Haroon is King - Azilal Province, June 25, 2010

Travel log:
Just tell someone your name is 'Elvis.'
People will laugh, pat you on the back, get excited, be interested and congratulatory. It's the same reaction I get when I tell people my name is 'Haroon,' the Arabic version of Aaron.
People call me 'king,' just like Elvis and it all hangs on the reputation of King Haroon al-Rachid. The king of all the Arab lands as told in One Thousand and One Arabian Nights is my name sake and he was known for his spectacular court in Baghdad surrounded by women.
It may not be on a sparkling throne, but surrounded by women occasionally makes the joke complete. In rural Morocco, women often outnumber men who go off to work in the bigger cities.
The women work the fields, chopping and carrying huge loads of feedgrass or wheat tied to the backs. Underneath the huge moving mounds of grass, the women struggle, bent over, but still wearing their shinning and shimmering fabric dresses. To walk passed a group may invite giggles and jokes and questions of whether or not I have a wife or even if I have a wife in Morocco.
There are also situations where the men have the numerical advantage. A rural community's clock is set to souk, the weekly flea market, which brings in vendors from around the area. The vendors make their way from souk to souk to set up their stalls on scheduled days. There, the men are in the great majority. They haggle for all sorts of household wares, tools, clothes (modern and traditional) and fruits and vegetables.
The scene is a hectic mix of business and pleasure conversations, shouts of vendors, kids buying candy, chickens being slaughtered and donkeys pushing their way through the crowd loaded up with supplies to last until the next week's souk.
Separate activities for men and women is a hallmark of life in Morocco. They often eat separately, when there are guests they might sleep separately and certainly the women are less frequently seen outside of their homes and fields.
Even if the king (me this time, not the actual King Mohammad VI who peers down from his official photograph affixed above so many rooms), wanted to change any of this, I have only so much power in this realm. The Berber dialects of Tashelheit and Tamazirt mix in unexpected ways in the Azilal section of the High Atlas and just making my decrees known is trouble enough.