On the Shores of the Mediterranean (48 page)

Their cells, cool enough in summer, were cold and damp in winter, and many of the students suffered from tuberculosis. The
only item of furniture was a mattress. Often, the only clothes they possessed were the ones they stood up in.

To survive, they earned what they could in the brief intervals between attending lectures and preparing for them, by copying out the Koran for anyone who wished to acquire one, work that could only be done by a Muslim, or by reading to those who could not read and writing for those who could not write. In extremis they even begged for food to supplement their meagre, self-supplied rations and the one daily loaf provided at the expense of the University, which was delivered to each of them through a hole in the door of the cell by the
mukaddam
, the cleaner and caretaker.

Their great day out was their annual visit to the tomb of Sidi ben Ali Harazem, a Sufi, a member of a Muslim mystical and pantheist sect, who died in the twelfth century. It is one of the most venerated of the many tombs on the outskirts of Fez, to which those who are a bit wrong in the head are taken in hope of a cure. There they elected one of their number to be their ‘Sultan’ for the following year, and he was subsequently taken to pray with great pomp and circumstance in the other great mosque of Old Fez, El Andalus, the Andalucian Mosque. The ceremonies still take place, although in 1953 the University, to the great detriment of the Old City, was moved lock, stock and barrel to a site outside the walls.

What did a
taleb
(literally a scribe), a student, learn at the University? Providing he had mastered the Koran by heart and knew the outlines of grammar and rhetoric he could attend lectures given by the professor of his choice. The professors, the
ulema
, sat on chairs or stools in one or other of the sixteen aisles of the Kairouyyin Mosque, if they were sufficiently eminent. If not, they were divided into three classes of excellence, and sat on the rush matting on the floor.

A student’s day began with morning prayers, followed by study of the Koran, commentaries on it, and of orthodox dogma, which took an hour or so, until about seven o’clock.

From then until ten o’clock he would study the
Sunna
, the body of traditional Islamic law, based on the acts and words of the Prophet, and jurisprudence, each with a different professor. A great deal was – and still is in Muslim education – learned by rote. In his dealings with a professor, the student would read a passage aloud and the professor would expound on it, dealing with the meaning or importance of individual words and quoting any commentators. No interruptions were permitted but at the end of the session the student could ask questions. From ten until midday he studied arithmetic or else learnt about the taking of astronomical observations, although the earth was not allowed to move round the sun as this was against the teachings of the Koran. In fact the study was principally important to the student for its astrological rather than its scientific or navigational significance.
³

In the afternoon, from one-thirty to two-thirty, grammar and rhetoric were dealt with, followed by science, which continued until the hour of the ’
asar
, mid-afternoon prayer.

In the evening the student was supposed to read history, geometry, astronomy, medicine, poetry, or whatever subjects he was interested in, besides preparing passages to be discussed the following day or else pacing, head down, round and round the courtyard of his college or the mosque, to a set rhythm which helped him to memorize texts. This, and the journey to and from the mosque, was about the only exercise he ever got. No wonder all the students looked ill.

Wednesday was a half holiday, Thursday and Friday whole
holidays, which enabled him to get on with his copying of the Koran, his public letter writing, sometimes even begging, if necessary.

We are shown their cells by the present
mukaddam
, who no longer has to deliver bread to the students as there are no longer any students to whom to deliver it. He is a fine, venerable-looking greybeard who positively radiates sanctity – often a bad sign in the Muslim world – but when I give him what is really a jolly generous dollop of the Moroccan equivalent of baksheesh he ceases to look either holy or radiant. It is as if someone had turned out the lights in a building, leaving it in darkness.

The Talaa Kebira, the street in which the College stands, continues to descend into the Old City, past mosques in various stages of dilapidation, blacksmiths’ booths, a
guelsa
, which is a sort of halting place on the way to the Shrine of Idriss II, with lamps burning before it, some tea houses, and down through
souks
with endless rows of shops on either side of it, shops that are nothing more than cupboards with doors that can be locked at night, each more or less a carbon copy of its neighbour and, in a
souk
selling the same commodities, displaying almost identical goods.

In them the shopkeepers sit – telling the beads of their rosaries, the
tasbeeh
, which can be of amber, fruit stones or simply plastic, ninety-five of them, with five more at the end to record repetitions – hour after hour, year after year, dreaming of money and the
houris
who will be at their disposition when at last they are wrapt away to Paradise, scarcely moving except to stretch out a languid hand to reach some item of stock in which a passer-by has betrayed some interest. Shops into which the customer hauls himself up, sometimes with the help of a dangling rope, to settle down, slipperless, for – if the object is of sufficient interest to warrant it – a long period of bargaining which usually ends with the shopkeeper
feigning despair or exasperation and saying to him, ‘Take it and begone!’ Shops in which the proprietors take siestas in the long, torrid, insufferable summer afternoons.

This street also has some
fondouks
in it.
Fondouks
were partly caravanserais and partly, some still are, warehouses in which the goods and raw materials for the craftsmen were stored before being auctioned and distributed throughout the various
souks
. At one time there were said to have been 477
fondouks
in Fez. They are the equivalent of the
han
in Asia. They are built round a central courtyard in which the caravan animals were tethered, with storerooms on the ground floors and with accommodation on the upper floors for the caravaneers where they awaited the auctioning of the merchandise and recuperated from the rigours of the journeys across the deserts. Some of these upper rooms in the poorer sorts of
fondouk
were barely large enough to allow the occupants to recline at full length. The guests provided their own bedding but the landlord supplied each of them with a large brass plate, a teapot, teacups and a receptacle in which to boil water. On either side of the entrance gate to the larger sort of
fondouk
there was usually a coffee stall where what was generally regarded as the best coffee in Fez was to be found.

All trades and crafts, except some specialist or smelly or otherwise disagreeable ones, such as those of the tanners and slaughterers, are situated along a main artery such as this. And so we pass, successively, the
souk
of the repairers of
babouches
, the
souk
in which they are made, the
souk
of the makers of rush and horsehair sieves, bellows, the reed mats used to line the walls of mosques and houses, of embroidered and gilded leather and of the sellers of nails and chains. Then the pretty
souk
of the perfumers, filled with scents, spices, sugar, candles and incense, to which the worshippers at the Zawiya of Idriss are as addicted as Roman Catholics and, at least until recently, arsenic and corrosive
sublimate, much in demand by wives eager to rid themselves of over-demanding husbands, being easily administered to them in their morning tea.

Then the henna
souk
, where the Moristan, the mad-house built by the Merinids, stands, in the indescribably filthy cells of which, well into the twentieth century, the occupants were kept chained to the walls with iron collars round their necks.

Down here is the glazed white pottery
souk
, the
souk
of the carpenters, a
souk
selling salt and fish from the Sebou, the
souk
of the eggs, a
souk
which sells yarn in the morning and corn in the evening, and the
souk
in which, until the beginning of this century, the slaves were sold, having previously been fattened up, taught some vestigial Arabic, enough of the religion and ceremonial practices of Islam to enable them to be deemed to have embraced it, and having been given one of the particular names reserved for them, such as, for men, Provided for, Fortunate; and for women Ruby and Dear.

And beyond these are the
souks
of the tailors, the
souk
of rugs and fabrics, the
souk
selling
häiks, selhams, jellabs
and other clothing, a
souk
where antiques are sold, and the
souk
of the coppersmiths.

And there is the Kisaria, otherwise the Market Place, which is not a market place at all, but the final labyrinth within a labyrinth, a network of covered
souks
, with gates which are locked at night, each with its own nightwatchman, as in the Great Covered Bazaar in Istanbul, and, like the Great Bazaar, burned down innumerable times, always to rise once more, phoenix-like, from its ashes.

In Old Fez, the craftsmen are members of guilds according to the particular craft they are engaged in. At the beginning of the century there were 126 of them. Such guilds bear scarcely any resemblance to the trade unions of the western world. Their members think of themselves primarily as belonging to the
Ummah
, the community of believers which, in theory, although it is difficult to know to what extent in actual practice a Fasi craftsman today would subscribe to this, transcends nationality, creed, and even ties of race and blood, a community held together by belief in the Oneness of God. One of the best ways of giving this practical expression was by becoming proficient in a craft, as a member of a guild working first as a
mubtadi
, an apprentice, then for long years as a
sani
, an artisan under a
mu’allim
, a master craftsman. The master of such a guild, who had wide powers – he could order the most draconic punishments for those who behaved dishonestly, for example – was the
shaykh
, the descendant of a line of
shaykhs
going back to two companions of the Prophet, Ali ben Abi Talib and Salman al-Farisi, and beyond them to Shem, the son of Adam.

Here in Fez, looking at the works performed by these craftsmen in mosques and
medersa
and secular buildings, in plaster and cedarwood and stone, in ceramics, firing the amazing, lustrous tiles, forming the bowls and vases decorated with the dark blue and jade green arabesques in the potteries out by the Ftouh Gate in the Andalus quarter on the right bank of the river, working in brass, binding the books in the soft red goat leather which required 20 different operations to produce it, 13 carried out by the master, his artisans and apprentices, the remaining 7 by other specialists, embroidering the single coloured silks, just a few of their abundant skills, one begins to understand that there is no division between religion and secular activity in traditional Islam and that what they were working for, collectively, was the Glory of God.

Behind the
souks
, many of them reached by the narrowest of alleys, many of them spanned by arches which appear to have the function of keeping the walls from coming together and sandwiching
between them whoever happens to be using them at the time, many of them concealing the workshops of the craftsmen, many of them cul-de-sacs, are what appear at a distance to be the great honeycombs of houses in which the Fasi live, those apparently interlocking cubes we have seen this morning from the hill, none of which, despite a superficial uniformity, ever quite repeating the form of another, a lack of symmetry which is an inherent part of the Muslim ethos, and one which manifests itself in every sort of art and artefact, from the asymmetry in the design and even the shape of a Berber rug, to the near perfection of a key-hole arch in a mosque courtyard which is ever so slightly but palpably different from its neighbour, partly because the design was not drawn out on paper but retained in the builder’s eye, partly because that was how the builder wanted it to be.

These dwellings, large or small, inhabited by rich and poor, but even if poor, here in Old Fez, until recently without the poverty and squalor of the slums, were designed and built, not for the requirements of a husband, wife and children, childless couples, the aged whose families have left home, or even for individuals – no
appartements meublés
, no bungalow accommodation on a single floor, no bachelor chambers – but as centres of family life to house the entire extant hierarchy of a family comprehending several generations. There is no word for ‘home’ in the Muslim vocabulary and in Morocco the nearest approach to it is
wakr
, which is almost exclusively used to describe the lair of a wild beast.

A typical Fasi house is an irregular quadrilateral, built of mud bricks and clay, the same material that was used to build so much else in Fez from walls to mosques. If there are any windows opening outwards on to the street they are high up and covered with wood or iron gratings. The only embellishment on these outer walls will probably be the hand of Fatimah, the Prophet’s daughter, delineated in hen’s blood, to ward off evil.

In such a house the courtyard is surrounded with a sort of cloister in which columns, which may be partly tiled, partly decorated with plasterwork, support richly encrusted arches. In the centre there is usually a fountain with a tiled or marble surround into which water splashes soothingly. In the courtyard there may also be orange trees, vines and figs. On the upper floors long, lofty rooms, some of them bedrooms, surround the well of the courtyard and look down on it.