ABSTRACT
While in the Arab states of the Middle East, pan-Arab romanticism and hatred of Israel take up a great part of every political conversation, the Moroccans regard these problems rather distantly, as corresponds to their geographical position. Although the Moroccan leaders also pay lip service to the ‘Arab Nation’, they regard it as a cultural community, and are quite sceptical about the idea of a political union. The Moroccans regard the Arab League as a harmless method of stressing that they are part of the Arab world. When the Arabs and the Jews were expelled from Spain they carried Spanish culture southwards. The Arabs call themselves ‘Whites’, and their regions Bilad el-Beidan , ‘Land of the Whites’, in contrast to Bilad as-Sudan, the ‘Land of the Blacks’. For the Negroes, harassed for hundreds of years by Arab slave traders, the Arabs were no doubt bad ‘whites’, just as the Europeans were for colonial peoples they had conquered.
