Here is a brief selection of favorite, new and hard-to-find books, prepared for your journey. You will find below direct links to Amazon where you will be able to purchase the following recommended books in your preferred format.
Travel & Field Guides
Insight Guides Morocco
Insight Guide to Morocco is a lavishly illustrated inspirational travel guide to Morocco and a beautiful souvenir of your trip. Perfect for travelers looking for a deeper dive into the destination’s history and culture, it’s ideal to inspire and help you plan your travels. With its great selection of places to see and colorful magazine-style layout, this Morocco guidebook is just the tool you need to accompany you before or during your trip. Whether it’s deciding when to go, choosing what to see or creating a travel plan to cover key places like Fez and Marrakech, it will answer all the questions you might have along the way.
Where to Watch Birds in Morocco
Morocco is a paradise for birdwatchers with its coasts, islands, wadis, plains, forests, mountains and deserts creating conditions that are often very different from those found in Europe. The richness of these habitats is clearly illustrated by the 452 species which have been recorded so far. This is a very short period in the dynamics of bird communities, but a very long period in a country that has developed so quickly. This book is not a field guide to species, rather it is a guide to the sites of key ornithological importance in Morocco. It contains information and detailed maps to enable you plan a visit and provide guidance when you are on your trip.
Morocco: The Essential Guide to Customs & Culture
This guide describes the life of Moroccans today, as well as the key customs and traditions that punctuate daily life. It examines the impact of religious beliefs and history on their lives, and provides insight into the values that people hold dear, as well as recent social and political developments. Tips on communicating, socializing, and on navigating the unfamiliar situations that visitors are likely to encounter ensure that they get the very best out of their time in this welcoming yet complex land.
Wild Guide Morocco: Great Adventures Through
Mountain, Coast, and Desert
Unveil Morocco’s wild heart with this inspiring new guide. Leading you to hidden oases, secret waterfalls, dramatic coastlines, ancient ruins and the vast Sahara Desert, it highlights over 650 destinations for adventurers, nature enthusiasts and those seeking authentic Moroccan experiences. Swim in refreshing river pools, hike dramatic gorges, camp under star-filled skies and encounter the magic of ancient villages. With detailed maps, insider tips, and advice for sustainable travel, you can explore Morocco’s untamed beauty with confidence.
History
Morocco: From Empire to Independence
From the strait of Gibraltar to the snowy peaks of the Atlas
Mountains and the windswept Sahara, this book captures a history as diverse and dramatic as Morocco’s legendary landscapes and cities. Beginning with Morocco’s incorporation into the Roman Empire, this is a tale of powerful empires, fearsome pirates, a bloody struggle against colonization and an equally hard-won independence. It charts Morocco’s uneasy passage to the twenty-first century, and reflects on the nation of citizens that is finally emerging from a diverse population of Arabs, Berbers and Africans.
Ahmad al-Mansur: The Beginnings of Modern Morocco
Sultan Ahmad al-Mansur was one of the most important rulers in the history of Morocco, which to this day bears the mark of his twenty-five year rule in the sixteenth century. Though famed for his cunning diplomacy in the power struggle over the Mediterranean, and his allegiance with Britain against Spain in the conquest for the newly discovered Americas, he was more than a political and military tactician. A descendent of the Prophet Muhammad himself, al-Mansur was a charismatic religious authority with ambitions to become Caliph and ruler of all Muslims.
Lords of the Atlas: The Rise and Fall of the House of Glaoua
Lords of the Atlas is a classic story of Morocco and the rise and
spectacular fall of the House of Glaoua. Madini and T’hami El Glaoui, sons of a Moroccan Caid by an Ethiopian concubine, rose meteorically to power in the almost medieval state of Morocco at the end of the nineteenth Century. This is the epic story of the more than fifty years in which they governed the country in barbaric, ostentatious splendor, until their spectacular downfall in 1956.
The Almohads: The Rise of an Islamic Empire
Allen Fromherz, drawing on medieval Arabic and Berber sources, analyses the history and myths surrounding the rise of the Almohads. He shows how Muhammad Ibn Tumart, the son of an obscure Berber tribal chief, founded his mission to reform Islam – then at a low point in its history, battered by the crusades, having lost Jerusalem and been undermined by weak spiritual and political leadership. Fromherz shows how Tumart formed the sinews of empire – by charismatic leadership, a reformed and powerful Islam, unity based on the closely-knit traditions of the Berber tribes, military power and sound administration.
The Sahara: A Cultural History
Eamonn Gearon covers the history of the Great Desert, from prehistoric origins to today’s political dramas. Millennia of human habitation, eleven modern nations, and landscapes that appeal and appall in equal measure: seas of sand and moonlike mountains, wastelands of rock and life-giving oases. “The Sahara” is guaranteed to please all who delight in history; fans of film; devotees of poetry and prose; political junkies seeking understanding of contemporary North Africa; and all desert lovers!
Jews Under Moroccan Skies
A detailed history of Jewish life in Morocco, describing in realistic detail how Jews and Muslims interweaved their lives in peace for
centuries. The authors give us the rich history of Berber Jews, the
Moroccan tzadikim, and Jewish mysticism in the country. They also describe the cultural differences between the Judeo-Spanish communities of the North, the Francophone urban Jews, and the Judeo- Arabic and Judeo-Berber traditions.
Literature/Memoirs
The Spider’s House: A Novel
The dilemma of the outsider in an alien society, and the gap in understanding between cultures, recurrent themes of Paul Bowles’s writings, are dramatized with brutal honesty in this novel set in Fez, Morocco, during that country’s 1954 nationalist uprising. Totally relevant to today’s political situation in the Middle East and elsewhere, richly descriptive of its setting, and uncompromising in its characterizations, The Spider’s House is perhaps Bowles’s best, most beautifully subtle novel.
Dreams of Trespass: Tales of a Harem Girlhood
“I was born in a harem in 1940 in Fez, Morocco.” So begins Fatima
Mernissi in this illuminating narrative of a childhood behind the iron gates of a domestic harem. In Dreams of Trespass, Mernissi weaves her own memories with the dreams and memories of the women who surrounded her in the courtyard of her youth — women who, without access to the world outside, recreated it from sheer imagination. Dreams of Trespass illuminates what it was like to be a modern Muslim woman in a place steeped in tradition.
Leo the African (Leon L’Africain)
From his childhood in Fez, having fled the Christian Inquisition, through his many journeys to the East as an itinerant merchant, Hasan’s story is a quixotic catalogue of pirates, slave girls and princesses, encompassing the complexities of a world in a state of religious flux. Hasan too is touched by the instability of the era, performing his hadj to Mecca, then converting to Christianity, only to relapse back to the Muslim faith later in life.
Desert
Desert is two stories. The first takes place between 1909 and
1912 and is about the migration of a young adolescent boy, Nour, and his people, the Blue Men of the Sahara Desert. Driven from their lands by French colonial soldiers, Nour’s tribe has come to the valley of the Saguiet El Hamra to seek the aid of the great spiritual leader known as Water of the Eyes. The religious chief sends them out from the holy city of Smara into the desert to travel still further. Spurred on by thirst, hunger, and suffering, Nour’s tribe and others flee northward in the hopes of finding a land that can harbor them at last. The second narrative tells the contemporary story of Lalla, a descendant of the Blue Men. An orphan living in a shantytown known as the Project near a coastal city in Morocco, Lalla must flee to France where even greater challenges await her.
Stolen Lives: 20 years in a Desert Jail
The daughter of a former aide to the king of Morocco, who was
executed after a failed assassination attempt on the ruler, describes how she, her five siblings, and her mother were imprisoned in a desert penal colony for twenty years.
The Sheltering Sky
In this classic work of psychological terror, Paul Bowles examines the ways in which Americans apprehend other cultures–and the ways in which their incomprehension destroys them. The story of three American travelers adrift in the cities and deserts of North Africa after World War II, The Sheltering Sky is at once merciless and heartbreaking in its compassion. It etches the limits of human reason and intelligence–perhaps even the limits of human life –
-when they touch the unfathomable emptiness and impassive cruelty of the dessert.
