Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Morocco and Then Some

And now they’re talking about Morocco. The public radio hosts were explaining how to make harira, a spicy lamb-vegetable-chickpea stew that all of Morocco consumes each evening during the holy month of Ramadan. Every square centimeter of Morocco, plus the dozen or so closest downwind countries, smells like herira for a whole month every year.

If you didn’t like herira, that would be almost as unpleasant as listening to public radio. Fortunately, almost everyone likes harira. There are definitely worse things to smell like. I won’t bother to list them for you.

Since I already know how to make harira (obtain spices, lamb, vegetables, and chick peas, and give them to my wife) I changed the station. WORT-Madison, a Pacifica affiliate that’s basically a bunch of boomer pseudo-leftists pretending to be “alternative” (which they actually were 50 years ago) was talking about Morocco too.

Then I got home, turned off the radio, checked my email, and found The New York Timesand Washington Post daily digests. Both had lead stories about…you guessed it…Morocco.

Being a shrewd and perceptive analyst finely-attuned to the subtlest nuances of current events, I pondered the data and deduced that Morocco is currently experiencing its Warholian fifteen minutes of fame.

For me, that’s the opportunity of a lifetime. I’m an academically-trained Morocco expert. My Ph.D. dissertation compares medieval Moroccan Sufi miracle stories to contemporary personal experience narratives of similarly miraculous events. So I’m not just an expert on Morocco, I’m specifically an expert on Moroccan miracles. I’m the guy everybody should be asking the obvious question: How in the world did Morocco’s underdog soccer team make it to the World Cup semifinals?

Unfortunately, I can’t answer that question, beyond the obvious “it’s the will of Allah,” since I know next to nothing about soccer. I did coach a soccer team for a couple of years when my kids were little, but my four-year-old players understood the game better than I did. I was too thick, or too American, to grasp their explanations of the offside rule (among other fine points of the game). As Groucho said: “It’s so simple a four-year-old could understand. So bring me a four-year-old—I can’t make heads or tails of it!”