Marvine Howe, London and New York: Oxford University Press, 2005. 428 pages.

Veteran journalist Marvine Howe’s book on Morocco is unique in its genre. Though she worked for Radio Maroc and as a stringer for the New York Times and Time-Life in Morocco from 1951 to 1962, Howe has covered several topics related to that country since and returned for a serious “Tour du Maroc” with two old friends in 2001. Her book, with its countless interviews of political and cultural personalities before and after her departure in the 1960s, is more than simply journalism. Howe has invested a lifetime of studying Morocco and its people. This book, addressed to a general audience, reads like a comprehensive “state of the union” survey of Morocco today, in its variegated political, cultural, ethnic, religious, and economic aspects – all in a lucid and often elegant prose.

Howe has kept up with all of the major works on Morocco over the years,
both in French and in English, from John Waterbury’s The Commander of the Faithful (1970) to Fatima Sadiqi’s Women, Gender, and Language in Morocco (2002). Even the more recent book by Shana Cohen and Larabi Jaidi, Morocco: Globalization and Its Consequences (2006), shares many of her conclusions.

Yet more than the academic cachet of her writing, it is the sheer magnitude (in numbers of people and span of years) of her personal knowledge of Moroccan opinion leaders that commends this research project. Already in the 1950s, she authored The Prince and I and One Woman’s Morocco, closeup views of the royal family and the events and actors behind them that led to Morocco’s independence. From the archives of the Moroccan Socialist Party comes a picture of opposition leader Mehdi Ben Barka (who later tragically disappeared in France) with the author by his side (p. 106).

Relentlessly, in the 1950s and again since the late 1990s, she has interviewed scores of people, including numerous visits with Nadia Yassine, the daughter of the outspoken Islamist leader Sheikh Abdessalam Yassine, from 1995 to 2004. Hence, most of the footnotes refer to personal interviews with people across the sociopolitical spectrum.

Nonetheless, Howe’s forte is also her weakness, at least for those readers interested in a detached, academic piece of writing. Howe clearly loves Morocco; she is fascinated by its history and the implications of its present challenges and easily falls into the role of a passionate outside player who, on the one hand, admits that only Moroccans can decide what is best for Morocco, but it seems that she cannot refrain from dishing out advice about the best way forward politically.

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