Yesterday the theme of "loss of identity" came up and I was told, not for the first time, that Europeans have lost their identity while Muslims remain loyal to theirs despite the pressures of modernization. This is usually advanced as proof of the greater integrity of Islam. This time I responded that Moroccans need to lose their identity just as Europeans have, in order to reconstruct it. They are already displaced from their past, but they have yet to accept the shock of that displacement. As a result, they are clinging to past forms which no longer offer security or meaning. What they need to do is admit they are lost, then turn their attention to forging a new synthesis, new ways of doing things in the new context. Of course they will borrow from their traditions in doing this, but they need to do it consciously, not as victims but as agents, like the Europeans did. On the other hand, it could be argued that the bastard modernization found in Morocco and other "underdeveloped" countries calls the whole modernist project into question. Rather than being the way forward for all humanity, maybe modernism is simply an aberration of the West. If this is true, then Morocco and other tradition-based societies are right to resist their "loss of identity" because once the modernist project finally unravels, they will have less backtracking to do. I've been told more than once that Muslim nations have no reason to break with their traditions as the West has done, because Islam continues to inform daily life in a way that Western religion does not. There is no reason to throw out what works. Indeed it should be defended against the failed experiments of the West.