The event will include the participation of the author and Ángeles Ramírez, who wrote the prologue to the book. She is a professor with the Department of Social Anthropology at the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid .

It has been tirelessly repeated that Morocco lies on the cusp between modernity and tradition, but this stereotype, despite being true to a degree, is not enough to explain all of the country’s paradoxes. To its peoples, Morocco is a nation which has chosen its own path, that will not surrender to Europe’s impositions, but at the same time does not align itself with an Arab world festering from religious and identity-based conflicts. However, to the Arabs of the East, it is a Berber, mixed-race country on the periphery, corrupted by French colonization. To Sub-Saharans, it is a country to look at over their shoulder. To Europeans, it is the neighbor constantly knocking at its door, one of the toughest negotiators that it has been forced to deal with. This book discusses society, including both the commonplace and the extraordinary, in a country both close and distant all at once, trapped within a system and a set of laws which look towards the past, passionate in its contradictions and its own particular steps both towards and away from modernization.

Javier Otazu is a journalist and the correspondent for the EFE News Agency in Rabat. He possesses in-depth knowledge of the Arab world and, in particular, Morocco. He has also worked in Egypt. He covered the pilgrimage to Mecca, walking like yet another traveler, as well as the wars in Kosovo and Iraq, the fall of the regime in Afghanistan and the earthquake in Haiti.