Core Values
Of course, it is perfectly possible to have a great holiday without drinking. However, attitudes to alcohol are symptomatic of a much wider return to core Muslim values in the region.

We journalists were not even allowed to use the word, having instead to refer elliptically to ‘beverages’ made of grape and so on. Conceivably, those days will return sooner than we think.

As the countries of the Maghreb slowly metamorphose into democracies, it seems pretty clear already from news coming out of Egypt and Tunisia that Muslim political parties offer the most comforting alternative to iron-handed dictatorships.

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However liberal these parties’ particular versions of Islam are, the fact is that there is a big contradiction between the ideals and family values of a Muslim society, with the national strategy to attract hoards of western tourists to behave on local beaches just as they would in the West – i.e., men and women freely mixing, exposing their skin and imbibing alcohol.

The irony is that they do so without shame — in both the positive and negative senses. For westerners, there is no reason to be ashamed of their behaviour. For Muslims and Arabs, the shame is in fact double, consisting in the behavior itself and the fact that the perpetrators feel no shame.

This is a gaping divide in terms of attitude, which frankly has always represented a major anomaly at the core of international tourism into many parts of the Arab World (not, of course, in such places as Makkah, but along many coastlines).

Now that other important anomalies are being sorted out — like the existence of unfair, corrupt governments, for example — it would seem naive to expect the contradictions inherent in Arab tourism to persist unchallenged.