Souq Souq A souq or souk (, "shuq", "shuka", Spanish: zoco, also spelled shuk, shooq, soq, esouk, succ, suk, sooq, suq, soek) is a marketplace or commercial quarter in Western Asian, North African and some Horn African cities () . The term "souq" goes by many alternatives in different parts of the world; in the Balkans, the term "bedesten" is used; in Malta the terms "suq" and sometimes "monti" are used for a marketplace; and in northern Morocco, the Spanish corruption "socco" is often used. The equivalent Persian term is "bazaar". In general a souq is synonymous with a bazaar or
Souq African traditional markets. Other spellings of this word involving the letter "Q" (sooq, souq, so'oq...) were likely developed using English and thus refer to Western Asian/Arab traditional markets, as British colonialism was present there during the 19th and 20th centuries. In Modern Standard Arabic the term "al-sooq" refers to markets in both the physical sense and the abstract economic sense (e.g., an Arabic-speaker would speak of the "sooq" in the old city as well as the "sooq" for oil, and would call the concept of the free market السوق الحرّ "as-sūq al-ḥurr"). In northern Morocco, the Spanish corruption "socco" is