 35 million. And the number seems to be growing not only in Morocco, but also in other Islamic countries like Egypt and even Saudi Arabia. There’s a steadily growing trend towards atheism in the Arab world (this has also been happening in the West), which prompted authorities in some countries to devise measures to “stop the spread of atheism”. Last year Saudi Arabia declared atheism as a form of terrorism!
– Since you brought up comparison with other countries, how would you compare Morocco to other places in the Islamic world?
– If you’re speaking of the Islamic world at large, the differences are huge. Indonesia for example, which has the largest Muslim population in the world, has a different language, Indonesian, and a distinct culture from Morocco or any other country. Turkey is known for being more secular than any other country with Muslim majority, though this historical Turkish secularism seems to be in danger as of late. Native European Muslims, in Bosnia or Albania for example (or the Tatars in Romania, especially Constanta county – editor's note), seem significantly more tolerant and open than their Middle Eastern counterparts, as several surveys show, like one study by Pew Research Center. I don’t know, the topic is too broad; but suffice is to say that there are substantial differences in culture and in language between Islamic countries. If you’re speaking specifically of the Middle East and North Africa, the so-called “Arab region”, there are more common cultural elements – a common official language which is Standard Arabic, for instance, but also many differences. For example, women in Morocco have relatively more freedom to dress as they like, especially in big cities like Casablanca, but in Saudi Arabia they have a strict dress code they must respect, which is the full burka which covers the whole body in black, except the eyes, and sometimes they can show the whole face too. A Saudi-Arabian may have a cultural shock if he comes to Romania, and sees women dressed “less than modestly” from his point of view, but to me there was nothing unusual about how people dressed here, women included.
– So you had no cultural shock when you came here?
– Yes, none at all. Well, the main reason is that I don’t subscribe to the conservative culture of my parents. Most youngsters in Morocco are much less conservative than their parents anyway. And also because I consider myself a world citizen and I’m interested in other cultures; so to me “foreign” is not synonymous with “frightful” or “despicable”, but rather with “fascinating” and “exciting”. The Internet allowed me to explore other places, and even make friends with some people from those cultures, without leaving my bedroom. I did note a few differences here, from things I was familiar with in Morocco of course; some details about traffic organization, people seem more hospitable than I expected, kissing in public is quite normal, but in Morocco it could get you in jail etc. But I wasn’t shocked by these things.
– In reference to what you said earlier, many of our readers may easily confuse the terms “Muslim” and “Arab”, or think they are the same. Considering your background, can you tell us the difference between these two terms?
– The difference can be summed up in one sentence: not all Muslims are Arabs, and not all Arabs are Muslims. In fact there are more non-Arab Muslims in the world, than there are Arabs of any religion. A Muslim is a follower of Islam. Islam is a monotheistic religion where people worship one god named Allah (which is just the Arabic word for “God”). Islam of course started with Arabs, and the Koran, the holy book of Islam, was originally written in Arabic. But most Muslims today are not Arabs, as I just mentioned. In fact, the 4 countries that have the largest Muslim populations in the world, Indonesia, India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh, are not Arab countries.
As to “Arab”, this is a term that is more difficult to define. Originally Arabs were a nomad people who roamed the Arabian Desert (nowadays Saudi Arabia and surrounding countries), and sometimes settled in agglomerations like Mecca. But most people living nowadays who call themselves Arabs are not descended from these Ancient people. They have simply been “Arabized” by the Arab-Islamic conquests of the 7th and 8th centuries. Some populations like the Persians in Iran converted to Islam, but remained strongly attached to their culture and language. In other places like Egypt, people lost their original identity over the centuries, and now they see themselves as Arabs; though there are also those who are aware of historical facts, and prefer to distinguish themselves as Egyptians only. Many genetic studies have shown that the North African gene pool has not been substantially influenced by the Arab conquests, and so the current populations are mostly descended of the same people who lived there for thousands of years. I have personally never considered myself as an Arab, although I’m sure most people will find that strange considering that I come from an “Arab” country. Morocco has two official languages by the way, Standard Arabic, and Berber which is the original language of my ancestors, and is still spoken, in several dialects, by 30-40% of Moroccans.
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