Friday, March 5, 2021

Sadia Khatri

Do Human Evolution and Islam Conflict in the Classroom?

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By SADIA KHATRI

This article was published on April 01, 2014 by Al Fanar Media, an online publication that covers higher education in the Arab world. It was presented there under an agreement with The Chronicle. 

Rabat, Morocco—Hanging outside of Professor Touria Benazzour’s office is a cut out of a magazine portrait of Charles Darwin.

Benazzour put it up when she began teaching human evolution 25 years ago, one of the first professors to introduce the sensitive and controversial topic in a Moroccan classroom. Today, Benazzour teaches in the Master’s degree program at Mohammad V University, the capital’s oldest higher-education public institution.

Empowering women locally: Sabah Lazaar

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By SADIA KHATRI

Photographs by MARK MINTON

Sabah Lazaar watches women pile into the white building of Annajan Cooperative: 16 and 17-year-olds trek from distances of several kilometers away, for a morning spent with sewing machines and computers. The vocational center wasn’t a sight in Lazaar’svillage while growing up—which is exactly why she founded it.

“I never wanted to work in a place where everything had already been provided,” she insists, “That would be an easy way out.”

In Sbaa Rouadi—Lazaar’s dry, humid village—sunset marks the end of activity. Men head home from farming, and women wrap up the day’s cooking.

A Vegetarian’s Guide to Morocco

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By SADIA KHATRI

Food streets in Morocco are a vegetarian’s nightmare. Butcher shops flaunt meat in every form: cut into sausage, minced, sliced, finely chopped. Roadside restaurants advertise an assortment of chawarmas, paninis and burgers while customers loiter about. Biased menus flap in defiance, offering modest salads as their sole vegetarian option, as smoke from barbequed chicken lingers invitingly above grilles, and snail and fish smells waft in to tantalize passerbys. In Morocco, meat is more than a popular cuisine: it is a lifestyle

“It’s very shame[ful] if you have people in your house and you put Tajine without meat,” stresses Ibrahim Adaoui, 46, referring to his favourite stew of chicken, tendered to perfection.

In Moroccan Villages, Solar Energy Powering Education

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By SADIA KHATRI

Gladiator sets and ancient Berber qasbahs are immediately associated with the Moroccan city of Ouarzazate.  But bustling behind its desert winds is a third, equally impressive feat: the pioneering of solar energy. A $9 billion plant launched in 2009 is slowly being assembled to life, while smaller plants on the city’s outskirts have already begun subsiding electricity costs. Yet, an earlier solar project has proved more monumental in some ways, by tackling a local problem: education in villages.

Each morning, in villages dotted around southern Morocco, children skip school to fetch water from nearby wells.

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