Question 1: Each year, you nominate a State- it might be African or European - to be a guest of honour at the Assilah festival. The guest for the Assilah 2010 festival is the United Arab Emirates. Last year the guest was a European State, Portugal. How and why did you choose the United Arab Emirates?
Answer 1: Before Portugal, we had Mexico as the guest. First of all, the leaders of the United Arab Emirates and Morocco have an excellent relationship, as do their two countries and that relationship is growing stronger every day. Secondly, the United Arab Emirates and, in particular, the Abu Dhabi Development Fund, has made significant contributions to the infrastructure of Assilah. We are very grateful to the United Arab Emirates authorities for their assistance in providing low-income social housing: there are now 300 apartments, a school and a museum, and a bus station. That has helped to stimulate the infrastructure and economic and social aspects of the city. The UAE has become an outstanding and effective leader in the fields of creativity, arts and culture, which has made it a significant factor in and major contributor to those fields. It was for all those reasons that we decided to invite the Emirates to be the guest of honour this year.
Question 2: Did the fact that the Abu Dhabi Authority for Culture and Heritage is a major cultural driving force in the Emirates affect your decision to select the Emirates as your guest this year?
Answer 2: I have a personal relationship with the Abu Dhabi Authority for Culture and Heritage (ADACH) and am honoured that I was chosen in 2008 to win the Sheikh Zayed Book Award that is awarded by the Authority. I also have an excellent and long-standing relationship with His Excellency Sheikh Sultan bin Tahnoun Al Nahyan, the Chairman of the Authority, and with Authority officials. The Authority undertakes many wonderful activities, including the Abu Dhabi International Book Fair, and is active throughout the world, at the various different shows it organises, especially the concerts in Abu Dhabi and Al Ain. We also have excellent relations with the Ministry of Culture, my dear friend Abdel-Rahman Al-Uwais, the Minister of Culture, Youth and Community Development and, since the Emirates became involved in renewable energy, with Masdar City.  I had the honour to work with my brother and friend His Highness Sheikh Abdullah Bin Zayed Al Nahyan, the Minister for Foreign Affairs, so am very familiar with the efforts that the Emirates has made in that field. As you know, the first Assilah seminar will take place this year at the twenty-fifth session of the Mu'tamid Ibn Abbad University summer school: "Renewable energy: progress along the road to human development". We have discussed the list of participants with Dr. Sultan Al-Jabir and his colleagues, and there will be a special exhibition of the efforts that have been made by the Emirates in the renewable energy sector and, in particular, the role of Masdar City as a beacon in the region in this field.
Question 3: What effect will the choice of the United Arab Emirates as guest of honour at the Assilah festival have on relations between the two countries in general, not just at the cultural, artistic and creative levels?
Answer 3: As I said, the relations between the two countries are excellent and continue to grow and become ever firmer every day. However, I should like to stress that the cement of true political and economic relations is socio-cultural. Culture is a beautiful bond and often it is invisible. The value system shared by the two peoples deepens and consolidates the bond between them, and I am sure that the presence of the United Arab Emirates at Assilah as the guest of honour will have a big impact, particularly in view of the daily broadcasts made by Moroccan, Arab and international channels and other media. The event is not just national, but a global gathering: 46 countries are taking part this year, contributing various arts, sciences and ideas. So it would be useful to see that such events and activities reach the man in the street and are not restricted to select audiences. People will come into daily contact with artists, poets, writers, storytellers and singers from the Emirates, and that is something that does not happen every day.
Question 4: You are yourself a politician and a member of the Moroccan Government and have been the Minister for Foreign Affairs and the Minister for Culture. You were also previously a diplomat, and were the Ambassador of Morocco to Washington. Why are you so interested in cultural affairs in general, and why did you think of holding the festival in the town of Assilah - I know you come from there?
Answer 4: I was brought up in a cultured environment and at school I used to win prizes for reciting the Quran. I was always very good at acting and used to sing - my voice was good. When I was 12 I bought my first camera and took photographs –back in the days of black and white film. So I naturally became acquainted with many artists, have lived with them to this day, and writers, artists and cinematographers have always been a part of my life outside my official work, even when I was ambassador to Washington. It was my ambition as a teenager to be a stage actor, but I studied communication technologies in America. As a new graduate, I longed to make films and used to film and produce movies. I went back to Assilah after being away for 23 years and found that my little town, which at that time, 1976 or 1977, had a population of only 17,000, was in a pitiable state. I decided to give back something to the town that had given me so much. I can trace my forefathers in Assilah back for 400 years. So the first thing I thought of was to go back to the beginning, first of all with the well-known Moroccan novelist Tahar Ben Jalloun. Together we wrote "masammat", that means ‘the pores of the skin’, which is the story of my childhood in Assilah. It was published in the early 1970s. In it I told the story of everyone who had passed through my life as I grew up. While Tahar Ben Jalloun was writing poetry, it became clear that I was falling in love and had reached the stage of getting married. I married Assilah – I mean that I embraced it. When I went back to Assilah it had no good street lighting or clean drinking water. When there was water, it only ran for one hour a day. Of course there was rubbish everywhere as well and open sewers. In short, it was in a really bad state. I decided to do something right away, and stood for the municipal elections in 1976 and was elected. In 1977 I stood for the parliamentary elections and won the Assilah seat as an independent member. By the way, I have never belonged to any party. In 1977 we started the Assilah project, and began thinking about how the city could make progress. We started by cleaning up the environment and in April 1977 we invited a group of visual artists to create murals in order to give the population wake-up call. The people got up one morning to find a group of madmen drawing all over their walls – those artists were extremely well known in the Arab world – and we told the people ‘Your city is beautiful, and these artists want it to be beautiful.’ We got the children to pick up the rubbish and clean the beach and so on. So that’s how things began. People got used to the drawing on the walls and there were only so many walls. So now we allow 15 walls each year to be painted by artists from Europe, the Arab world, China and Japan. So things developed, and we began to place everywhere the slogan ‘Culture and art for development’. We believed that culture and art – creativity, imagination and ideas – are just as valuable a resource as oil or minerals. Today, thanks be to God, 32 years later, half of the children who were then 8 and 12 years old are members of the town council, and they include lawyers, craftsmen, pharmacists and so on. This is real human development – those children have grown up in a town that is like a museum – on their way to school, the children see walls signed by artists, and that stays with them for a whole year. The ground too is paved by artists, and everyone respects those works of art, and they stay clean and are not touched or defaced. The works attract tourists to this beautiful field of art.

Question 5:What do you think about Arab art today? Do you think it is sufficiently flexible to emulate the development in thought, ideas and creativity that has taken place in other parts of the world? 
Answer 5: This year, one of the seminars at the Mu'tamid Ibn Abbad University, which will be held immediately after the seminar on renewable energy, is a very important seminar called ‘Dialogue of Arab cultures’. Some people, who don’t want to hear about cultures, have taken exception to that title – they want to cling to the idea that there is one, uniform Arab culture.
We talk about the dialogue of civilizations at the United Nations and in international forums here and there, but what about the dialogue of Arab cultures? We Arabs talk about others, but we don’t talk about ourselves. We know plenty about other people but not much about ourselves. We chose a handful of the most important Arab thinkers and intellectuals from the Mashraq and the Maghreb in order to discuss this issue. Quite honestly, it’s hard to evaluate Arab culture as a whole, especially given the current situation and what Arab culture has been through, especially during the Second World War. Secondly, there are other ethnic cultures alongside Arab culture: Amazigh, Kurdish, Assyrian, Nubian, etc. etc. We can’t ignore those cultures – on the contrary, they enrich Arab culture. In the age of Islam, Arab culture has benefited from its contact with other cultures, from the Philippines to Portugal. Thirdly, I think that various types of effort are being made in the Arab cultural space – here in the United Arab Emirates, everyone can see the huge investment that the State and certain private sectors have made in building and establishing facilities for culture and creativity, including museums, schools, foundations and theatres, and there is plenty of funding to bring over musical groups from all over the world, from Europe and Asia – it is all enriching. Anyway, I think that Arab cultures are in crisis, with the Arab region being torn by various forms of extremism, either religious or ethnic, and by local or national conflicts, which have convulsed the Arab region.  Unfortunately, money, rather than knowledge, is what people now aspire to. We should remember that the elite in the Arab world has shrunk as well, so that the discourse that we hear, which is prevalent even in book fairs, is not the discourse of the Arab elite. We no longer see the Arab elite in the forefront of progress; we don’t hear them questioning values as much as we should. There is a kind of laxity and lack of intellectualism in Arab cultural dealings.
 We no longer have the philosophers that we used to have in the past, such as the late Muhammad Abed Al-Jabiri or Abdullah Al-Arawi. That generation has gone and unfortunately it has not been replaced. This is the situation and I really hope that the Arab Governments, through their ministries of culture and civil society organizations – what I say is important – will pay attention to this matter, because in the end, culture, as I said before, is the cement that keeps the State together and keeps all the things that go into making a people closely connected. You can't pin down the constituent elements of any people with money that is invested in bank accounts, capital assets or buildings - nothing lasts. As the French say, culture is all that is left when everything else has gone. So let me tell you this little story and then I'll stop. Once, when General Charles de Gaulle was President of France, a journalist asked him why he always asked the well-known writer André Malraux, the Minister of Culture, to sit on his right at all Government meetings or on other official occasions, rather than, say, the Ministers for Foreign Affairs, Defence, Economy, Justice or any of the other ministers, as might be expected? De Gaulle replied that the presence of Malraux on his right demonstrated the human dimension of every project that was under consideration. So, if we want to keep our Arab identity, we have to pay attention to human development.
Question 6:What are the constituent elements of culture? Do you think that the essence of the new thought has begun to spread throughout the body of Arab culture, without which - I mean that culture - it cannot be spread as widely as possible
Answer 6: History teaches us that excellence spreads of its own accord. Every writer, thinker and artist in the world began by writing about local concerns in innovative language that had universal appeal. Think of Naguib Mahfouz - he had never travelled to another country when he was writing about his neighbourhood. Trotsky and Pasternak and others were just the same. Bernard Shaw had never travelled either, but he and others became popular. Why? Because their writing was of a really high standard and universally relevant. The question is not whether a creative person is local - the issue is one of quality or the value of the local work. It's just like a healthy foetus, which can find a way out of the body of the mother carrying him - if it is not healthy, it will die. From another point of view, we in the contemporary world are experiencing a very important stage in our countries' political approach, which is one of decentralization. I think the United Arab Emirates are setting us a very important example: the Emirates enjoy the ability to make a lot of decisions locally and are, to a large extent, self-governing. The same system exists in America and Germany. In Morocco, we have begun to apply a system that we call regionalism. The culture now in European countries has become more localized - it is the municipal councils that are responsible for museums, infrastructure and schools, those are no longer the concern of the central authorities. It is the mosaic that there is in every country that gives form, colour and dimension to a rich national culture. Let me talk about our experience in Assilah - we have stated in no uncertain terms that culture and creativity are not the prisoners of any ideology, party, creed or religion. This is the way that true culture begins, without any predetermined orientation.