Maghreb Politics Review: A Much-Needed English Site on the Maghreb

I just learned (thanks to the always readable and valuable Egypt-based blog The Arabist) of a new (about a month old) blog, Maghreb Politics Review, a group blog led by (or at least including) Kal from The Moor Next Door, which I've cited before for being kind enough to both note this blog's existence and expand my understanding of the events in Berriane.

The group blog, which seems to have started just a bit before this one did, has a mix of posts so far, but including one rather scholarly one on Mauritania, which is always the forgotten Maghreb country.

I'm not a Maghrebist, as the Algerian commenters on this blog have realized, but I've always had an interest going back to my old grad school advisor John D. Ruedy, an Algerian specialist. Yet I've never even set foot in Algeria; Tunisia I know pretty well, and Morocco a bit, and one thing that has always bothered me is the fact that virtually all the literature on the Maghreb is, for obvious historical reasons, in French. I only rarely get articles for The Middle East Journal on the Maghreb. (There'll be one on Algeria in the next issue, and it is in English, but it's by Jean-Pierre Filiu from Sciences-Po in Paris, which underscores the point.) Some articles may be going to John Entelis' Journal of North African Studies, but I suspect most are appearing in French.

Which reminds me of a story . . . Sometime in the late 1980s or early 1990s, I was flying to Tunis and, for some reason, I was routed by whoever made the reservations (don't remember who was paying for this particular trip, but it wasn't I) via Frankfurt and Munich to Tunis. The airport clerk checking me in and checking my passport and visas said to me, "let's see, Frankfurt, Munich, Tunis . . . is that in Germany, too?"

That stuck in my mind at the moment, but was really underscored some hours later when, leaving Carthage-Tunis airport in a taxi which took the northerly route to the city rather than the causeway, we passed a sign for the "US Military Cemetery," and I reflected on how many Americans had died at Kasserine Pass, El Guettar, and elsewhere in Tunisia in the liberation of North Africa in 1942, yet today airline clerks wonder if it's in Germany. Well, we were fighting Germans there.

That may not be germane to what Maghreb Politics Review is trying to do, but note that their URL is "maghrebinenglish.wordpress.com." I welcome any informed material on the Maghreb in English, since there has been so little for so long. For too many Anglophones (which the comments on my Berriane posts suggest is now a pejorative), the Maghreb is French-speaking territory and we aren't invited to comment. That's too bad, since the Arab west is a vital part of the Arab world, which even too many Arabs in the Mashriq (the east) don't appreciate.