Dispatch from Morocco

ESSAOUIRA, MOROCCO—In the days after the Trump administration issued its ill-advised and disastrously executed freeze on the refugee program and ban on humans entering the United States with passports from seven majority-Muslim countries, a friend of a friend posted a meme on Facebook that gave me a hearty and much-needed laugh. The meme offered a list of things one could supposedly expect if living in a Muslim country, to wit: no alcohol, no music, no dancing, no movies, cruelty to animals and, bizarrely, no vegetarianism—or possibly only vegetarianism. I can’t recall exactly and the post has since been deleted. 

I had to laugh because I was in Morocco, a 95 percent Muslim country, and just hours earlier I had literally been singing and dancing with some friends before heading to a small outdoor cafe where I almost got the beef tajine but decided on vegetarian instead, which was delicious. While I was eating, I watched a Moroccan man save a kitten from being beaten to death by a grown-up cat and gently carry it to safety. Then I went home, where my housemate offered me a beer, which I declined before tucking into bed to watch a movie. 

One of the most destructive things about moments when extreme actions provoke extreme responses is that people tend to indulge a primordial impulse to start radically oversimplifying the world and dividing it up into enemies and friends. If you believe, as I do, that turning away refugees in deference to hysteria is immoral and cowardly, to part of the country you’re a naive bleeding-heart-slash-millennial-snowflake. If you believe, as I do, that banning travel from seven Muslim-majority countries is terrible policy counterproductive to U.S. national security interests that needlessly upends the lives of thousands of perfectly decent people, you are seen by some as sympathetic to radical Islam, or at best dangerously ignorant to the threat it poses. If you believe, as I do, that Islam, like the other Abrahamic monotheisms, is a bad idea and the world would be better off if people stopped believing in it, you are a racist, or an Islamophobe, or a white nationalist, or, increasingly in my case, a straight white dude, which has become a kind of epithet of its own in some circles. 

One of the wonderful things about Morocco is that in every moment its mere existence reveals the lie upon which that kind of tribalism is based. The crooked, frenetic streets of the medina in Essaouira are a diverse labyrinth of not only colors, patterns and smells—the fog of redolent spices, piss, clean air unpolluted by combustion engines, roasting meat, that indeterminate smell of either food or body odor—but of people, too. 

Most Moroccan women wear headscarves, though some do not and others wear niqab (the full-body garment with slits for the eyes fashionable in Saudi Arabia). They walk in mixed groups, sometimes arm in arm, apparently unbothered by the different clothing decisions each has made for herself (or, perhaps, allowed her husband to make for her). During the call to prayer that echoes tinnily from mosques five times a day, some Moroccan Muslims stop to pray in the formal way, some take a moment to reflect on God, and some just carry on with whatever they were doing. Alcohol is forbidden is Islam, but some Moroccans do drink—there’s even a traditional kind of Moroccan moonshine made from dates with legendary powers of intoxication. 

While I was buying soap the other day a pathetic wretch shuffled up next to me, vacantly, with a bag of glue held to his face, dribbling thick globs of saliva from his mouth, stoned completely out of whatever was left of his mind. The moment was sad and unsettling, but it also spoke to the same truth I’ve been hammering away at here. So diverse is humanity that even in Morocco—a conservative country where homosexuality is illegal, gender roles are clearly and rigidly defined, and sobriety is enforced through peer pressure (rather like an evangelical Christian paradise, come to think of it)—there’s still room for a man to be a failure, to stumble and stumble again, to be, in other words, human.

Morocco is living, bustling proof that the simplemindedness of meme-thinking is, in a word, stupid. The world does not look like that. There is no corner of the earth in which humanity, in all its weird variety, exists as a monolith that might be accurately understood or described by something so simpleminded as a meme. 

Denver Nicks is a Tulsa native currently traveling abroad. For more from Denver, read his dispatch from Lisbon, Portugal.