While Morocco rarely makes the front page of the news, the three radicalized attackers who died in the Brussels attack in March were all born to Moroccan parents and grew up in Belgium. At least three of the Paris attackers who brutalized the city last November were also second-generation Moroccan immigrants.
But Morocco has also tried to lead the Muslim world with its more inclusive brand of Islam, which has brought religious leaders from all over the world to the Moroccan capital.
"It so happens now that imams from Russia, France, and African countries come to Rabat, to Morocco, and to this center where they're trying to teach them the moderate aspect of Islam," says Mohamed Zefzaf, now an English professor at Massachusetts Bay Community College.
Mohamed spent his childhood in Molenbeek — the same neighborhood in Brussels where many of the attackers lived. His family moved there in 1968 from a small village outside of Tangiers, and he remembers his years in Belgium with great fondness, even as he continues to see himself as a Moroccan years later living in the United States.
"You have to go to Rabat, to Morocco, to see what the Moroccans are trying to do to create what they call 'a rapprochement between people,'" says Zefzaf.
For decades, workers like his father came across the Straight of Gibraltar to Spain, and then to elsewhere in Europe, as a part of guest worker programs. Today, some 3 million Moroccan nationals live in Europe, and that's not counting the descendants of earlier immigrants.
At the same time, Morocco itself has also become a de facto destination for immigrants that have been shut out of Europe by hardened borders. That has put Morocco in the ambiguous position of being both a host and a source for migrants.
For a deeper look at migration to and from Morocco, The Takeaway speaks to Kelsey Norman, a doctoral candidate, at the University of California, Irvine, who has studied the migration policies of countries around the Mediterranean.