Here’s Looking at You, King

Ahmed Benchemsi had a playfully subversive thought: Why not publish the king’s salary? It’s his readers’ taxes that pay for it, after all, and the sum -- approved by parliament -- is publicly available information. So TelQuel, the Moroccan newsweekly that Benchemsi publishes, ran a 12-page spread on the king’s pay (roughly $50,000 a month) and his palace’s staggering annual operating budget (about $270 million) in its first issue of the year.

Moroccans talked of nothing else for days in what was only the most adventurous example of the scrappy magazine’s uncanny ability to set the agenda in this North African kingdom and push the boundaries of acceptable discourse. The ostensibly public royal budget, after all, is not something most Moroccan journalists dare write about. Nor is it something members of parliament ask about either, according to Benchemsi. “They are too afraid to even look at the numbers, so they just vote yes and move on.” He isn’t much of a George W. Bush fan, but Benchemsi is an important player on the team the administration is cheering on in the Muslim and Arab worlds -- the modernizing and democratizing team. Bush in his State of the Union address talked about the “hopeful reform taking hold in an arc from Morocco to Jordan to Bahrain,” and this 30-year-old Moroccan journalist with a wry sense of humor is doing his bit to forge a new civic culture.

Morocco is a puzzling place, alternately offering visitors reason for optimism and dread. This is the westernmost outpost of the Arab world -- Casablanca is west of London -- and it has long prided itself on its close ties to the West and its moderate brand of Islam. Yet an alarming number of Islamic terror group recruits in Europe are immigrants of Moroccan origin, and the nation experienced its own first large-scale terrorist attacks with a series of bombings in Casablanca in May of 2003.

Women in Morocco have far more freedom than their counterparts in Saudi Arabia or even in Egypt. Last year, they were finally granted a package of reforms that include the right to seek divorce under certain circumstances. But more of them are voluntarily wearing veils today than a decade ago as a result of a growing sense of pan-Arab Islamism. It’s a sentiment fueled by the U.S. invasion of Iraq, more than one pro-American observer told me during a week I spent in the country.

Over a recent lunch in Casablanca, Benchemsi told me he decided to lay off writing about the king for a while after the year’s first issue: “You know, give him a few weeks to get used to the idea that everyone now knows his salary, and what he spends on his cars each year.” Not rubbing it in makes sense in a kingdom where insulting the king is a crime, for which a number of other journalists in recent years have gone to jail.

TelQuel, written in French, the elite’s language, is far more influential than its circulation of 20,000 copies might suggest. It claims to write about “Morocco as it really is,” and it has done muckraking pieces on such other taboo subjects as AIDS and the drug trade. It is not overtly ideological, besides its aggressive secularism. “The government knows well how to deal with those who kiss its hand and those who attack it, but it gets confused about those of us in between,” Benchemsi says.

But what impressed me most about TelQuel -- and indeed about Morocco’s prospects overall as a beacon of modernity in the region -- is the fact that major banks, airlines and multinationals like Hewlett-Packard feel free to advertise in it, despite its controversial content, apparently without fear of reprisal. That’s a tribute to King Mohammed VI’s efforts to liberalize the country after taking over from his father, King Hassan II, who died in 1999 after ruling with a firm grip for nearly four decades. The current king has even blessed a process of reconciliation in which former victims of his father’s repressive regime are testifying about their illegal imprisonment and torture.

The danger for Morocco is that Benchemsi and a new crop of liberal-minded public groups aren’t the only ones adept at exploiting new freedoms. By all accounts, the most energetic political force in Morocco these days is the Islamist Justice and Development Party. Indeed, the other piece of journalism that created TelQuel-like buzz this year ran in the party’s newspaper. It said the tsunami in Southeast Asia was God’s way of punishing hedonism and warned that a similar fate awaited Morocco unless it began to conform to God’s law.