Last year, for instance, researchers looked at more than 67,000 misdemeanor cases in Suffolk County, Mass., which includes Boston, and found that people arrested but not charged for offenses like drug possession and shoplifting were less than half as likely as those who were prosecuted to be arrested again two years later for a new crime.

Mohsin Hamid

ALF A CENTURY LATER Nadia returned for the first time to the city of herbirth, where the fires she had witnessed in her youth had burnedthemselves out long ago, the lives of cities being far more persistent andmore gently cyclical than those of people, and the city she found herself inwas not a heaven but it was not a hell, and it was familiar but alsounfamiliar, and as she wandered about slowly, exploring, she was informedof the proximity of Saeed, and after standing motionless for a considerablemoment she communicated with him, and they agreed to meet

She felt she was beginning to belong, and when one told her about theoption of living at the cooperative, and that she could avail herself of it ifher family was oppressing her, or, another added quickly, even if she just

threshold of the shanty

LL OVER THE WORLD people were slipping away from where they hadbeen, from once fertile plains cracking with dryness, from seasidevillages gasping beneath tidal surges, from overcrowded cities andmurderous battlefields, and slipping away from other people too, peoplethey had in some cases loved, as Nadia was slipping away from Saeed, andSaeed from Nadia

We are all migrants through time

people who looked more at home than she was, even the homeless oneswho spoke no English, more at home maybe because they were younger,and when she went out it seemed to her that she too had migrated, thateveryone migrates, even if we stay in the same houses our whole lives,because we can’t help it.

hen he prayed he touchedhis parents, who could not otherwise be touched, and he touched a feelingthat we are all children who lose our parents, all of us, every man andwoman and boy and girl, and we too will all be lost by those who comeafter us and love us, and this loss unites humanity, unites every humanbeing, the temporary nature of our being-ness, and our shared sorrow,

homeland

nd yet it was not quite true to say there were almost no natives,nativeness being a relative matter, and many others considered themselvesnative to this country, by which they meant that they or their parents or theirgrandparents or the grandparents of their grandparents had been born on thestrip of land that stretched from the mid-northern-Pacific to the mid-northern-Atlantic, that their existence here did not owe anything to aphysical migration that had occurred in their lifetime

She fell in behind her parents, who nodded at Saeed in recognition, andhe turned and led them all from that place, a place that was alreadybeginning to be theirs, to another where going forward they could reliablyfind a meal

Nadia wanted to say more to Saeed than that, but just then her throat feltraw, almost painful, and what else she would have liked to say was unableto find a way through to her tongue and her lips.Saeed also had things on his mind. He knew he could have spoken toNadia now. He knew he should have spoken to Nadia now, for they hadtime and were together and were not distracted. But he likewise could notbring himself to speak.

But mostly there was little to report, just the day-to-day goings-on of countless people working and living and aging andfalling in and out of love, as is the case everywhere, and so not deemedworthy of headline billing or thought to be of much interest to anyone butthose directly involved

There the wrinkled man escorted him over tram tracks to thestudio where he worked, and showed him some of his paintings, and theelderly man was too caught up in what was happening to be objective, buthe thought these paintings were marked by real talent. He asked if he mightbuy one, and was instead given his choice as a gift.

In exchange for theirlabor in clearing terrain and building infrastructure and assemblingdwellings from prefabricated blocks, migrants were promised forty metersand a pipe: a home on forty square meters of land and a connection to allthe utilities of modernity

oexistence would have required one party to cease to exist, and theextinguishing party too would have been transformed in the process, andtoo many native parents would not after have been able to look theirchildren in the eye, to speak with head held high of what their generationhad done

Perhaps they had decided they did not have it in them to do what wouldhave needed to be done, to corral and bloody and where necessary slaughterthe migrants, and had determined that some other way would have to befound. Perhaps they had grasped that the doors could not be closed, andnew doors would continue to open,

Saeed wondered aloud once again if thenatives would really kill them, and Nadia said once again that the nativeswere so frightened that they could do anything

They heardhelicopters and more shooting and announcements to peacefully vacate thearea made over speakers so powerful that they shook the floor, and they sawthrough the gap between mattress and window thousands of leafletsdropping from the sky,

Both of them knew that thebattle of London would be hopelessly one-sided, and like many others theyno longer ventured far from their home

it having beenthat many years, and the girl hugged her mother and then became shy.

doors

ithout borders nations appearedto be becoming somewhat illusory, and people were questioning what rolethey had to play.

and it seemed that as everyone was comingtogether everyone was also moving apart.

as though shewas from the past reading about the future, or from the future reading aboutthe past, and she almost felt that if she got up and walked home at thismoment there would be two Nadias, that she would split into two Nadias

A THRIVING TRADE in electricity was under way in dark London, run bythose who lived in pockets with power, and Saeed and Nadia were able torecharge their phones from time to time,

cutting across divisions of race or language ornation, for what did those divisions matter now in a world full of doors, theonly divisions that mattered now were between those who sought the rightof passage and those who would deny them passage, and in such a worldthe religion of the righteous must defend those who sought passage

What makes them our kind?”“They’re from our country.”“From the country we used to be from.”

ot because he had not encounteredanything similar in his own country, he had, but because here in this househe was the only man from his country, and those sizing him up were fromanother country, and there were far more of them, and he was alone. Thistouched upon something basic, something tribal, and evoked tension and asort of suppressed fear. He was uncertain when he could relax, if he couldrelax, and so when he was outside his bedroom but inside the house heseldom felt fully at ease

Nigerians were in fact not all Nigerians, some werehalf Nigerians, or from places that bordered Nigeria, from families thatspanned both sides of a border, and further that there was perhaps no suchthing as a Nigerian

But in London there were parts as bright as ever, brighter thananyplace Saeed or Nadia had seen before, glowing up into the sky andreflecting down again from the clouds, and in contrast the city’s dark swathsseemed darker, more significant, the way that blackness in the oceansuggests not less light from above, but a sudden drop-off in the depthsbelow.

here an enterprising migrant had rigged together a connection to a still-active high-voltage line, risking and in some cases succumbing toelectrocution

waiting for labor, for the efforts of dark bodiesfrom the villages, and in these trees there were now dark bodies to

AFTER THE RIOTS the talk on the television was of a major operation, one cityat a time, starting in London, to reclaim Britain for Britain, and it wasreported that the army was being deployed, and the police as well, and thosewho had once served in the army and the police, and volunteers who hadreceived a weeklong course of training.

Vienna being no stranger, in the annals of history, to war, andthe militants had perhaps hoped to provoke a reaction against migrants

and that the doors out, which is to say the doors to richerdestinations, were heavily guarded, but the doors in, the doors from poorerplaces, were mostly left unsecured, perhaps in the hope that people wouldgo back to where they came from—although almost no one ever did—orperhaps because there were simply too many doors from too many poorerplaces to guard them all

Saeed and Nadia could, and so by making the promise he demanded shemake she was in a sense killing him, but that is the way of things, for whenwe migrate, we murder from our lives those we leave behind.

Saeed’s father wept only when hewas alone in his room, silently, without tears, his body seized as though bya stutter, or a shiver, that would not let go, for his sense of loss wasboundless, and his sense of the benevolence of the universe was shaken,and his wife had been his best friend.

she might havewaited much longer had Saeed’s mother not been killed, a stray heavy-caliber round passing through the windshield of her family’s car and takingwith it a quarter of Saeed’s mother’s head, not while she was driving, forshe had not driven in months, but while she was checking inside for anearring she thought she had misplaced

The few remaining local channels still on the air were saying that thewar was going well but the international ones were saying that it was goingbadly indeed, adding to an unprecedented flow of migrants that was hittingthe rich countries, who were building walls and fences and strengtheningtheir borders, but seemingly to unsatisfactory effect.

Nadia would never be able to determinewhat had become of them, but she always hoped they had found a way todepart unharmed, abandoning the city to the predations of warriors on bothsides who seemed content to flatten it in order to possess it

Saeed’s mother thought she saw a former student of hers firing with muchdetermination and focus a machine gun mounted on the back of a pickuptruck. She looked at him and he looked at her and he did not turn and shoother, and so she suspected it was him, although Saeed’s father said it meantnothing more than that she had seen a man who wished to fire in anotherdirection.

shattering Saeed’s bathroom window while he was in theshower, and shaking like an earthquake

he old man asked the officer whether it was Mexicans that had beencoming through, or was it Muslims, because he couldn’t be sure, and theofficer said he couldn’t answer, sir.

and for these young men who had established aperimeter around his property, as he watched, standing on the street withtheir commanding officer.

cancer of the throat that had withered him to theweight of a young girl, and who had not spoken to the old man for years,and when the old man had gone to see him in the hospital could no longerspeak, could only look, and in his eyes was exhaustion but not so muchfear, brave eyes, on a kid brother the old man had never before thought of asbrav

ready to resist the claims andexpectations of the world, and stepped outside to go for a walk in a nearbypark that would by now be emptying

to those of young men, andespecially of young women, and above all of children who went to sleepunfed but could see on some small screen people in foreign lands preparingand consuming and even conducting food fights with feasts of suchopulence that the very fact of their existence boggled the mind.

But now wandswaved in the city’s air, untethered and free, phones in the millions, and anumber could be obtained in minutes, for a pittance

IN TIMES OF VIOLENCE, there is always that first acquaintance or intimate ofours, who, when they are touched, makes what had seemed like a baddream suddenly, evisceratingly real.

She dramati-cally swept her hands over her head and around her face with an imagi-nary headscarf in her hands. “I don’t like them. You can vote for them.

From his mother, the child integrates the essential principles of his education; the men, who together will form the nation to come will have received their first ideas from a woman. The cultural and moral development of Morocco and of its future generations rests on the education of the Moroccan woman

She just wanted more schools for Muslim girls and for more Arabic and Islam to be taught to future “mothers of the nation.”

Other Muslim states had set an example by linking national renaissance to the education of women, showing “that the rebirth of a people must pro-ceed in tandem with the intellectual elevation of the woman.”

Othman al-Fayache, rebutted an arti-cle in the French newspaper Depeche de Fès by an indigenous affairs officer, Jouffray, that lauded France’s preservation of “Berber” freedom .

230 CHAPTER 7 2. Housekeeping Education: This education must take priority. Your school is a house-keeping school. He ended by saying, “I well know your conviction [about teaching the girls to read and write], but I must insist that you make sure never to overempha-size in this direction.” 24Perspectives among the French administrators and Moroccan parents began to shift, though, in the 1930s, and the DPI was forced to reevaluate the exclusive curricular focus on handicrafts and housekeeping. In 1939, questionnaires were sent out in the course of an internal study about adapt-ing an Algerian curriculum to the Moroccan context. The responses provide insight into the goals and experiences of the French women who directed these schools, including their perspectives on the “Moroccan social milieu” in which they worked. They frequently mentioned how Moroccan families were ambivalent about girls’ education; they wanted a modern curriculum but were hesitant about entrusting their daughters to a French-run system. In their report, Mesdames Le Beux and Brunot, two teachers at the lycée of Fes, commented: It is extremely difficult to know what the Moroccan families want. For some, it seems they are ready to raise their girls like their boys, but oth-ers want to hear nothing of this. Whether they are for or against girls education, they send me their daughters for the most part, only with a great deal of repugnance, and only continue to do so with a great deal of pressure from us. 25A hardline response from another director, Renée Duval, reiterated that the protectorate’s educational priorities were not to emancipate Moroccan women or disturb the social and class structures in place; instead, the priority was to preserve the existing order

Bussy also reiterated the long-term political importance of women’s education as a form of pénétration pacifique into the Moroccan home, remarking that “the political influence of these constant interactions with the indigenous world, with children and the women who—particularly at this point—show a curiosity about external events, cannot but be a help to French peaceful penetration.

in a desperate stagnation

Revoking Algerian Jews’ French citizenship reclassified them at a lower rung in the social hier-archy: they could no longer enroll in French schools, be under French legal jurisdiction, or even be admitted into European hospitals. Instead, they had to use the “native” health care facilities, unless there were extenuat-ing circumstances in which a certain type of care was only available in the European medical system or there were political priorities that necessitated special treatment

a second-class category of citizenship for French Jews that forbade nearly all Jewish participation in public life

He felt that it would also be dif-ficult to integrate Moroccan Jews with Moroccan Muslim units of tirailleurs(indigenous sharpshooter regiments) or spahis (indigenous light cavalry units) because of their different “mentality,” which he argued would require dif-ferent modes of instruction.

Buy French and you help the free nation that protects and defends you.

“Jews belong to a different race than ours; they form a vast nation of exploiters and thieves”

the point was not to make Moroccan Jews French; it was to carry out state and nation-building on behalf of the sultan

Young comrades, be conscious of your duties as Moroccan citizens, try to understand your Muslim compatriots, create sporting groups and clubs where the Moroccan youth can learn of the duties of man

Bouhlal exhorted Moroccan Jews to preserve the “indissoluble union between Muslims and Jews, in a strictly Moroccan national framework, for the good of our common patrie, for the general interest of our collectivity

Moroccan nationalists were tempted to sharpen the boundary of Arabo-Islamic identity by targeting Moroccan Jews as an internal religious other when they rallied popular support for their cause in mass demonstrations.

He concluded the piece by declaring his opposition to a “Moroc-can Crémieux Decree,” but he also expressed concern about the spread of anti-Semitism in Europe and in the protectorate and called on the “Young Moroccans” (the nationalists publishing the paper) to denounce i

An article titled “Judeo-Muslim Friendship” reported a joint state-ment from Jewish and Muslim notables in the Spanish zone that celebrated the historic tolerance and friendship between the groups and rejected pro-paganda that encouraged Jews to assimilate.

French citizens, arguing that such a move would violate the 1912 treaty and foment discord between the two races

solidarity

He contrasted the European Christian anti-Semitism displayed in the “pogroms of the Romanians” and the “Hitlerian inquisition in Germany” with the historic solidarity, tolerance, and freedom Jews had enjoyed since they took refuge in Morocco

Moroccan nationalists also voiced concerns about the prospect of the French unilaterally naturalizing Morocco’s Jews, as had been done in Algeria. In the Fes-based L’Action du Peuple, Mohamed el-Ouezzani equated initia-tives to naturalize Morocco’s Jews as French citizens to the policies expressed in the 1930 Berber dahir. He warned that Arabs themselves would end up a persecuted minority:

Morocco’s Jews also presented a dilemma for Moroccan nationalists, who worked from the early 1930s to defend a unitary definition of Arabo-Islamic national identity against the divisionary logics of the colonial stat

Zionist activity not only risked further escalating Jewish-Muslim tensions, it also threatened the protectorate fiction that legitimated their intervention in Morocco.

asking why they did not teach Turkish or Arabic and agri-cultural skills instead of French and Parisian bourgeois values

190 CHAPTER 6An early Zionist initiative was to raise funds through existing benevolence missions, including special relief collections for Moroccan Jewish commu-nities in Palestine facing hardships caused by World War I. 26 Zionists also focused on education, creating schools that taught modern Hebrew. The first, Maghen David, was founded in Casablanca in 1920; others followed in the 1930s, including Fes in 1931, Oujda in 1935, and Sefrou in 1936. In many respects, these Zionist schools paralleled the activities of the Mus-lim free schools; they created a foundation for Jewish cultural nationalism through the teaching of the Hebrew language, nationalist hymns, and the use of Zionist symbols

They were also held in limbo on another fundamental criterion of national identity, the opportunity to die for the nation . In both world wars, they were severely restricted from fighting for France, which might have strengthened a case for their naturalization, or for Morocco, because colonial authorities feared that the creation of Moroccan Jewish brigade would provoke tensions with the sultan, creating a blasphemous innovation that contravened Islamic law and the “traditional” order of Moroccan societ

Cases more frequently involved Moroccan Jews who fought to confirm French or another nationality, which often conferred advantageous inheri-tance rights.

- parallels to how definitions of whiteness have changed in the US and different people have allied themselves with whiteness because of its privileges

“Jews in Morocco,” who constituted a substantial population in Morocco’s coastal commercial centers, included Jews with French citizenship or any other non-Moroccan nationality. These “Jews living in Morocco” were under the jurisdiction of the French legal system and had access to French system schools.

e 1870 Crémieux Decree unilaterally nat-uralized Algerian Jews as French citizens and complicated relations among newly enfranchised Jews, the settler population (some of which was overtly anti-Semitic), and Muslims who were denied citizenship—as a cautionary tale

- parallel to American empire, argument during the Spanish-American war that certain peoples were unworthy of being incorporated into the US

The AIU encour-aged the “moral progress” and “emancipation” of Jews living in the Muslim world, principally through the propagation of French language and culture

In the 1860s, there were several Western interventions to “protect” Morocco’s Jews, beginning with a visit to Marrakesh in 1863 by Sir Moses Montefiore, the prominent Jewish philanthropist, to petition the sultan to release nine Jews imprisoned in Saf

Morocco’s Jews highlighted fundamental ques-tions about the boundaries of the Arabo-Islamic national community they imagined: Was this religious minority to be classified as dhimmi (a protected religious minority under Islamic law), subjects of the sultan/king, or equal citizens of the Moroccan nation?