Diary – 13 January 2007

The new year is little more than a week old and while everybody else is no doubt still righteously munching lettuce leaves, joining gyms and going teetotal, I’ve already broken Personal Resolution Number One: to reduce my carbon footprint. Barely off a Ryanair flight from Provence (where we’d spent New Year in freakishly hot sunshine, proof if ever it were needed of climate change), my boyfriend and I promptly boarded an easyJet plane to Morocco. OK, so I know the likes of Al Gore would have my guts for garters, but it’s a while since I’ve had a holiday and, given that it’s considerably cheaper to fly to Marrakech than get a train to Manchester, I’m afraid I succumbed. The sooner aviation is part of the EU emissions trading scheme the better, because as long as budget airlines operate thus, it’ll remain even easier to break this resolution than it is the gym-going one. A feat indeed.

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So here I am in chaotic, enchanting Marrakech, an African Muslim city that appears to bear little resemblance to any of either the African or Muslim countries I’ve spent time in. For a place that has apparently produced some of the most vicious anti-Western terrorists of recent years, it feels refreshingly tolerant. In the bustling medina, over the pleasant din of donkeys clopping and cars honking and traders coaxing and tourists cooing, I can hear gnawa musicians, secular Arabic pop songs and djembe drummers all battling it out with the local muezzin. I’ve hardly seen a woman in a veil and yesterday, as I riffled through an Islamic antique shop in the souk, I came across a Torah scroll, beautifully preserved and in ancient Hebrew, jostling among the antique Korans. Strolling round the spiritually tranquil and aesthetically sublime Ben Youssef Medersa, it struck me as desperately sad that the word ‘madrasah’ has come to be synonymous in the West with extremist indoctrination.