Rain and Early Modern North African History

I took this when I woke up to find it raining one morning.
Generally I'm not a fan of how early I have to get up for
class, but it does have it's perks

So I promised myself that I’d write a substantial post if it killed me this weekend.

So, I got better, and then I stayed up too late reading, and felt like junk at the end of the school week anyway. J has slowly been getting better, but then yesterday her problems started all over again, so healthwise, we’re not doing great.

We’re also a bit disappointed with our interactions with the Moroccan family. We haven’t been up for much, so mostly they’ve been perfunctory. “Hi, how are you?” kind of stuff. Better than nothing, but not significantly better than our relationships with people who run the little snack stalls we frequent.

This lack of real interaction has been harder for J than it has been for me. She’s studying Arabic because she wants to understand how Arabs think, how they live, and who they are. Interacting with people is precisely the reason she wanted to learn Arabic in the first place, and not being able to do that much has been frustrating.

For me, it hasn’t been so bad. I’m less outgoing by nature, and anyway I want to learn Arabic primarily to do stuffy old history things. I hope to be able to converse with Arabs in Arabic, but all I really NEED to do is read. And on that front, it was a fantastic week for me.

J and I were browsing through a bookstore when I found a book called Morocco and Europe, What Happened Between the Fifteenth and the Eighteenth Centuries. Honestly, I think I almost wet myself when I saw it (and that’s not nearly as much of an exaggeration as it ought to be). This might seem strange to some people, but it should only require a little explanation.

I’ve been interested in history since I was young. Back then, it was mostly the battles and armies that caught my attention, but it was still interest. When I got to OU, one of the first things I decided was to go into either history or political science, preferably both. When I met J, my interests shifted a bit. I had always been interested in European history more than anything else, probably because I lacked the basic context required to think about history for any other area. Dating a person studying Arabic will tend to pull a person in that direction, and anyway I’ve always liked history for its own sake.

Right before I decided to take up Arabic myself, I had gotten myself interested in Early Modern European (1500-1750 roughly) history. I could write for a much longer time than I could be interesting in talking about how criminal it is that we don’t know the basic outlines of history for this period, but that’s another post entirely. Suffice it to say, I was hooked on this time period.

Then I spent six weeks in Morocco with J, beginning my study of Arabic. There’s not much better at sparking the interest of a historian than plopping them into the middle of strange country which they immediately fall in love with. So when I got back last year, I did a research paper that combined all of my interests. I wrote almost thirty pages about the relationship between Britain (because my favorite professor specializes in British history, and I’ve taken five classes from him) and Arabic speaking North Africa in the Early Modern period.

So when J and I decided to return to Morocco this fall, I decided one of my top priorities would be finding books about my topic. I finished the paper, but I plan on submitting it to graduate schools, so I want it to be as impressive as possible. If I can incorporate Arabic sources into my research as an undergrad, I become a much more impressive candidate for grad schools.

So, when J and I explored several bookstores and found that most of books were written in French, it was a bit frustrating. French is the language of the intellectual class in Morocco (which was occupied by France for quite some time), so it wasn’t a huge surprise, but it’s still frustrating. It became especially so when we found several books that would make fantastic additions to my paper, except that they were in French. I plan on learning French eventually, as most of the best work about North Africa will be in French, but I won’t learn it in time to include French sources in my paper.

Thus we get the near pants wetting when I read, in Arabic, Morocco and Europe, What Happened Between the Fifteenth and the Eighteenth Centuries. Not only was it cool that I was able to read the title at all, but this book promises to be exactly the kind of thing I had wanted to include in my paper.

So that was cool.

In other news, winter has set in here. That tends to mean temperatures in the seventies when the sun is out, and the forties and fifties when it isn’t. It also means a decent amount of rain.

The rain is kind of a switch. J and I have spent most of the last couple years in our college town in the States, which due to some weird quirk of elevation, only rarely gets real rain. What it does get plenty of is drizzle, fog, and general ickiness.

So having it raining for two days straight has been odd. We’re talking drench you in seconds kind of stuff. I can probably count the number of times our town has had that kind of rain during the day on my hands. It’s a nice change. It reminds me of when I was younger and used to play in the rain. For just a few moments (before I remembered I was wearing a book bag with lots of stuff in it), the rain was just this friendly presence that it was fun to run through. I don’t think adults get enough of that kind of thing. At least, I haven’t in the past few years.

That’s the news. I’d say I’m going to try to post more regularly, but that never seems to lead anywhere good. Until next time…

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PS

J’s hoping to put up some posts soon. We’ll see if it actually happens, but that’s the plan.