Nine Quarters of Jerusalem by Matthew Teller

Author:Matthew Teller [Teller, Matthew]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Other Press
Published: 2022-09-13T00:00:00+00:00

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Hold on, brief time out needed. Arabic can be confusing, and I’m afraid this is another example.

Gharb means west. Maghrib, a noun derived from it, means “a place in the west” (and, relatedly, “evening,” and therefore also the daily prayer recited at sunset). But, separately, the same word maghrib is also used for two different geographical concepts – on the one hand Morocco, and on the other all the Arabic-speaking countries of North Africa to the west of Egypt (so Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya, Western Sahara and Mauritania). It has even passed into English: the Maghrib, or Maghreb, is a familiar general term for Arab and Amazigh – that is, Berber – North Africa.

For our purposes relevant adjectives are maghribi (singular) and magharba (plural) – these can mean Moroccan/Moroccans if used narrowly, or North African/North Africans in a wider sense. Unless a speaker clarifies which meaning is intended, there’s no real way to be sure which it is. This linguistic ambiguity, coupled nowadays with a false conflation of this Muslim community’s history with unrelated Israeli narratives around Moroccan Jewry, means that Jerusalem’s Haret al-Magharba,[*1] which might best be translated as “North African Quarter,” is usually given as “Moroccan Quarter.” The adjacent gateway into Al-Aqsa, which became known as Bab al-Magharba (“North Africans’ Gate”), is mangled on street signs into “Morocco Gate.” And to add another layer of confusion, the southern gate in Jerusalem’s city walls here was also given the name Bab al-Magharba, despite keeping “Dung Gate” in Hebrew and English. It’s all a bit of a muddle.

Now, in order to understand what happened here later, we need to widen the scope a little.

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