We had to destroy it to save it

That photo was taken by me a few days ago in Morocco's High Atlas Mountains. My soundtrack for time spent at altitude was the reissue Music of Morocco recorded by Paul Bowles as archived in the Library of Congress. As my photo shows Morocco still has a unique ambience in the mountainous areas. But overall Morocco was a very different country when Bowles made his recordings in 1959. As the Italian writer and traveller Tiziano Terzani explains in A Fortune Teller Told Me: 

 A country at the crossroads between modernization cum destruction and an isolation that would preserve its identity has no real choice: others have chosen on its behalf. Businessmen, bankers, experts from international organizations, officers of the UN and half the world's governments and passionate prophets of 'development' at all costs. They believe unanimously in a kind of mission not far removed from that of the American General in Vietnam who, after razing a Vietcong-occupied village to the ground, said proudly: "We had to destroy it to save it". 

Paul Bowles' open-minded approach to cultural traditions is at odds with today's divisive thinking.  As well a wealth of music from the indigenous Muslim Berbers, Bowles recorded secular Sephardic songs in Meknes and Chalom Lakha Chèbii (Peace on the Seventh Day) by a cantor at the synagogue in Essaouira. At the end of the nineteenth century around 7000 Jews lived in the Jewish quarter, known as the mellah, in Essaouira. But the creation of Israel and the continuing tension between Arabs and Jews decimated the Jewish community. Now only a few Jewish families live in the city, although there has been some recent rehabilitation of the city's Jewish heritage.

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