Anouar Majid attends event at Institut du Monde Arabe

Anouar Majid, Ph.D., vice president for Global Affairs and director of the Center for Global Humanities, was recently invited to a presentation and celebration of Serge Berdugo’s book project on the rehabilitation of Jewish cemeteries in Morocco.

The event took place at the Institut de Monde Arabe, a center dedicated to highlighting the cultures of the Arab world, which is headed by Jack Lang, who served as France’s minister of culture throughout much of the 1980s and twice as minister of education in the 1990s and early 2000s.

Ministers, ambassadors, rabbis, imams, bishops, intellectuals, diplomats and many others came together to celebrate Morocco’s millennial Jewish history, the country’s diversity and several other virtues of Morocco.

According to Majid, following the presentation of the book, three French Moroccans—an imam, a rabbi and a bishop—all practicing in the same district of Évry, a suburb of Paris, were awarded medals of honor by the King of Morocco’s sister Princess Lalla Meriem, on the king’s behalf.

France’s Prime Minister Manuel Valls, recently in the limelight following the terrorist acts in Paris, spoke to the audience, condemning all forms of discrimination and then explaining the often poorly misunderstood concept of laïcité (analogous to the American idea of secularism).

Majid commented, "It is often said that France went too far with its anti-clerical revolution, but Valls gave his nation’s ideology— laïcité —a decidedly Jeffersonian meaning."