About

Reflections of
Humanising Societies

a shared logbook of a safar, journey in a shoreless ocean

I First Movement

Who are we?

We are Tamkeen for Our Humanity Foundation;  Mirror of a Humanising Society, a Moroccan foundation born in Tangier, Morocco in 2009. Yet our journey began before our institution did: at the end of 2007, our founding members entered a phenomenological introspection, a research process formed by our co-reflected lived experiences within the social, corporate, financial and governmental worlds of Morocco and beyond.

Our enquiry was first led by questions about the persistence of suffering and disharmony in our society. Slowly, we realised that our questions themselves were limiting us by their causality, their linear grids, and so we learnt to question our questions. We recognised that our reflection was deficit-shaped, blinding us to the beauty in us, in our communities and in our societies. We began to see with different eyes, to widen our gaze, and to listen deeply to what flows from the roots of societal life. Our guiding question became:

How can our communities, schools, universities, organisations, societal systems, governance and economic models, and societies become an expression and manifestation of the beauty of our shared humanity?

Since then, and for more than fifteen years, we have been growing trust-nurtured, long-term relationships across villages and cities, schools and universities, youth communities, civil society, governmental institutions and global governance organisations. We do not write here as observers on the shore, the ocean of our common humanity is shoreless.

II Second Movement

The meaning of Tamkeen

Tamkeen is an Arabic word often translated as empowerment. The translation is not only insufficient, it is misleading. Em-power-ment presumes a dialectics of power: someone empowers another; power is transferred, granted, or claimed. Tamkeen presupposes neither a lack to be filled nor a hierarchy to be reversed.

Its root-verb, m-k-n, signals a gesture, a return to the source, a circle. It points to a self-revealing nature, in a similar way a mirror does. From this root flows a living ecology of meaning:

Emanating from the root of Tamkeen m · k · n
makana مَكَّنَ
to enable
momkeen مُمْكِن
possible
imkania إِمْكَانِيَّة
possibility
imkan إِمْكَان
potential
makan makeen مَكَان مَكِين
the safe and nurturing place-time, the womb
istimkan اِسْتِمْكَان
self-realised potential

Tamkeen signifies the realisation of the possibilities of the potential of a seed finding rest in the potential of the conditions of a love-nurturing and nurtured womb, and, in blossoming, transforming itself with its conditions for blossoming.

Tamkeen thus refers simultaneously to the transformation that emanates from immanent potential and to the co-emergent transformation of the conditions that make transformation possible,  tahawol istimkani, metamorphic transformation. It is not a programme, a methodology, or a theory of change. It signifies what it does by how it does.

Tamkeen unfolds and reveals itself as an expression of its essence, a mirror, an experience of beauty, a process of growing shared understanding realising the existentiality and essentiality of love, an approach, a language grown from co-reflected lived experience, a lived philosophy, a relational flow-field through which the immanent beauty of communities, systems and societies becomes visible to itself and expresses itself through societal harmony and human co-flourishing.

III Third Movement

The meaning of our blog

These are not reflections on humanising societies, but reflections of them. To write on is to assume the distance of an observer; to write of is to remain within the current. Not humanised societies, as though the work were finished; not humane, as though humanity were finally secured, but humanising: the verb kept alive, a society humanising itself while being humanised by itself. The plural matters. There is no single humanising society standing as a model for the others. Every community carries its own history, language and possibilities of becoming, yet none journeys alone.

The word blog descends from log, the ship’s logbook, named after the wooden log sailors once cast into the sea to discover how they were moving. Long before it became a digital space, a log was the quiet practice of a traveller recording the voyage while still at sea, trusting that the honest coordinates of a safar, a journey, matter even before their meaning is complete. Every reflection offered here is a small entry in a shared logbook: it marks neither arrival nor achievement, only where the process has brought our growing shared understanding for now.

Blog begins with the letter b. In Arabic, the bāʼ of Bismillāh is the letter of accompaniment, of beginning not alone, but with. In the Hebrew tradition, creation begins with bet, the letter whose very name means house. The old traditions draw the bāʼ as a vessel resting upon a single point, the humble dot beneath, carrying what remains unseen. Beneath every reflection here lie relationships that made it possible, and an Amanah — entrustment — quietly carried beneath the waterline.

This space breathes rather than announces. One reflection arrives; another follows weeks or months later; a question thought answered returns, because the path has turned and the same landscape reveals another face. What gathers over time is not an argument but a constellation, not a doctrine, but the trace of a process learning to recognise itself, to realise its beauty, and navigate its becoming.

The Astrolabe

When our navigation becomes the navigated, my dear friend,

The wind will blow our love-woven sails,

And love will blow the wind that fills our destiny,

The ocean will be a home called “our humanity”,

And our astrolabe will have moving coordinates,

Each reflecting our growing understanding of what it means to trust our humanity.

Tamkeen, 2022

If these reflections have a hope, it is that, from time to time, they may become another surface prepared to receive light, another coordinate by which a fellow traveller might quietly rediscover their place upon the ocean we call our humanity.