When my Moroccan wife of a year needed a visa to enter the United States it seemed simple enough – a trip to the American Consulate in Rabat, then on to visit friends and family. There were a number of good reasons to expect the procedure to go smoothly.

Mauritania is undoubtedly the most overlooked country in the Maghreb. The largely desert Islamic Republic, with an Arab and Berber population in the north and black Africans in the south, is seldom in the news – unless it has something to do with al-Qaida.

Mainstream narratives of the Arab Spring have been both simplistic and influential. The coverage of the uprisings in the Maghreb and the Middle East has been dominated by the notion that the events were as unforeseeable as they were sudden. But for the observer of social change and cultural production in North Africa, the 2011 uprisings were anything but surprising.

Zionist historians have an ideological mission. They must look back into history and draw essentialist conclusions about the ‘enemies’ of the Jews no matter the countervailing evidence. As long as there have been gentiles determined to persecute and even exterminate the chosen people, there will be a need for an Israel armed to the teeth with jet fighters, advanced missile systems, and nuclear weapons.

The wave of popular uprisings that has shaken the Middle East and North Africa is popularly seen as an ‘Arab Spring’. A number of alternative terms, deemed more appropriate, or less misleading, have also been proposed, including the ‘Arab Awakenings’, the ‘Arab Intifadas’, the ‘Arab Revolutions’ or the ‘Arab Rebellions’.

Tangier: a city of many legends, myths and dreams. A gate between different worlds: real and unreal, seen and unseen, magic and sometimes even tragic.

Great poetry, even when it is beholden to power, is a voice of dissent. This dissent need not be political; indeed, it is more often the dissent of beauty, insanity, individuality, or emotion. But from its place at the margins, poetry can occasionally move into the centre, where it gives voice and dress to the identity of a people.

Days are wrapped up in the cold darkness long after sunrise. I fumble around in the kitchen to get myself a cup of tea, as B. listens to the news. A young street-vendor has set himself afire in a remote underprivileged part of Tunisia because the police would not let him sell his fruit.

The fourteenth-century Maghrebi philosopher of history Wali al-Din ‘Abd al-Rahman Ibn Khaldun (1332–1406) has been thought by many to be the most profound thinker Islam has ever produced.

Morocco’s Arabic name, ‘al-Maghreb’, emerges from the root gh-r-b, which denotes concepts including the west, distance, and alienation. ‘Ghareeb’ means strange. ‘Ightirab’ means living outside the Arab world, whether in the west or the east. ‘Maghreb’ also means sunset, dusk, the evening prayer, the time at which the daily fast is broken.