Middle East Focus: Gulf GCC: Moroccan Couscous Controversy, Jordanian Humor Controversy……..

Arabia Deserta

Gulf GCC: Moroccan Couscous Controversy, Jordanian Humor Controversy……..

Rattlesnake Ridge

BFF
Last spring the leaders of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) held a meeting in Riyadh that came up with what Americans would call a “doozy”. They, or rather the Al Saud overseers of the GCC, openly invited the Kingdoms of Morocco and Jordan to join the GCC. That was a shocker. That GCC meeting reminded me of those old Hollywood films where the hero (and heroine) wake up from a drunken binge to find themselves in a double bed Las Vegas or Mexico and married to someone they only met the night before.

Moroccans, being North Africans of the Greater Maghreb, seemed naturally skeptic, and their king responded by initiating the type of constitutional reforms that last March had led to a Saudi military intervention when demanded by the people of Bahrain. The political and, at least as important, cultural obstacles are nearly insurmountable. I tweeted to someone from Morocco that there are many insurmountable difficulties (personally I thought the idea was ridiculous, as absurd as the idea of a GCC confederation being pushed by Saudi surrogates in the Gulf). I noted that for one thing, the favorite dish of Morocco, and the rest of North Africa, is the couscous (that is cous+cous). The “cous” is Arabic for vagina: it is hard enough pronouncing it once in public let alone doing it twice in restaurants and at dinners, as in “please pass the vagina-vagina”. On the brighter side, most senior Saudi princes (and probably Emirati shaikhs as well as others) love to spend very long holidays in Morocco. Maybe it has to do with the cous-cous.

As for Jordan, well, the main obstacle may be the famously nonexistent Jordanian sense of humor. The alleged Jordanian sense of humor is as bad as the Palestinian one, and even worse than the Israeli sense of humor. To clarify this point: Jordanian sense of humor is even worse than the Gulf sense of humor (we Gulfies, most of us, take ourselves too effing seriously, even if others don’t take us as seriously). Jordan can be a source of labor for the Gulf region, especially mid-level and low-level humorless bureaucrats. They already export humorless security “advisers” to some Gulf GCC states like Bahrain and the UAE. These two Gulf countries have early realized the potential for utilizing the Jordanian lack of humor and have eagerly availed themselves of certain class of imported skills. They especially like the interrogators and torturers, allegedly, who can convince a dissident or protester that they actually know much more than they had ever thought they knew.

Meanwhile, I am waiting for a glimpse of the serious weighty negotiations that the GCC bureaucrats are doing, or will be doing, with their Jordanians and Moroccan counterparts. So far not a hint of anything, which means there is nothing going on: perhaps that is one reason others don’t take us Gulfies as seriously as we take ourselves.
Just a suggestion that may give a good Wahhabi Salafi an infarct: how about inviting Iraq, Iran, Yemen, and perhaps Lebanon, to join the GCC?
Cheers
mhg

m.h.ghuloum@gmail.com