I attended a fascinating presentation today, sponsored by the Middle East Institute and the Tangier American Legation Museum Society, on the state of efforts to preserve the old city, or medina, in Tangier.  Hanae Bekkari, vice president of the Tangier Medina Foundation and a prominent Moroccan architect, described the history of the city and the Foundation's preservation efforts.  She delivered the talk in English, and then took questions through an interpreter, to which she responded in French.

Among the Foundation's more remarkable projects is a women's literacy project, which in addition to teaching women to read and write Arabic, administers a microcredit fund which lends money to the women in order to promote independent enterprise.  One goal of the project is to help preserve the medina, which is now largely inhabited by low income families from rural areas, by raising the income of the families who live there.  A higher level of prosperity will allow both the tenants and the landlords to invest more in the preservation of the old buildings. The Foundation sees this approach as preferable to the gentrification which has overtaken similar historic areas in other cities.

Tangier, owing to its history as a crossroads between Europe and North Africa, is an architectural layer cake.  It still retains its original Roman layout, a city divided by two main thoroughfares at the center of which lies the forum.  The Roman forum has successively been the site of a Roman temple, a Christian cathedral, and a mosque, which until lately had fallen into ruin but which has been restored under the new King of Morocco.  The buildings themselves reflect the successive destruction and rebuilding that has accompanied successive invastions by the Romans, the Arabs, the Portuguese, and the English, and in this respect differ from the largely intact architecture of the great Moroccan imperial cities of Fez and Marrakesh, whose Islamic architecture has been preserved intact for many centuries.

10:52:05 PM    

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For Me, It Was Never About God Washington Post writer Rick Weiss offers a poignant personal testament to his belief that religion is more about searching than about certainty. He discusses his profound disappointment that the Boy Scouts' ethic of self reliance that was so much a part of his youth has given way to a narrow-minded religious bigotry since the highjacking of the national leadership by zealots.

Weiss writes: "I was a Scout for five years, and rose to the rank of Eagle, and never felt I had to declare my allegiance to a God. Quite the contrary. The beauty of Scouting, it has always seemed to me, is that it teaches practical skills and an earthy self-reliance that allows boys to venture into wild environments where they can contemplate for themselves the real meaning of responsibility, humility and their place in the universe. Why would an organization demand a rote expression of religious faith when it's in a position to cultivate the real thing from scratch?"

Weiss's question is particularly moving in light of his account of his own long spiritual quest. At the end of the story, Weiss recounts how he took out his carefully stored Eagle medal, boxed it up with some twigs, and mailed it back to Scouting headquarters in Texas. More and more these days, I think perhaps I should do the same.

9:35:11 PM    


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 One thing I never realized as a child is that the real point of making your bed is not so that it will look good during the day, but so that it will be comfortable to lie down in at night.  I always resisted the former reason, but the logic of the latter is inescapable.

8:08:47 AM    


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 We cherish an illusion of permanence, but we are constantly reminded how provisional and contingent life is.

8:07:23 AM    


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