Les sindbads marocains

In her most recent work, Les Sindbads marocains: voyage dans le Maroc civique, Mernissi invites her readers to move in a different direction, to undertake a very unique sort of promenade in her homeland. She tells us that we should not be content simply to sojourn in regions that we think we know well, whether through extensive coverage in the mass media (typically linked to the question of terrorism), or through brief visits to destinations that purposefully fashion themselves to entice Western tourists. Instead, she encourages us to undertake a different voyage, resembling a quest for self-discovery through a perpetual openness to the "other," to the stranger [...] Moroccan Sinbads manages simultaneously to be a remarkable tourist guide and a highly intelligent sociological survey of the Moroccan people, be they intellectuals or peasants, urban or rural dwellers, militant civil rights activists or innovative artists. We find ourselves transported into the suburbs of Casablanca and Tangiers, to the mountain of the Rif, and the Medina of Rabat. In her own manner Mernissi exalts the "forgotten ones" of modernity, the social rejects, the outcasts who live on the margins, and who sometimes are actually able to appropriate modernity for their own benefit. -- Review by Benjamin Stora in http://www.univ-paris13.fr (April 17, 2013).