Tangier, Asilah & Rabat

Hello...okay time for a quick post before embarking on a crazy week of homework, projects, and ending in Spain to visit Nicole (a friend studying in Germany this semester)!

Last weekend, three of the other international students (Anna, Anna, & Aileen) and I signed up to go with the Explorer's Club (group on campus) to Tangier and Asilah. It was quite the adventure.

We left at (get this) 3 am in the morning from the AUI campus and drove the 6 hours to the northern coast where Tangier is located (it's the port to go across the Strait of Gibralter into Spain by ferry) stuffed into two 15-passenger university vans. I proceeded to sleep the entirety of the trip waking up just in time to see the first sight of Tangier the next morning. Good times.

So, the group started out in Tangier that day with breakfast and then went and explored the medina where we met some characters from AUI, I bought some sweet green beaded shoes, and we ended up having lunch in a McDonalds [pretty much the same as in the US just with smaller portions, no value meals, and less choices] with a great view of the bay, see below:

After our walk around the medina and some confusion amongst the group over times and such, we got in the vans again and headed out into the hilly countryside...which was gorgeous. This was the best part of the trip because we never would have seen the views of the coast or gone to the cave Hercule's Grotto (see photo album for pics) on our own, not the kind of place grande taxis take you too. So that was awesome and if you have time to look at the pics you can see that we saw some beautiful views!

By that point I was exhausted, so I basically went back to the hotel and slept waking up briefly for my daily dose of carbohydrates (I swear most of what I eat here is carbs...good times). The next morning, we woke up and left Tangier for Asilah a small town a bit eastward I believe...we stopped for what I thought was just a brief stretch-your-legs-time, but ended up being right on the coast! We tooks some pics and then yours truly thought it would be a great idea to take off her shoes and play in the water...which was awesome. Sometimes there's nothing more freeing than running through shallow waves, digging your feet on the sand, and doing cartwheels on the coast! Small price to pay for being wet and sandy for the rest of the day!

Okay, after that we went to get lunch which took forever and wasn't that great. But it was fun to chat with the other Moroccan students who by this point were buddy-buddy with us and joking around, which was great since sometimes it feels like its really hard to get to know the Moroccan students here. Unfortunately lunch took so long that we didn't have very much time in the medina, which was actually really nice and spacious with some great stuff in the shops. I got some jewelry and really enjoyed just walking around, but before too long it was back in the buses for what seemed like a much-longer van ride back of course. But we played some car games with some of the other students, so that made it go by a little quicker. We arrived back on campus at 11, right on the dot (which is shocking for Moroccan time!). Overall, it was a really enjoyable trip!

SHIFT to this weekend...Aileen and one of the Anna's and I headed up to Rabat for a short day and a half trip...we took a grande taxi to Meknes and then took the 3-hour train to Rabat from there. It was a bit confusing as there were no clear station names nor announcements, so we would have missed our stop had we not seen a friend of ours get off! But luckily we made it and after one random misstop found a decent hotel and set off to explore the city a bit.

We started off by looking at the maps in our guidebook which made the medina (old part of the city) look really far away...yeah when we got in the taxi to have him take us there he looked us pretty funny, and took us the long way which even then was only like 8 blocks. Hilarious. But we had fun going around the city, did some shopping of course. Rabat's medina is a bit more spacious than for example Fez, and the shopkeepers are a lot less hovering which is really nice.

After that, we continued out of the medina to the kasbah (fortified area with an old palace) and got attacked by this young girl wanting to put a henna design on our hands...she grabbed Aileen's hand and stopped before Aileen could even say no! By then, we were all flustered and laughing as the girl instructed me to take pictures while she rapidly drew a henna design all over her hand including what she said was Aileen's name, assuming that we could not read Arabic, but alas we may look like tourists but we can read Arabic and will soon have our Moroccan resident cards! So, of course Aileen had to pay her a bit even though she didn't want it, but it was another good lesson to learn to immediately say "LA!" (no in Arabic) to dissuade any young teenagers who may want to take advantage of foreigners.

We walked around the gardens in the kasbah for awhile and then headed back through the city in time to see the sun set over the city walls and see this really huge fortress of a church that was built in the 1930s. It basically looks like the colonial powers wanted to say, "BAM we're hear to stay" and so built a huge two tiered white church...massive. We dropped our purchases off at our hotel and went off in search of a sushi resturant that we'd heard was really good.

At this point I must pause and explain. I am all for eating cultural foods when you are overseas, and I have certainly tried tangine and couscous and other foods native to Morocco and the region. I even enjoy them. However, being at AUI most of what I eat is the same thing over and over again as the dining hall here is much like any college campus dining services across the world...not very good. So, I eat a lot of carbs. I exist on bread. And therefore there is a lot of discussion of foods that we miss from back home and dreaming of Jimmy John's Turkey Tom sandwiches, Donatos pizza, Olive Garden pasta (they manage to ruin pasta here at the dining hall, and I realize this is hard to do), green bean casserole, macaroni and cheese, peanut butter...you get the picture.

Thus, Anna and I were craving sushi and so we found this resturant, called Matsuri which ended up being excellent! It was set up apparently like a traditional resturant where the chefs are out in the main area cutting up the sushi and then they put it on plates on a conveyor built and it goes around and you can just pick up what you want from your table! It was sooo good! We had a really good time and got ourselves dessert and wine afterwards and so just had a perfect girls night out! It would have been even better had the movie theater been open afterwards, but alas we can't win them all (it's become a game to find an actual movie theater in Morocco in the hopes of seeing Babel or some other movie while we're here, but I'm rapidly losing hope).

The next morning we got up and had breakfast at a bakery (breakfast is the best meal of the day here in Morocco!) and got some cookies for the train ride home and then grabbed and early train back and arrived back in Ifrane safely about 4 hours later! In time to go to church and do some homework!

So, that was the weekend finishing off my February travels with a bang! This week, I have some work to catchup on as its getting close to some paper deadlines and midterms, alas. Academics does intercede into more fun travels at times, but hopefully all will be well!

God's blessings wherever you are!

Check out the pics!

So, I'll update later telling about my adventures from last weekend in Tangier & Asilah with the Explorer's Club and my jaunt tomorrow up north to Rabat...but for now if you want to see pictures of me and and the Mediterranean beach! Check out the link to the right for my photo album!

God's peace!

Arabic-English Exchange

Hello! Sorry, I haven't posted in awhile. Technology has not been my friend this week as my internet has not worked in my room since I returned from Tangier this past weekend, and on top of that I had my first busy week of schoolwork since I arrived at Al Akhawayn...so basically my week has consisted of going back and forth between the library, packing and unpacking my backpack, re-setting up my labtop, reading, doing work and studying. Ah, the life of a student.

But, an update about travels and classes later, for now I want a bit of excitement from teaching English at the local high school here in Ifrane tonight! I and some of the other international students (about 10 of us now) made a commitment to teach English two nights a week starting about 2 weeks ago after meeting with the government delegate in charge of education here in the Ifrane province. We were all a little nervous at first, but its been a great experience so far!

We're teaching about 80-90 girls overall (broken up into about 5 classes) who live in the residential part of the school as they come from all over the province. So, we come at about 7:00pm and teach until 8:30 in this huge school with echo-y dark hallways, a huge room full of chopped wood to heat the classrooms, and classrooms lining hallways that consist of basically desks and chalkboards (sometimes with chalk, sometimes not) and of course the students! The students range from like 15-19 and are all at varying levels of English preparing for the big test they have to take before graduation, so we're trying to help them review and get ready!

I and my co-teacher Caly basically go in and teach whatever "lesson" we've prepared and then help them with their homework, which usually takes up the majority of the time as their English book is awful. To give you a sense, their latest lesson is a two page reading on pollution in the mediterranean sea, complete with a list of diseases like typhoid and cholera and a lot of hard verbs and nouns that seem a bit ridiculous for beginning-intermediate students, but whatever. Of course, its a little harder to get over the grammatical mistakes like misspelling "paragraph."

Anyway, we've had a lot of fun teaching them the words for clothing (today I made a worksheet with pics of clothes & accessories from the internet!) and talking about verb tenses and parts of speech. Today, we went over time which was also really fun...and convenient as we just finished reviewing time in my Arabic class, so I got to totally pull out my fledgling Arabic skills, and it totally even helped me explain the conecpt of "15 minutes till, 20 minutes after" in English! A small step, but I was excited nonetheless!

The girls are all really sweet and eager to learn and they love Caly and I so its a fun hour of us acting out English concepts, laughing and attempting to teach them a little something too!

Although, Caly and I were talking today about how its still a bit crazy that we're doing this...just being thrust into a school as volunteers with no curriculum, supervision, or really any goal except the overall "teach English." Granted we were vouched for by the chaplian and have the reputation of AUI international students, who are at least from an English-speaking country...but still, certainly a long way from the rigidness of the US educational system at home with benchmarks, requirements, and probably background checks...okay maybe not that much, but you get the picture.

Anyway, I'm really excited to continue the experience partly because its good to get away from abstract academic thinking and do something active where i really get to help these girls and try out my Arabic skills a bit, but its also fun to think about different ways to teach English, and realize again and again how hard it is to learn another language!

Okay, the library's closing. So there's my fun experience for the night. And here's a picture of me and some of my students!

Ma-salaama!

Middle Atlas = Love

Well this weekend I made the rounds to a couple of the small towns/cities in the Middle Atlas region (the Middle Atlas mountains are the mid-range mountains in Morocco, the High Atlas are as would seem to be obvious, at a higher altitude) and decidedly fell in love with the region! The Middle Atlas is a pocket of mountains (perhaps large hills really) followed by valley after valley full of a wide variety of trees and crops and then more mountains (and repeated again and again). It's great. :-)

Anyway, my Middle Atlas tour started off on Saturday, when my friend Cassie and I set off for Imouzzer, a small town about 20 minutes away from Ifrane. It was a bit intimidating at first because its not one of those towns that gets a lot of tourists clearly and there were a lot of people out and about, and two foreign girls do get attention by virtue of being 1) female without male escort, 2) looking foreign, and 3) obviously being tourists walking around with little aim but to see what we could see. But we soon got into the scheme of things and enjoyed walking around Imouzzer. The town sits in the mountains on the road leading towards Fez and looks out over a valley towards more mountains, so we had a great time searching for the best views and got to poke around the town while we were at it. [See mosque on left.] After our brief exploration of Imouzzer, we climbed in another taxi and after gaining a couple more passengers we headed off towards Sefrou.

I didn't know much about Sefrou before we went, just what my pastor and guidebook had told me, but it turned out to be great! It has an old medina like that of Fez, but its much more relaxed and less crowded, and also both in and outside the old city is cleaner and seems to be a bit like a mountain oasis.

View of Sefrou from the edge of town.

Cassie and I had a great time exploring inside Sefrou's city walls. It has many of the same stone-lined walkways that wind throughout the city like Fez, except with less people and a bit less craziness. It very much feels like an ordinary city that people live/work/play in...yet still has a certain character that makes it very Moroccan/Middle Eastern-North African/and a bit otherworldly to the American eye. Cassie and I basically had fun getting lost; we would walk for awhile and then look around and realize that we were back where we started, so then start again and take a different turn. We got some wierd looks, met a few fun little kids, got some great harsha and bread for lunch, ended up finding some fun nooks and crannies where it felt a bit like an ultimate game of hide-and-go-seek and saw some amazing architecture. Sefrou, like Fez varies at every bend, you turn one corner and find yourself amidst small shops stock full with shoes, designer clothes from the US, scarves and material, and other odds and ends. But a minute later, you find yourself seeing welders and woodworkers making doors or gates or various other products, and then after another bend your nose is assaulted with the smell of fresh bread, spices, and the bright colors of fruits and veggies.

Unsurprisingly, we found our way out of the city gates accidentally and found ourselves in a more modern part of the city with a bit more space between shops, modern-looking buildings, and some beautiful park spaces with fountains, trees and cafes. There was definitely quite a bit of upscale housing in Sefrou, intermixed with the more-common 2-3 story buildings that were built on top of one another over the years and look a bit dilapatated.

However, we didn't have to walk too far before we came to this temporary marketplace full of fruits and vegetables for rows and rows and rows...it was just set up in the middle of a field and smelled more or rotten/spoiled produce until you stepped under the tent covers. We didn't end up buying anything, but walked around some more before getting back into the grand taxi and heading home for the day.

On Sunday, after a lovely morning of sleeping in, a couple of the girls and I headed to Azrou which is only about 15 minutes away from Azrou and has amazing views along the way. We were blessed with AMAZING weather this weekend - i didn't wear a coat for like the first time since I've been here! So, it was a great ride along the way. Sadly, we didn't get to see a whole lot in Azrou because some of the shops were closed and we didn't have directions as to what to check out, but it was fun to walk around and get a sense of the town if nothing else.

A view of Azrou.

So that was my weekend, pretty lowkey but certainly fun to see a bit more of the area around where I'm living for the semester. Now another week of academics coming up and the beginning of volunteering at the local Ifrane high school. Should be fun!

Aerobic Translation

If you ever want a good laugh and a good workout at the same time, you should try going to an aerobics class taught in another language. It's pretty much hilarious.

Some of the other international students and I decided to check out the aerobic classes this week. We went on Tuesday and got there too late to get a step...so we did step aerobics...without a step. Tonight we got there in advance to get a step...but it wasn't a step night, it was weight night. However, when they announced this, we didn't understand and by the time we got it...all the weights had been snatched up. Although, we may have been fortunate, in light of the woman who leads this class.

She's hysterical. She's this tiny woman with curly hair that goes everywhere who is constantly moving at a frighteningly quick and energetic pace, with her voice echoing loudly over the crazy techno music that is blasting throughout the room. Amazingly enough I would be able to understand her just fine, were she not speaking French. Although, I think by the end of the semester I'll have learned how to count to at least 7 or 8 in French because she puts us in major pain doing various stretches and moves as she counts them out, 1, 2, 3, 4...Ow, ow, ow, ow.

It's basically hilarious to watch all of us American girls in the back attempting 1) to keep up with her and the other girls as we're out of shape and 2) to watch as we get behind or ahead or stop too soon or late on the various moves because when she does give warning that she's going to stop and change moves (which is not always) she says them in French, and we all just stumble and laugh. We're totally those kids in the back of the room that everyone sort of looks at and shakes their heads. It's a good time.

So that's my funny experience for the week.

In other exciting news. I've officially booked my plane tickets for Spring Break during which I will get to visit my friends Libbi and Claire in Cambridge/London for three days, and do brief stints in Cairo and Paris with some friends from here! I'm so excited! Although, i may not be after 8 flights on various discount airlines...but hey, that's why being a traveling student is so fun and so cheap!

I also have fun travels coming up in the next couple weeks, so stay tuned in!

Ashura/Yom Kippur/Atonement

Every Wednesday evening, the little church community at AUI gets together at the chaplain's house for pizza and salad (the latter of which is rare in M'co!), fellowship, and a bit of bible study. It's always a lovely mid-week gathering.

For the past two weeks, we've discussed something I found very interesting, the three Abrahamic tradition holidays - Ashura (Islamic), Yom Kippur (Jewish) and Day of Atonement (Christian). It was really interesting to discuss the similiarities and differences between the stories and traditions, and also just to discuss the differences between our own traditions in the various Catholic/Protestant/Orthodox backgrounds.

But what I found most interesting, was the common thread that in all three religions its important for believers to take a day to try to atone, or to take a peace from my "Making Things Right" class last semester...become at one with God.

And it was also cool, because after thinking about the profoundness of the tradition of Yom Kippur and the importance of the biblical sacrifices to atone on behalf of the Jewish people, it really reminded me of the controversial nature of the Christian claim that Jesus' death atoned for our sins and made it possible to receive God's forgiveness once and for all. Also made some parts of Hebrews seem pretty cool!

So, that was my cool interesting bit for the day. This week's been pretty good. Resettling into the academic scheme of things and surprising myself by getting excited about some of the information again...i thought last semester had beat up my inner academic to the point of needing a long hiatus, but we'll see. I'm trying to take it easy and just let the learning happen without getting stressed or overly into it. That's the plan at least!

Signing off for now...

Superbowl Mania

Yay for the Colts!

So, we ended up getting access to a big screen tv on campus that had the superbowl and so I got to bandwagon a bit and see the big win (with Bears fans no less!). Although, the commentary was in French, there were no commercials except a couple French ones for cars or Microsoft Vista, and by the end it was just me and the losing Bears fans, but hey! good time.

Anyway, hope ya'll are all celebrating in Indy!

Fez!

This weekend, I got my first real taste of exploring a Moroccan city and loved it! A bunch of us international students headed north to Fez, about an hour's taxi ride and stayed the night and then explored the medina, or old city of Fez on Saturday!

Friday, when we got there it was a bit dismal. Most of the shops in the new part of the city where our hotel was were closed and it was rainy, so not exactly super exciting. But we did have tea in this little resturant in "Central Park" of Fez where there were ducks and such. Kind of fun. The rest of the evening we walked around a little, found a little artesian's shop with a lot of cool pottery and sweet furniture, and celebrated on of the guy's birthdays after checking into our hotel. The hotel, by the way is noteworthy, simply because of how cheap it was! We got triple rooms for 446 dirhams each, which is about $55 divided by three people - crazy cheap! And even then a couple of the girls who were hear last semester attempted to barter it down! The rooms were nice and we had a fun hanging out Friday night.

Saturday, we got up and got breakfast (freshly squeezed amazing orange juice and harsha, which is this amazing breakfast food hear that looks sort of like a solid english muffin, but tastes more like cornbread) and then were taken to the medina (city in Arabic), which in Fez refers to the old city to the guide that our hotel recommended. Fez is infamous for being a labyrinth of tight, merging walkways with many many shopkeepers very willing to hassle and push you into their shops, so every guidebook ever made always recommends visitors to get guides. We totally lucked out, our guide Abdel Aziz, was awesome and was definitely worth the 250 dirhams ($30) for the day. He not only took us all around the city and to some great shops (where of course he gets kickbacks for our purchases, but that didn't stop him from advising us on prices and refusing to let shopkeepers to take advantage of us), but entertained us and got us a great ride back to Ifrane at the end of the day!

So, the tour began by winding around through the streets of Fez, to the right is a Moroccan house we visited. The city itself reminded me a lot of the old city of Jerusalem, except bigger. But everything seems to be built in and around itself...there are hundreds of mosques within the city, so you turn a corner and there appears to be this mosque creeping out amidst the houses that are multiple stories that have continually been built up upon themselves over the centuries. There are few street signs, and there doesn't seem to be any rhyme or reason to where they are placed; those who live there know how to get around, and for those visitors who go by themselves, well God be with them. :-)

There were many low ceilings, and going into this corridor it was completely black! Very fun. But it struck me that it didn't seem to be as busy as I thought it would be initially. After awhile though the streets opened up into long hallways of bazaar-like shops, in other words the souks as they call them. Hallways filled with food and produce, or long, flowing, ornately-decorated dresses and fabrics, whole stalls filled with threads of every color imaginable, and then those crammed with shampoos, soaps and other household items familiar because of their brand names but unfamiliar without the seeming precision of Western supermarket-style spacing and layout.

As if our eyes didn't have enough to see, we were soon taken to a tannery (which I was excited to see as again its one of those things you only see with the guide as its impossible to find within the city if you're on your own!) where we got to see a bit of the production-process of making leather products...and then of course were taken to a shop where we could buy as many of the products as we wanted! Below is the picture of the outdoor tannery...its a bit like stepping back into time, but also highly precise. The colorful bins sort of in the center right are made of all natural colors, and the piles of stuff lying all around are the wool or skins of sheep and camel laying out to dry before going through the next part of the process.

The tannery shop itself was also a fun experience. We went in and there were floors of jackets, purses, bags, belts, purses, whips, shoes, hats, you name it! But if you showed the smallest interest, bam! you had a sales person beside you demonstrating the wonderousness of the piece. It was like Best Buy...Moroccan style. Except, in Fez, you don't know the price of the item and you don't get the price until you've decided on what you want. And even then you have to tell how much you're willing to offer...I had decided on some smaller items and abandoned the other things I had my eye on and left the room. After having the complimentary Moroccan tea of course. Downstairs the head salesman came after me again...I said no and gave a low price, he said no it was too low. So I paid for my small items...and he came back again, gave the price for two just slightly higher than my price and held out his hand and suddenly I had made a second purchase. Good times. I was bartering without even knowing it. Always good to question yourself when shopping...even if you aren't trying to barter! (PS: I got my items for a better price than one of the other girls who claims to be excellent after being here a semester. Yeah, I was proud of myself.)

So then, back into the heart of the medina. More sights, famous mosques, souks...and then to the carpet shop. After we had all taken pacts not to buy anything!

...so we got this lovely opening talk from the carpet salesman explaining all the different types of carpets and the standard price system (ha, there is no such thing!) and brought out these beautiful carpets with natural colors, handmade of course from women from all over the country. And then out came the Moroccan tea again (we had some great tea that day!)

So, I asked to see some of the carpets from the Middle Atlas region (mountainous region where Al Akhawayn is located) just so I would know what they looked like, of course. And so the main carpet salesman and one of his helpers, started pulling out the carpets and he told me a couple ballpark prices and I told him they were too high, and one of the other girls who had already bought a couple carpets helped me hold to them. Again I left the room after deciding I wasn't going to buy one but would look some place cheaper, again they followed me. Then, I was looking with the other girls at a couple of different carpets and he came up to me and held out his hand...and suddenly I owned a red carpet for 800 dirhams ($100). Granted, after I had decided, a couple of the other girls bought them too...so he made some money that day!

So, it was a good time. And I have my Moroccan carpet already! After, the carpet shop we went to a nice resturant where would some delicious couscous (again famous dish here in M'co). By that time we were all getting pretty tired, and so we got back in a taxi and headed back to Ifrane.

Oh, as a last little picture...everywhere we went in Fez we saw a picture of the King of Morocco. Random casual shots, shots of him and his son, formal shots. It was so funny! So I thought it was especially appropriate that his portrait was displayed so prominently in the carpet shop! So funny!

So, that's my weekend adventure. Today's been a pretty quiet day and looking forward to a new week. Wishing luck back home to the Colts tomorrow night!

PS: More pictures from the Fez trip can be seen using the link to the right.

2nd Week Academic Slump

I don't want to say that it happens every semester and that all classes are susceptible to this...but it really they are.

The second week slump.

The excitement of the first week is gone, and real class begins. Or if that excitement was never there in the first place then students and faculty alike break into mutual resigned pessimism. Either way, the second week slump makes everyone its victim.

This week's classes were exactly that. Mostly because it was a week of continued introductory material in the form of lectures without a lot of depth and certainly not a great deal of enjoyment. And the little depth that was there was sort of shocking to me because most of my professors here have spent a great deal of time talking about political philosophy that lays the groundwork for the subject at hand. I've been feeling academically inept with my professors throwing around names like Marx, Weber, Althusser, Gramsci, Hegel, Rosseau, and theories and ideas like dialectics, dependency theory, modes of production, etc with a simultanous look like you should have a good idea of what all of these are...bad news bears. I feel a real need for a political philosophy class right now, or better yet last semester. Luckily, I have a better handle on the international relations theories and international law and such...all then at that point hearing about the differences between states and nations gets exhausting after 4 classes covering the same point. Oy.

So anyway, the past three lass periods in my four lecture style classes have all been like that to some degree, and I can't tell whether there is just more of an emphasis on the background philosophies here because i'm abraod, or because three of them are grad courses. Althought, my history professor has spent the past three periods talking about the basis of historiographies in the Middle East...that's 4.5 hours of my life wasted in what could have been a reasonable interesting 30 minutes. But if anything, he did at least assure that I will never consider studying historiography in my future. Check that off the possible career list.

As I was sitting in class i did re-realize that no matter whcih field you go into you end up learning a whole new lingo. For those in development/economics, the WB is not Warner Bros but the World Bank. SAP isn't the stuff syrup is made of, its a structural adjustment program. You've got the UN, the UNDP, the ICJ, the MDG's, WTO, WHO, etc. Terms like GDP, GNP, the HDI are always thrown around and then you've got region specific terms like MENA. Oh good times. Yay for an IR vocabulary.

Well, besides the annoyances it has been interesting to think about some of the themes that we're talking about. In my Middle East Politics and History of MENA in the 20th Century class, we've started at basically the same time talking about the fall of the Ottoman Empire at the beginning of the 20th Cenutry and the rise of colonialism and the huge impact that had on shaping the states in the Middle East in North Africa. (Crossing over into internationa law too here) It's very interesting to think about how the concept of a central "state" is really a western concept that had virtually no roots before the colonial period in the Middle East. But since the Treaty of Westphalia, the state system has been the "in" fad and has virtually changed how the world was organized. But in the Middle East in North Africa this tradition was formed by the colonizers when they set up territorial states with superifical borders, capitals, and leaders and history in the region hasbeen shaped thus ever since. So there is this huge tension between the state and the people in terms of nationalism, tribes, religion, etc. I think in the west, the idea of a state - governmental organization, bureaucracy, etc - separate from religion and ethnicity seems so basic. But in this part of the world, it's questioned and for really good reasons. Who is to say that the state system is the best way to do things?

It certainly brings up some interesting tensions in international law and in thinking about how middle eastern countries relate with each other and the rest fo the world...