When you hear about the Internet and the Middle East, it's usually in reference to online message boards where militants claim responsibility for attacks or about overprotective Muslim countries shutting down MySpace to prevent the mingling of the sexes.

Today, we bring you a different online project: the effort to create a region-specific, comprehensive search engine. Think Google for the Arab world.

My friend Sherif Omar happens to be the project manager for Onkosh, the most ambitious attempt yet to build an Arab-specific search engine. Sherif is a software developer affiliated with Orascom Telecom, the Egyptian telecommunications giant that, among many other holdings, provides cell-phone service for Algeria, Iraq, Egypt and several other African and Asian countries. Orascom boasts more than 60 million subscribers.

Onkosh is live, though still in its early phase -- the official launch is scheduled for September to coincide with Gitex, the region's leading IT and software expo. However, it's already generating buzz among Arab bloggers and other Internet users who have tried in vain to find a reliable clearinghouse for Arab-related music, news, images and message boards.

One blogger wrote, "We always came across attempts to establish a proper Arabic search engine. Among those were araby.com and mersal and masrawy and whatnot. Recently, I came across what may be the perfect not just Arabic but -- as they call it -- English/Arabic search engine." Another blogger who stumbled across Onkosh deemed it, "the coolest Arabic search engine to date."

Here are 10 questions for Sherif about what Internet users can expect of Onkosh, and how non-Arabs can use the site, www.onkosh.com.

Q. What does Onkosh mean?
A. Onkosh means “to unearth” in colloquial Arabic. We wanted a name that would stand out and was easily recognizable.

Q. How is it similar to Google? How is it different?
A. It’s like Google in that it offers different search services in an easy and clean interface. It’s different in that it’s focused on the Arab Internet user. We have a lot of features that are specific for Arab searches. We have an English-to-Arabic transliterator. Our blog search is focused only on Arab-related blogs, unlike other blog searches, which are general. We have a file search, which allows you to search for music and music videos and applications on user forums. Forums are a very large part of Internet use in the Arab world. They use them not only for discussion but also for downloading music and music videos. Onkosh also "understands" the Arabic language. It doesn’t only search for text, it understands what you’re searching for and improves the results.

Q. What’s the coolest feature?
A. The coolest feature would have to be "Bel3araby,” our English-to-Arabic transliterator. It means you can enter English characters for any Arabic phrase and it will provide you the equivalent Arabic characters to search for. It’s not translation, it’s transliteration. For example, if you want to look for the Egyptian newspaper Al Masry al Youm, you can type that in, using English characters, and it will return you the Arabic results. Another cool feature is Onkosh.mobi, which is the mobile version of Onkosh and it’s the first Arabic search engine to have a version you can use on your cell phone. It’s a free service that anybody can access. We even have Bel3araby on the mobile version, so you don’t need an Arabic keypad to search.

Q. How can people who don't speak Arabic use Onkosh?
A. Onkosh is focused on Arab users, but a large portion of Arab Internet use is in English, or, in the Maghreb, in French. For example, a large number of the top Egyptian blogs are actually written in English. Onkosh has an interface in both English and Arabic. Currently, the news and forums sections have only Arabic content, but we plan to add an English section to the news and have English-language papers from the Arab world. The rest of the site – blogs, Web and image – all have content in Arabic, English and French. But, again, the majority is Arabic because that is our focus.

Q. Other groups have tried in the past to create Arabic-language search engines and they never really took off. Why should we expect this one to be different?
A. The Arab Internet market is growing rapidly. It’s still a pretty small market. There have been a few half-hearted attempts to enter the market. It’s not a market where anyone is going to make serious money anytime soon. We’re in this for the long haul. We realize the Arab Internet market is young, but it’s growing and we’re continually adapting to the Arab users' needs. Google Arabic doesn’t really have Arab-specific features. We’ve seen in markets such as Russia and China that Google has not fared very well against local competition that really understands the local users’ needs.

Q. Where is it based? How many staff are working on this? What’s the project cost, or at least a range? This is an Orascom venture, so this must be pretty well funded, right?
A. The Onkosh team is based in Cairo and we have a staff of about 10 people working on it. As for money and funding, Orascom is committed to the project for the long term and sees great growth potential. I’m not at liberty to discuss budgets.

Q. In your research to create Onkosh, what kinds of trends or patterns have you discovered about Arab Internet use? Anything surprising?
A. There is a lot of usage for religion-related discussions, entertainment news and music and video files. There is convergence – Arab users are getting into social networking sites now, they are becoming very Internet savvy and there is a big increase in Arabic content on the Web.

Q. The Web is controversial in the Middle East. Governments often shut down opposition Web sites and prosecute bloggers. Jihadists recruit and disseminate messages over the Internet. Many porn and social-networking sites are blocked in Muslim nations. How will Onkosh deal with that and has there been any pressure from the Egyptian government as to what content is included?

A. We perform no form of censorship whatsoever. We index all relavent content out there. We don’t exclude anything because we think it’s controversial or might offend somebody. We’re impartial. Internet censorship in Egypt, while it exists, is not as widespread as reported or as serious as some other countries in the region.

Q. Are there news offerings that you can't find elsewhere? It's been difficult to find a good, comprehensive list of Arab media.
A. Not yet. Our news aggregator now is pretty much on par with Google. In the near future, we hope to make our news aggregator more country specific.

Q. What’s been the biggest obstacle in creating Onkosh?
A. The biggest obstacle has been the technical challenge of building a search engine that understands the Arabic language, as well as the fact that it’s a really small market and there is a serious lack of statistics about Arab Internet behavior. We went to cyber cafes and did interviews to try to understand how people use the Internet and what features we could offer to make their lives easier.

For a rare, black-and-white view of the Middle East’s recent past, check out this repository of photographs offered by an enterprising Lebanese group.

The nonprofit Arab Image Foundation collects old photos Arab families have stashed in shoeboxes under their beds or tucked away in heirloom albums. The intrepid staff of the AIF also has uncovered gems amid the dusty remains of the once-legendary portrait studios of Cairo, Beirut and other capitals now past their prime.

The goal, according to the group’s home page, is “to promote photography in the Middle East and North Africa by locating, collecting and preserving the region’s photographic heritage.” The photos show the Middle East as it’s rarely depicted in the news: innovative, sensuous, sophisticated and fun.

I first learned of the foundation several years ago when an Arab-American literary group in Minneapolis invited one of the AIF’s founders for a talk in the Twin Cities. I don’t remember the visitor’s name, but I recall his passion for the project, which he described as an antidote to the prevailing Western stereotype of the Middle East as a hopelessly backward region populated by menacing men and subservient women.

This collection is a provocative visual history of colonialism, occupations, revolutions, wars and industrialism – all recorded by diligent lensmen, both amateurs and professionals, who are long dead.

While many of the photos capture life as it was for the Arab world’s upper crust (gender-bending garden parties, saucy sailor outfits, elaborate weddings, fancy new cars), there are also pictures of Bedouin warriors, a group of Druze women in traditional dress and European tourists decked out in Arab garb. There are ethereal photos shot in Morocco from 1900 to 1960 and a series comprised of Lebanese families’ vacation snapshots.

And long before the advent of PhotoShop, photographers such as the legendary Van Leo were playing around with optical illusions and splicing film to create some truly avant-garde images.

Palestinian history gets a special focus: you can see Russian Orthodox pilgrims visiting the holy land in 1890, a Jewish settler from as early as 1932, and Red Crescent workers treating wounded Arabs in the fateful year of 1948. Among the most recent photos is a haunting collection called, “Les Martyrs de Cana.”

The foundation’s new site is under construction (and has been for quite some time), but you can still see the existing collections by clicking on “current site.” You have the option of an English, French or Arabic online tour. On the left side of the page, browse “exhibitions.”

My favorite photo is the one shown above, taken by Salim Abu Izzedin in Egypt in 1902. The subject is identified only as Lutfiyah Abu Izzedin, and there are no details about her age or relationship to the photographer. Like a Mona Lisa for the Arab world, it’s her hint of a smile that gives me pause. There’s just no telling what was on her mind.

The Arab world is not known for its transportation excellence.

Inhabitants of most Middle Eastern nations go about their daily business via miserably overcrowded buses, smelly taxis, unventilated trains and unreliable subways. Domestic flights typically aren't much better; there's a reason EgyptAir is known as EgyptScare.

So, it was with wariness that I booked a ticket from Casablanca to Rabat on Morocco's national railway, Office National des Chemins de Fer (ONCF). Don't worry, friends had promised, Morocco's railway system is among the best and cheapest in the world.

I didn’t believe them at first, but they were right. I was addicted after that first little jaunt to the capital. Provided you plunk down a few extra dirhams for a first-class ticket, trains are the way to go in Morocco. You get a plush seat and a huge picture window that allows the country to roll by in lush, textured panoramas.

That early Casa-Rabat commute (one hour, $7) led to longer and more interesting train rides: Rabat-Fez (three hours, about $11), and then Fez-Oujda (five hours, about $20). Emboldened (and out of options because all the planes were booked, anyway), I finally went for the long haul: all the way from Oujda, on the Algerian border, back to Casablanca.

It was a 13-hour overnight trip in a “wagonlit,” a private sleeper cabin with bunk beds, a faux leather couch and a nifty table that lifted up to reveal a washbasin with hot and cold running water. A plastic pouch contained a toothbrush, toothpaste, shaving cream and a towelette, all stamped with the railway’s logo, ONCF. The ticket cost the equivalent of $60.

At risk of sounding like a passenger on the Orientalist Express, Morocco looks pretty exotic from the windows of a rumbling railway car. On one trip, the white-capped waves of the Atlantic Ocean appeared out the left window. A tall, red-and-white striped lighthouse cut through the horizon. On another journey, neat squares of farmland unfolded. Shepherds tended flocks of sheep and goats, while donkey carts ambled down dirt roads.

The scenes were alternately barren and brilliant. Sometimes, there was nothing but desert that stretched for miles and miles. Other times, we passed stucco homes splashed with indigo, pink, white or turquoise paint. Satellite dishes sprang like mushrooms from urban apartment rooftops and even from tin-roof shacks in the countryside.

Moroccan women hung out their laundry on trees in front of a stately villa topped with Spanish tiles. Railway workers sought shelter from the blazing sun underneath LG refrigerator boxes they’d fashioned into makeshift tents along the tracks.

Graffiti-spattered walls showcased the handiwork of Moroccan taggers. A vast field of white crosses signaled a Christian cemetery. There were streams and cactus groves, windmills and soccer stadiums, white birds perched on the backs of cows.

In theory, smoking is banned on all trains. In reality, groups of passengers gather between railway cars to light up (and not just cigarettes) without protest from the gray-capped attendants.

The attendants were more stringent with place-hoppers. On one trip, a noisy trio of pretty boys – each with gelled hair, aviator sunglasses and sagging jeans – grew sheepish as they were escorted to their second-class seats when they failed to produce the correct tickets to remain in the air-conditioned, first-class cabin.

Fellow passengers launched into long discussions of politics, al Qaida and the war in Iraq. Young Moroccans drowned out the conversation by cranking up their iPods and securing their headphones. The occasional European or Asian backpacker joined the fray, consulting dog-eared guidebooks and anxiously asking other travelers where they should get off.

On the trip from Fez to Oujda, I caught sight of three young boys lying shoulder-to-shoulder just a few feet from the railroad tracks. Their rusty bikes were propped against a wall. The boys were stretched out on their backs, arms folded like pillows under their heads, as they watched the trains go by.

Signs promoting a gargantuan resort community called “Mediterranea” are sprinkled all along the drive to Morocco’s postcard-perfect northeastern seaboard. The ads hint at palm trees and pristine beaches, an exotic getaway that will steer tourism dollars to this U.S.-allied Muslim kingdom.

The Spanish-led development scheduled to open this year is part of the Moroccan government’s efforts to revamp its tourism industry and create jobs for thousands of impoverished residents from this long-neglected patch of land that borders Algeria. According to Fadesa Group, the Spanish parent company, “the resort will include 3,000 homes and 16,000 hotel beds, a marina, three golf courses and a shopping and service area.”

The signs for Mediterranea continue all the way to Najib Bachiri’s sun-dappled office in the small town of Berkane, which is just a stone’s throw from the coast. An outspoken environmental activist, Bachiri doesn’t share the billboards’ vision of the positive changes Mediterranea and similar development projects will bring to Morocco.

The government always uses job creation to justify the destruction of what should be preserved,” Bachiri said with a deep sigh.

Bachiri leads an environmental advocacy group based in the rustic St. Agnes Catholic Church, which lost its congregation when the founder – an eccentric, pro-Nazi French priest – was forced out after World War II. Today, Bachiri and his staff look after the abandoned church in exchange for office space where they try to raise awareness of  Morocco’s stunning biodiversity.

One recent day at the church, Bachiri unrolled posters of native flora and fauna that he warns will disappear if the government’s development spree continues unchecked. He pointed to trees, turtles, ducks, lizards and other wildlife that he says are being wiped out by Mediterranea, which he says is built on some 1,000 hectares of wetlands that are close to an internationally recognized nature reserve.

            “Morocco is going through a development phase where there is no durable strategy for environmental preservation,” Bachiri said. “Now, there is a big fight against all this crazy development. Within three years, if Morocco doesn’t take strict measures, there will be negative impacts for the other parts of the reserve.”

Bachiri complains that Fadesa, the Spanish construction giant in charge of Mediterranea, hasn’t offered a real environmental impact assessment of the project. He claims that construction waste is being dumped straight into the Moulouya River.

(Fadesa Maroc's website doesn't include environmental information, but you can read the company's promotions for Mediterranea here. The U.N. says groups are working with Fadesa to create an environmental education center at the resort site. Summary here.)

“Morocco is the second country, after Turkey, with the most diversified flora in the Mediterranean. But with this crazy philosophy of development, I think we’ll lose that rank in the years to come,” Bachiri said.

Bachiri also doubts that Mediterranea can make good on its vows to inject tourism cash into the local economy. He said studies on earlier resort projects in Agadir showed that 75 percent of the returns were remitted to Europe or were accruing interest in Moroccan businessmen’s bank accounts.

The kind of tourism the Moroccan government is aiming for is not the kind that will help lift Moroccans out of poverty,” he said. “The money is not reinvested in the communities.”

By trade, Bachiri is a high-school English teacher and a former trainer of Peace Corps volunteers dispatched to Morocco. I met him in a roundabout way through reporting on sub-Saharan African refugees who pass through Berkane on perilous journeys to illegally enter Spain. His twin passions for human rights and environmental preservation intersect with the Africans, who camp in the region’s forests as they wait to be smuggled into Europe.

Bachiri has become a vocal crusader on both issues, which hasn’t won him any friends in the Moroccan government.

I’m on their blacklist,” he said with a wry laugh.

His environmental campaign includes writing letters to politicians, reaching out to the local media and forging relationships with international wildlife advocates. An American friend gave him a series of vintage Smokey the Bear posters, which are framed and hang throughout the church.

Bachiri’s latest worry is that the government isn’t taking climate change into consideration as it continues to approve development projects. In an ominous tone, he said he’d already begun to notice strange ecological occurrences along the Mediterranean coast. This year, a rare April rain continued for a week. Flowering trees blossomed before their time. Hedgehogs emerged earlier than usual.

Bachiri said global warming could sink developers’ plans even if his advocacy work fails. He quoted a study predicting that a large chunk of Saidia, the resort town where Mediterranea is under construction, could be submerged by 2040.

The music, cuisine and ancient sites are pleasant distractions, but the real reason we came to Fez is to interview a man named Mohamed Suleimani al Alami. A native of this lovely imperial city, he’s one of a handful of Moroccan prisoners who have been released from the Guantanamo prison camp.

Many other Moroccans are still in Guantanamo, some of them identified only by first name on www.cageprisoners.com, a Web site that compiles information on detainees at the notorious U.S. prison. After striking out with five other former Guantanamo detainees (three were still in Moroccan custody and two declined interviews), Mohamed Suleimani al Alami was our last hope.

Signs looked ominous from the beginning. In Rabat, we’d met with al Alami’s attorney, who told us his client had declined all interviews with journalists since his return to Morocco last year. The lawyer, however, was happy to show us court papers and letters from al Alami’s thick case file.

According to his attorney, 42-year-old al Alami was farming cattle with an Afghan partner when he was detained in 2001 in a village near Jalalabad, in eastern Afghanistan. He’d left Morocco because of family problems stemming from his marriage. He and his wife have a young daughter. (The attorney and the documents painted a detailed account of al Alami’s road to Guantanamo, but I have to save them for a news story. You can read al Alami’s testimony before the Combatant Status Review Tribunal on pages 72-73 of the document here.)

After more than four years as Guantanamo inmate No. 237, al Alami was released in early 2006 and repatriated to Morocco. He was finally home, but his ordeal wasn’t over – a Moroccan court charged him with participation in “a criminal gang, practice of activities in a non-recognized association and organization of unauthorized public meetings.”

He narrowly avoided a five-year prison sentence when a Moroccan judge acquitted him after a key witness recanted testimony that he’d seen al Alami at the Faruq training camp, according to al Alami’s lawyer. Fully cleared of any wrongdoing, al Alami returned to Fez to help look after his ailing father.

We arrived in Fez late Wednesday night and began calling al Alami’s phone number first thing Thursday morning. The phone rang and rang, but there was no answer. Later that afternoon, we tried again. The phone was switched off for the rest of the night. We began to wonder if we even had the correct number.

We’d pretty much given up and were preparing to leave Fez today when we tried the number a final time. Fouzi, a Moroccan friend who is acting as a translator and guide for me here, was startled when a relative of al Alami’s picked up and agreed to put the former detainee on the line. Fouzi and I huddled together in excitement, hoping for a breakthrough.

Al Alami was polite and friendly as he listened to our spiel about wanting to document the stories of former Guantanamo detainees. We reassured him we would only inquire about his time in U.S. custody, not his stint in Moroccan prison (many former detainees worry about being rearrested if they speak out about their post-release experiences in their home countries).

             “Let me think about it and consult some people and get back to you in a few minutes,” al Alami said.

            Ah, we thought, the classic brush-off. We didn’t expect to hear from him again, but we did – five minutes later.

            “I’m sorry, but I’ve consulted with my people and they’ve advised me not to do any media interviews,” al Alami said.

            We asked him if we could at least give him a list of questions that he could answer at his convenience and return to us by email.

            “Sorry, but I wouldn’t answer it even if you left it,” he said.

The taxi hurtled through the ancient, labyrinthine streets around Fez’s old city, and we had no idea where to tell the driver to stop.

It was nearly midnight and we were meeting some Moroccan musicians from my traveling companion’s hometown along the Algerian border. They spend every summer lounging in Fez, in a rented stucco home in the heart of what once was a Jewish district of the medina.

We heard a shrill whistle come from three shadows perched on a medieval wall – thank goodness our acquaintances had come to guide us through the medina’s maze of more than 9,000 alleys.

Rita, the host’s precocious 9-year-old daughter, took our hands and led us through dark, trash-strewn passageways to her home. Children know the paths best, we were told. The musicians joked that if we ever get lost in Fez, we should just yell, “Rita!” and she’ll come to the rescue.

Even before we reached the house, gnawa songs echoed through the narrow, cobblestone alley. I turn to Wikipedia for a better description of the music than I could come up with: “Gnawas play deeply hypnotic trance music, marked by low-toned, rhythmic sintir melodies, call-and-response singing, hand clapping and cymbals called krakebs.” It’s a fusion of classical Islamic Sufism and pre-Islamic African traditions.

Our hosts were Moroccans from Oujda, not ethnic gnawas. They had learned the songs from gnawa musicians in their hometown and were so hooked on it that the entire family now plays the sintir, or hejhouj, the three-stringed bass lute that is the foundation of gnawa music.

The home was a traditional whitewashed villa that still boasts the original mosaic tiled floors. We all sat in a carved-out nook with plush cushions spread around a low-sitting round table. The family had decorated their summer place with a spray of peacock feathers in a vase and crayon murals Rita had created on the white interior walls. All of her drawings were of the hejhouj.

The father is Rashid, a gnawa devotee who was wearing a denim shirt and baggy yellow pants emblazoned with maps of Africa. Naeema, his beautiful wife, sang along to the music as she shuttled to and from the kitchen with silver trays of mint tea. Hamid, their spiky-haired son in a Muhammad Ali boxing T-shirt, was on summer vacation from a French university where’s he majoring in finance. And Rita is their prodigy, a little singer/dancer/actress who shares her father’s passion for gnawa music.

The only other guest was Bouzidi, a tall, good-natured man who spent the night either playing various musical instruments or taking hits from a long, thin hashish pipe. He washed down potent arak, an anise-flavored alcoholic drink. Rashid said he was once so drunk on arak that he had the sudden urge to ride through the streets on a donkey.

“I went to the donkey and told him, ‘You’re going to carry me,’” Rashid said. “We went on the ride and I was still drunk. I told the donkey thank you, and he kicked me.”

Naeema set out ceramic dishes of dates, pistachios and peanuts, and the family settled in for a jam session. Rashid tuned his hejhouj and began to play. Bouzidi picked up a tambourine-style instrument called bendir. Rita clicked plastic cassette tapes together for percussion. Naeema sang from a cushion in the corner. Hamid, the college student, filmed the scene on his cell phone.

Some of the songs were classics, while others were improvised. For example, a central figure in gnawa music is the poor, hapless Bambara. The proverbial Bambara never gets ahead and is always broke. Nevertheless, he has a great sense of humor, is deeply spiritual and is a gifted storyteller.

Rashid told his daughter to think up funny verses to sing about Bambara. He plucked the hejhouj while Rita riffed that lords and ladies drink mint tea, but poor Bambara gets only coffee. Lords and ladies get apples, but poor Bambara eats only cactus fruit. Lords and ladies drive cars, while poor Bambara gets by with a bicycle.

The chorus of the song goes, “This is the fate of Bambara. This is the fate of the poor man.”

The music was indeed entrancing; two hours had passed before we realized how late it had gotten. We left the family’s home after 2 in the morning. We could still hear their music as we walked back through the alleys leading out of the medina.

A local magazine published a tongue-in-cheek list of the top 10 Moroccan superstitions and old wives' tales. You'll recognize some of them; they're the same in the West. And I first heard the one about a broom touching an unmarried woman's feet from a Mexican friend whose family swears by the belief.

Here are the Moroccan superstitions, summarized:

1. Don't pour hot water down a sanitation hole after dark because you risk burning revenge-minded jinn asleep underground. (Jinn are supernatural beings mentioned in the Quran) An angry jinni, the story says, is sure to track you down and disrupt your life as payback for your thoughtlessness.

2. Sheepskin prevents acne, clears blackheads and erases scars. You just take the skin of a freshly slaughtered sheep and rub the inside of it on your face.

3. If you've swallowed a bad spirit, drink a nightcap of milk with orange-blossom water.

4. Among several urine-related superstitions: Urinate on your hands if you're clumsy and urinate in front of your house to prevent the evil eye from creeping inside.

5. A twitchy eye means bad news is coming. An itchy hand predicts money on the way. If your right eyebrow itches, someone is singing your praises. If your left eyebrow itches, someone's talking badly about you.

6. If you brush a girl's feet with a broom, she'll never get married.

7. It's better to go around someone sitting in your path. Stepping over him will stunt his growth.

8. Never eat food that's been sitting out overnight because mischievous nocturnal jinn probably have tampered with it.

9. To guard against evil eye, be discreet. Be humble about your own success, hide the extent of your fortune, even present yourself in an unfavorable light.

10. Don't use a whistle in the house. Don't place your shoes upside down. Don't open an umbrella in a closed space.

Recent government crackdowns on local newspapers and magazines prompted the Committee to Protect Journalists to list Morocco among the 10 worst backsliders on media freedom for 2006.

In May, CPJ said said “Morocco joins Tunisia as the Arab world’s leading jailer of journalists, with three sentenced to prison terms.” The report also says authorities banished three top journalists through politically motivated lawsuits. For the whole report, look here.

In the past month alone, the government seized copies of two current affairs magazines based on accusations that articles had offended Muslim sensibilities and showed a lack of respect for the king. Unbowed by the government’s crackdown, both publications were back on newsstands this week, as cheeky and irreverent as ever.

The targeted news magazines – the Arabic-language Nichane (Forthright) and its French-language sister publication TelQuel (As it is) – didn’t pull any punches a week after the warning. TelQuel’s pages opened with a bold headline: “Nichane seized, TelQuel destroyed, Benchemsi charged. What really happened?” The accompanying story is a tick-tock of how government forces confiscated copies of the magazines and brought charges against a manager.

The cover story of TelQuel (think “Newsweek” with more attitude) was a graphic look at sex surgeries, with commentary from a leading “sexologue” from Casablanca, the going rates for operations such as penis or breast enlargements and interviews with Moroccans about their experiences with cosmetic enhancement.

Keep flipping through the magazine and there’s a special section about next month’s elections; the guide informs voters about candidates’ track records on growth, employment, education and other hot topics. The writers poke fun at the ruling party’s attempts to play down the increasing role of political Islam. The TelQuel headline: “Between a swim and a fruit juice, let’s gloss over the Islamists.”

The “world” section discussed the Minneapolis bridge collapse, “Citizen Murdoch” buying the Wall Street Journal and this grim summary of current affairs: “A murdered Iraq, uncertain U.S. elections, a Europe fraught with doubt and an always-troubled Middle East.”

The entertainment section showcased a popular Moroccan rapper named Bigg next to a full-page ad for Belvedere vodka. It also guided readers to “the Moroccan Pearls of YouTube,” with links to videos that ranged from secret footage of local police brutality to voluptuous strippers who had managed to circumvent YouTube’s filter for racy content.

Is it only a matter of time before such lively, politically charged reporting is gone and Moroccans are stuck with the same bland, state-approved news as the rest of the region?

Friends had warned that I’d find Casablanca too crowded, too industrial, too much like Cairo. Spend the most time in Marrakesh and Fez, they advised.

Well, if the rest of Morocco is even better than this dynamic port city, then it’s going to be a great first trip.

Reporting (on Guantanamo detainees, next month’s elections and Islamists in North Africa) consumes the days, leaving the evenings free for absorbing Casablanca’s ocean breeze, fresh seafood, relaxed atmosphere and mélange of cultures.

It was jarring to realize how very Francophone this country still is – so much more so than even Lebanon, where employees of the national airline unfailingly answer the phone with a cheery “Bonjour!” I spent a couple days trying to memorize phrases in the guttural Moroccan accent; a French refresher course would have served me better.

In Morocco, a half-century after independence, French lingers in restaurant menus, street signs and everyday conversation. Escargots are street food – you buy a bowl of them in a soup of mint and herbs, pluck a safety pin from an overturned lemon and skewer the snail meat. It’s summertime, which means all the Moroccan immigrants are home from the Paris suburbs, livening up the streets with European fashions and French-Arab hip-hop beats.

Amid the many vestiges of colonialism (the language, the architecture, etc.), it’s refreshing to see so many people walking around in their djellabas, the traditional Moroccan hooded gowns. In Egypt, no middle-class person would be caught dead outside his or her home in a galabiya (the Egyptian version of the djellaba). In Morocco, however, you see street kids wearing them as well as ultra-chic women who rock them with stilettos and Fendi bags.

I have no idea if it predates French rule, but this place takes café culture to an extreme. You can buy a nos-nos (café au lait) or mherssa (double espresso broken with a splash of milk) from countless sidewalk cafés filled with men who have nothing better to do on a weekday. And I’m talking All. Day. Long. Hours are whiled away at salons de thé, where the famous Moroccan mint tea flows round the clock.

“We are a nation of loiterers,” joked Fouzi, my Moroccan friend and travel companion.

A high unemployment rate means little money and lots of free time. In broad daylight, Moroccans roll potent hashish joints and puff away against a soundtrack of rai or reggae. On a walk tonight I saw a guy with his face buried in a plastic bag, huffing glue just a few steps from a five-star hotel. Beggars are relentless, as are the shoeshine boys and the scruffy men who approach café patrons with knockoff designer watches or perfumes.

As in many other Muslim nations, Islamists have stepped in to fill the government’s voids. Here, they feed, clothe and educate the poor, while simultaneously reinforcing the families’ ties to Islam. The Saudi Wahabbi influence that’s spreading through Egypt, Gaza, Syria, Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon and other places is much less overt here, though this is a topic I want to explore more and examine for regional differences.

On the surface in Casablanca, at least, bushy Osama-style beards and full facial veils are rare. When they need to, however, the Islamists reveal their hidden strength. A few years back, Fouzi tells me, 4 million Islamist supporters turned out to protest an Israeli offensive against Palestinians. And that was in a country where Islamists are under scrutiny and don’t have their own newspapers or TV channels to communicate with followers.

Morocco’s King Mohammed VI, the U.S.-allied monarch known among his subjects as M6, is combating the region’s renaissance of political Islam by (a.) mass arrests of Islamists, (b.) playing up his long dormant but official title of “Prince of the Believers” (Fouzi says Morocco is technically still a caliphate; it never fell under Ottoman rule), (c.) retaining veto power over key government posts such as the defense and interior ministries, and (d.) aggressively launching development projects in many long-neglected provinces.

We hope to travel to Rabat, Marrakesh, Fez, Oujda and other cities to check out the political and social forces at work across this country. Next month’s elections should be an interesting showdown for Morocco’s colorful players: the young king and his government, secular opposition parties, the moderate Islamists of the PJD and the more militant Islamists spearheaded by the enigmatic Nadia Yassine (whose party always has boycotted government participation).

An Iraqi woman I met in Baghdad has just been granted political asylum in the United States. She now lives in Amman, Jordan, where she’s taking courses at the American embassy about what to expect when she moves to the U.S. of A.

To help her assimilate, the Iraqi woman received a copy of a federal pamphlet called, “Welcome to the United States: A Guidebook for Refugees.” One recent night, she leafed through it, cracking up at photo illustrations such as the one of a grinning, dark-skinned immigrant washing dishes in a restaurant. The chapter told of all the other opportunities that await a refugee with a plastic card stamped, “Resident Alien” in block letters.

There was also a lot of useful information on how to set up a bank account, rent an apartment, obtain a driver license, get medicine from a pharmacy, pay utilities, find child care – all those tedious little tasks we take for granted. The guide points refugees to “ethnic food stores” where they can find familiar spices and snacks. And it warned of culture shock that could make new arrivals feel, “frustrated, tired, angry, indifferent, sad, uninterested in eating.”

One of the opening chapters is called, “About Americans.” Here is an excerpt:

“Most Americans value self-reliance and hard work. They expect newcomers to get jobs as soon as possible and to take care of themselves and their families. They also expect newcomers who do not speak English to learn it as soon as they can…”

“Since September 2001, some Americans have become distrustful of those who wear non-Western clothing or seem foreign in certain ways. A few people may even express anger or suspicion. But most Americans will welcome you and want to learn about your culture.”