Here is the thing: every Friday is a couscous Friday...We eat nice couscous here. People who are here on a regular rotation count how much time they have left by how many couscous they have let...obviously I don’t because it would not make any sense at all for me.Anyway, I was talking about couscous Fridays with my friend Y. . He told me how if he was home today he would have a picnic with couscous and told me how they eat it out of one big wooden plate for all and how they drink milk with it etc etc…Then he went on about how he wish I was Algerian so I could go to visit his family and he would make sure we had couscous to eat. When I told him that I was thinking of visit Ghardaia (remember the Mzab) because it seemed like one of the safest place to visit for a woman alone, he agreed. And just as in any typical conversation we started talking about the Mzab and why it was there and where their culture came from etc and the name of Ibn Khaldoun came up. He is an historian-sociologist who wrote about the history of this part of the world. I looked him up on the internet and it does look like if you are going to read one book on the subject this would be the way to go. To put things in perspective I should say that he was born in 1332.
So here is a reading suggestion, Y. says that this is the only way to understand this part of the world, the Arabs, the Berbers, Islam and everything which is going on now, try IBN KHALDOUN also spelt "Khaldun". I know I will.
