God Helps Those Who Help Each Other

            The other day I was chatting with a bunch of boys about a little bit of everything.  I want to report bits and pieces of the conversation because I think it will tell you a lot about how some Moroccans perceive the world.  To set the stage, these are four boys who I know very well, two of them are in their last year of high school while the other two are about to start their second year of university.  The two university students are both studying history.  None of the four has much English, but they are patient and willing to explain things in simple Arabic when we hit a roadblock.  One has quite good French, which helps with cognates.  All four are hard working, ambitious, and smart.  None has ever left the country, or, for that matter, travelled all that extensively in the country.

            I can’t remember quite how the conversation began, but it started getting interesting when we began to talk about democracy.  Their initial definition of democracy was a little off; they defined it as “being able to do whatever you want.”  I explained that while everyone should have a voice and a vote (two words which, in Arabic, are almost the same, sot and sout respectively) in a democracy oftentimes many people don’t get to do what they want because the vote is against them.  I then tried to further explain that in many democracies there are also failsafe laws to try to keep a majority group from subjugating a minority group.  In this way even majorities don’t always get to “do whatever they want” in democracies.  I made a tacit attempt to segue into Egypt from here (because I think its important that young people here understand why there was so much anger at the Muslim Brotherhood, anger that has now allowed a much more actively repressive regime to step in), but as I’ve talked about in previous posts there is a staunch refusal here to acknowledge that Morsi ever did anything wrong.

            Quite naturally from this failed segue we segued again into the news and how much you can trust the media.  I believe I’ve mentioned before that many Moroccans don’t trust any news source.  Given how used they are to state run and state censored news this isn’t surprising.  Unfortunately it leads to a tendency to believe in some pretty wild conspiracy theories (which media outlets are a part of).  These boys, like a lot of Moroccans I’ve talked to, would feel at home at a 9/11 Truthers conference, and this is where they steered the conversation next.  I have no patience for this theory, either at home or abroad, so I told the kids we were going to look closely at the possible motives both the U.S. Government and Al Qaeda might have had for attacking the towers, and the risks they would take on doing so.  Anyone who has ever debated a Truther back home knows how lopsided this list becomes, and I can now proudly say that two of the kids now believe Al Qaeda did it, the other two went from staunch believers in a government conspiracy to unsure.  I ended this part of the discussion by saying that while a healthy skepticism in what you read and hear in the media isn’t a bad thing, but a good skeptic doesn’t always write off what they read and hear, they analyze it, compare it to other sources, and use their brain to figure out what makes the most sense.  The boys seemed to like that idea.

            9/11 talk quickly and easily moved to Afghanistan and Iraq, which then moved to us talking about Syria and the recent threat of force and even more recent redaction of the threat.  These boys are pure cynics about United States involvement in Middle Eastern wars.  Interestingly, they don’t question that America ought to act as the world policeman.  I’d always thought it was only a small group of Americans who thought that was America’s duty.  These kids though think it is America’s duty, as the superpower, to keep order.  Whatever ought to be, though, they also think that America is bungling this duty.  In the case of Syria their anger is that we didn’t strike.  While I can’t speak for all of them, from other conversations I know at least one of these boys does not discriminate against Shia Muslims (Assad’s sect is a subgroup of the Shia), so for at least one of them the Sunni-Shia divide was not coloring this call for action.  We talked for awhile then about reasons for the U.S. not attacking, and past U.S. interventions and invasions (specifically, Libya, Iraq, Afghanistan, and Kosovo, which they knew a surprising amount about).  This got us talking about self-serving and altruistic national urges and how sometimes both of these can be present in an international action.

            This led to talking about the purpose of the Peace Corps itself.  I told them both about the more “self-serving” element (a way to peacefully swing countries out of Soviet influence, now a way to better America’s image in the world) and the altruistic elements of Peace Corps three stated goals: to pass on technical skills to people in the developing world who want them, to better other people’s understanding of Americans and American culture, to better American’s understanding of other peoples and other peoples’ cultures.  They liked that I mentioned both sides of the coin.  Then they asked what my opinion of the youth in their town is after having lived here almost a year and a half.

            I started by saying it is of course very hard to generalize, but if I had to I could divide the boys into two roughly equal groups: the group that works hard and the lazy bums.  I could do the same with the girls, I said, only then the groups aren’t equal, the vast majority of girls fall into the hard working group.  I told them I think this is because girls have so much of a more challenging life here, so they push harder against those challenges.  Three of the boys indignantly said girls lives were no harder thank you very much, but the fourth scoffed as they said so and joined me listing off the many ways girls have it harder here (less opportunity for work, more likely to be pulled out of school, less able to travel, less able to go outside at all, harassment, the list went on).  We convinced the other three rather quickly.

            Seeing an opportunity, I asked the boys what they thought we could do, as men, to help girls and women here in their struggle for equality, but they shot back that it’s impossible to improve the world since God makes its order.  I replied that God helps those who help themselves, then quickly added “and each other,” which to me seems like it would be truer.  This launched us into a discussion of whether this was a “Christian idea” or one that could apply in Islam too.  When I tried to join in they asked what I knew about Islam, so I laid down my credentials and told them about the college course I took and the books I read.  One boy said that American college courses on Islam must be about how bad the religion is.  I told them not at all, and explained that I’d had Muslim professors, Muslim TAs, Muslim friends in these classes, and even the ones taught by non-Muslims focused on Islam as a beautiful and great faith.  They seemed pretty shocked.  This makes me worry about how Christianity is approached in their classes, of the three Islamic Studies teachers at the high school I know one really dislikes America—he has twice shown up at my events and gone on anti-America rants and to him America and Christianity are synonyms—but the other two both seem like they would give a fairer appraisal, one is even a good friend who once delivered a counter rant to the first guy.  It didn’t seem like the time to ask, since they had to go and I wanted to end on a good note.  All in all it was quite the conversation!

P.S. Just so people don’t get concerned about the anti-American teacher, although he very much dislikes the States he seems to have no beef with me personally, and except for when he shows up at my events and says that America created AIDS (at the AIDS awareness event) or that America polluted the world (at my CLIMB kids Environmental Education Conference) he and I are quite civil to each other.  I do wonder, since he never seems all that interested in having longer conversations, if he knows my Arabic is good enough to follow his rants.