Where are the progressives in Morocco?

A long time of research on Morocco, the country where I grew up, where I am from and where I belong, has led me to question questions that may seem pretentious, but which really respond to an intransigent need of the Moroccan people. The need for "changes", changes that bring hope, hope that will materialize in the future. Changes that are expected to come from those who have possibilities and use them for the common good. 

However, reading many sad progressive egomaniacs, I feel the intellectual abandonment of many Moroccans towards their people. I notice the inhospitable bubble in which almost everyone lives on the fringes of the painful reality, where they do not feel part of a country, nor do they consider themselves fellow citizens of the most unfortunate. The same bubble through which thousands of people suffer every day in Derechos, at the cost of their difficulties in the labour market, their exploitation in the big cities, from minors to the elderly.

These are no more and no less than hundreds of intellectual progressives, among others who confine themselves to a parliament to beg for crumbs, not to defend the obvious, who are content to say "religion and politics must be separated", but then run to hide behind the high walls of arrogance and greed that keep them and allow them to have their status, their money, their power. 

Yes, sometimes it is good to look inward, among those of us who seek to establish the debate between "progress", to understand that if religiosity is on the rise as a model of identity it is not because of the "tireless work" of those who had possibilities and who, knowing what the people were suffering, were satisfied with knowing that they were going to live well. Therein lies the violent indifference of the privileged. Those who defend freedom by whispering, because they know that the fact that they live outside the law has no real legal consequences. 

Those who soon forget that laicism must not be defended for its own possible good, which allows for a "westernised and accommodated" life, but is a model of society that protects freedoms, the rights of all equally, that avoids exclusion for any reason and that guarantees dignity above all. This is the one that is broken and snatched away from hundreds of Moroccans every day.

A laicism that thousands of religious people try to dismantle every day in the name of atheism, blocking the access of lay people to the public stage, those who have unwillingly chosen to occupy the bank of silence. A complicit silence, which covers up ideological violence towards the lower and precarious classes of a people. 

All over the world people continue to claim rights in the name of "laicism", that is, religious neutrality, the right of Muslims, Christians, agnostics, Jews or atheists to live in freedom. The right to be able to choose. The freedom of conscience. However, those supposed defenders of laicism do not feel challenged by the fanatics and extremists who label them as Westernised atheists, preferring to use silence and to accommodate it with the word "tolerance", justifying the unjustifiable. Give food to those who steal bread. 

Those progressive Moroccan laymen who, with their intellectual supremacy, claim that Morocco is not ready for civil rules that are far removed from religious ones. Similar to the Islamist supremacists who are the banners of the Muslims in their countries and communities.

 They claim to be talking about a Morocco that is not even asked how it is, for which they do not talk about child marriages, paedophilia and prostitution, the misery of urban areas, the lack of infrastructure in rural areas. 

A whitewashed Morocco, in the name of an outward image which, by doing harm, denies no more and no less the suffering of thousands of people. These progressive people, whose humanity has been destroyed by the beauty of their riads and the slums of their cities, do not hesitate to deny reality when their country is questioned from outside. 

These are the progressives who avoid debate on a daily basis. They do not open it up because they consider that the rest of Moroccans are not capable of deciding whether they want civil standards outside religion, because they believe that there are no Moroccans capable of understanding that rejecting Islamic laws and standards does not imply rejecting Islam. These are the same people who deny the power to decide to the same people who are crying out and begging for information, means, changes, hope and a future. These people who receive daily handfuls of misogynist and sectarian Islamist doctrine, because progressives who have opportunities refuse to consider themselves their fellow citizens.

If you want to know why a people is not progressive. Ask the progressives what they think of the people.