On the Shores of the Mediterranean (49 page)

The roof, surrounded by walls and trellises, is the retreat of the women of the house, from which they can look out over the city and down into it without themselves being seen. Like all Moroccans the Fasi use the rooms on the upper floors of their houses in winter, the lower ones in summer. Then during the hot nights the inner court collects the cooler air which descends into it; by day the stifling heated air flows across the mouth of it, leaving the lower floors and the courtyard cool.

Such a house, although it appears to be inextricably locked together with its neighbours, is not. There are no communal stairs. Each windowless, walled dwelling that goes to make up the mass is completely cut off from its neighbour, without any possibility of being overlooked, except perhaps from the roof. Each one is essentially a sanctuary, demonstrating as well as anything material can the essential duality of Islam. The huddle of houses displays the unity of all within Islam, the walled sanctuary, the place where the head of the family is its
imam
and in which his person, and those of his family, are intensely private, inviolable,
harām
, forbidden to others, as inviolable as the Zawiya, the shrine of Moulay Idriss.

The alleys surrounding the Zawiya are packed with Fasi and pilgrims from the furthest parts of Morocco, all of whom come to obtain a
baraka
, the Saint’s blessing. They are also crowded with beggars who crouch against its outer walls, demanding alms ‘For God and my Lord Idriss!’

Such beggars, men and women, are said in Islam to ‘stand at God’s door’, and what they receive is described as being ‘God’s due’. For those who appear reluctant to give them this due, a familiar prayer is ‘May God give thee something to give!’ To which the hard-of-heart or the penniless may reply, but rarely do, so close to the shrine, ‘God open the way for us and thee to prosperity!’

Here, in these outer walls, there is an aperture in the surrounding woodwork, which is richly decorated, in which the pilgrims place their offerings, at the same time pressing their lips to the woodwork, offerings which are distributed, according to immemorial custom, among the descendants of the Saint. Next to the aperture is a
souk
where pilgrims can buy candles to burn at the shrine and incense, dates, nuts, figs and cakes. This is a shrine said to be a
horm
, a place where a fugitive from justice could, and might perhaps still under certain circumstances, gain sanctuary. The lanes leading to it always have chains or bars drawn across them and to pass beyond these barriers for a Jew meant either instant apostasy or death. As late as the 1870s no Christians were allowed in the city at all.

There is no admission either for the non-Muslim to the great Kairouyyin Mosque, founded in 859 by a pious old Arab lady named Fatima, a refugee from Ifriqiya, then the name for Tunisia, in memory of holy Kairouan, then its capital and her former home. She had it built on behalf of her fellow refugees from Ifriqiya who swarmed to live here on this, the left, west bank of the river, in what became known as the Kairouyyin quarter, after the foundation of the city by Idriss.

The population of the right, eastern bank of the river, already occupied by Berbers before the arrival of Idriss, was greatly increased in 818 by a large number of Arab refugees from Spain who had fled from Andalucia after an unsuccessful rebellion
against their unpleasant ruler Hakam I in 814. Others, a larger number, fled to Egypt, from which they eventually crossed the Mediterranean to conquer Crete. This quarter was, and still is, known as the Andalus Quarter. The refugees from Tunisia and Spain numbered among them a high proportion of craftsmen and it was they and their descendants whose skills made Fez renowned.

The Kairouyyin Mosque is a world within a world, but one inhabited only during the hours of daylight, apart from by its custodians and those such as the Companions of the Sick, when engaged in their chantings. In it, under sixteen long, white-painted naves, each spanned by twenty-one arches supported by two hundred and seventy columns, more than 20,000 worshippers can congregate on the reed matting which covers the floors, and each component part seems to reflect the other, as if in a giant hall of mirrors.

The Mosque was until recently the seat of a University older than the Sorbonne, which was founded in 1257, older than Oxford, founded 1227, older than Bologna, founded 1119, although none of its colleges were built at the time of its foundation, the date of which no one is quite sure. It is so old that Pope Sylvester II, who was Pope from 999 to 1003, is said to have attended it before his elevation to the papacy, one of the only known unbelievers ever to have done so. Here he learned the principles of Arab mathematics and was able to introduce the study of them into Europe. Well into the 1950s some three hundred students still attended lectures in the Kairouyyin Mosque.

As it grows dark, which it does very early here, we go up through the Fondouk Ihoudi, what was the old Jewish quarter, slipping on the greasy cobble stones, greasy because the sewers are being dug up in this area, and for a moment look down into their unimaginably awful depths. Then up to the beautiful Jamai Palace built
by the half-barmy Sultan Abd ul-Aziz on the steep slope inside the walls by Bab Guissa, the gate in the north-east corner which we went out through in the small hours of the morning.

The Palace is now an hotel with a terraced garden filled with palms, cypresses and willows, and, as hotels go, a very good one.

Difficult to believe, sitting in the bar, ordering a very expensive drink, something you cannot obtain for love or money otherwise inside the walls of Old or New Fez, and something that we are at present much in need of, that as late as 1908 Sultan Abd ul-Aziz – who that year was deposed by his equally revolting brother, Moulay el-Hafid – sat in judgement here on prostrate figures stretched out before him against a backdrop of the salted, pickled heads of those whom he had already judged and found wanting, impaled on spikes, the equivalent of an ‘out’ tray in the western world.

We crossed the Strait of Gibraltar from Africa to Europe in a car ferry, and the sight of the Rock, with a long plume of thin cloud streaming away from what is invariably compared to a lion’s head, because that is what it looks like, filled me with the same feelings that I had experienced previously either when passing through the Strait or approaching it, of excitement, awe and barely suppressed feelings of stubborn pride at the thought that we, we being the British, were somehow still contriving to hold on to something we really didn’t want any more – just as we hadn’t really wanted Malta any more, but had finally succeeded in disentangling ourselves from it, leaving it to the Maltese, at the same time managing to convey the impression that to get rid of it was
the last thing we wanted to do. Now we were supposed to hand Gibraltar and its inhabitants over to Spain, something which we displayed a dogged reluctance to do on account of Spain’s bad track record, and something we were not entitled to do, Gibraltar being a British Crown Colony, which can in fact only be handed over to its occupants who will then have the alternatives of holding it or losing it.

Leaving the ship we went out through the customs on the Mole on which policemen in shirt-sleeves and tall London helmets stood around looking keen and helpful, and along it to terra firma where two or three enormous prostitutes were sitting on park benches waiting to catch some hot-blooded arrivals from the Land of the Moors, like us straight off the 10.30 p.m. boat, and bear them away to their dens. Then we went on through Old Mole Gate and Waterport Gate into Casemate Square where a butcher’s shop in the market advertised itself in Spanish and English as ‘Importers of Best Quality, Fresh Frozen, Prime Cuts’, and through the Waterport Gate into Main Street in New Town, which is a compound of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century architecture with extravagant additions, Main Street itself being long and narrow and full of buildings, the upper parts of which are partly Andalucian in inspiration, partly Genoese, and the lower floors shops filled with, because this is a duty-free port, all the stuff normally on sale in a duty-free shop in an airport, over which you can haggle in a thoroughly un-British way with the Gibraltarians. The Gibraltarians, otherwise known as Rock Scorpions, are mainly of Italian, Spanish and Portuguese descent, and they flourish like exotic plants bedded out in the midst of what is a British garrison town and naval base, full of naval outfitters with hardly anyone left to outfit and barber’s shops in which you can get the worst sort of British army haircut if you ask for it.

But even if they are keen shopkeepers, the inhabitants are a
loyal lot in a curiously British way. They have long memories of regiments and ships’ companies, some popular, some less so, all now dead and gone. When the battle cruiser
Hood
was sunk by the
Bismarck
in the Denmark Strait in 1941, the Gibraltarians were in tears. They loved her because she was a beautiful ship, and her crew because they had such a good football team.

The Rock is historic. It makes you feel its history as powerfully as any other great ruin in the Mediterranean, for it is a ruin of what it was constructed for. Everywhere there are dismantled batteries and the dark embrasures of long disused forts. There is not a single coastal defence gun on the entire Rock with which it could be defended. Men who died of wounds after Trafalgar lie buried here, outside the gates in a tree-shaded cemetery beneath monuments decorated with cannonballs.

Otherwise life went on here in what was early spring exactly as it had done in another spring when I was last here, only the regiments and the organizations taking part were different. On the fifth of May there was a ceremonial parade of the Royal Engineers commemorating the tenth anniversary of the granting to them of the Freedom of the City of Gibraltar, followed by, on the sixth, the Drum Platoon of the 1st Staffordshire Regiment with 1/4 Marquis of Milford Haven’s Own Scout Band giving a concert in the Piazza, and all through the month of March there were other diversions: jumble sales and dinner dances and the Women’s Corona Society Card Evening, all of which took place at the Catholic Community Centre, and a Girls’ Comprehensive Drama Week and a Gibraltar Youth Theatre Dance Drama, and a Mental Welfare Exhibition at the John Mackintosh Hall and a Motor Cycle Trial at Catalan Bay and the Gibraltar Automobile Club Hill Climb at Lathbury Barracks, both of which seemed rather risky projects on a 2½-square-mile rock. On the twenty-eighth, Double Summer Time would begin, leaving the Rock two
hours in advance of Greenwich Mean Time, and everyone would get out their swimming costumes and rush off to Easter Beach and Catalan Bay on the east side of it. And every Monday there was the ceremonial Changing of the Guard outside the Governor’s residence by the resident battalion, and the meeting of the Gibraltar Photographic Society. Tuesday saw the meeting of Rotary at the Rock Hotel, and a Whist Drive at the Queensway Club. The Judo Club met on Tuesdays and Thursdays, and on the second Wednesday of every month Lions International met at the Holiday Inn. On Thursday the Philatelic Society met at the John Mackintosh Hall – all stamp collectors welcome – and the Gibraltar Art Society also met at the same venue. There was also Old Tyme Dancing at the DSA Hall, Queensway. On Saturday the St Joseph’s Blue Disco (opposite South Barracks) welcomed all sixteen-year-olds or under. On Sunday there was Clay Pigeon Shooting on Europa Point and, on the first and third Sundays of every month, the Round Table met at the Garrison Library.

It would be difficult to think of another similar size plot offering such a variety of activities, or anywhere else in the world for that matter.

We sat on the main ridge of the Rock, some 1200 feet up but below the highest point, which is 1396 feet above the sea. The long plume of cloud had vanished and the sun shone from a cloudless sky. To the west was what was presumably the Atlantic, although where the Atlantic begins – the Strait being 36 miles long – and the Mediterranean ends I am still unsure. To the east, where one could see for ever but there was nothing but water to be seen, was undoubtedly the Mediterranean. To the south, fifteen miles away across the eastern end of the Strait, only dimly visible in the haze was Almina Point near Ceuta, the southern of the two Pillars of Hercules, in what was still a small foreign enclave on
Moroccan soil, all that remained of Spanish Morocco which the Spaniards appeared to be as reluctant to leave to the Moroccans as we appeared to be to leave Gibraltar to the Spaniards. In between, in the Strait, which for centuries was the limit of enterprise for the seafaring peoples of the Mediterranean world, the surface waters of the Atlantic flowed eastwards into the Mediterranean, while deep below the surface, in complete contradiction to the waters of the Bosphorus and the Dardanelles flowing to and from the Black Sea to the Aegean, it flowed westwards to the Atlantic.

It was beautiful up here. Looking at the Rock from out to sea it seemed to be nothing but a barren expanse. Here where we were, at the head of a steep and rocky descent by what are known as the Mediterranean Steps to the north side, which was already in shadow, it was covered with vegetation, including some of the 400 flowering plants and ferns that are indigenous to Gibraltar, not to speak of others which have been subsequently introduced, and among which the bees were now humming busily.

It was also a singularly quiet and lonely place, something for which, after a comparatively short stay on it of twenty-four hours, we were beginning to crave, just near O’Hara’s Tower where Joyce’s Molly Bloom, wearing a skirt opening up the side, tortured the life out of Lieutenant Mulvey before deftly putting an end to his misery. He had a good eye for country, Joyce.

After this we went back to Africa by hydrofoil, which at that time was the only way, short of flying to London and then flying back to Spain, of getting to Spain from Gibraltar.

After this money-consuming journey – back to Tangier, then back to Algeciras by ship, the sea by this time being too rough for the hydrofoil from Tangier to Tarifa – we travelled westwards along the still wild and beautiful coast of southern Andalucia, with little
beaches far below hidden between bluffs covered with scrub and broom, behind which rose rocky hills covered with cork and eucalyptus trees, to Tarifa, the most Moorish town in Andalucia with an
alcazar
, a Moorish castle from which, beleaguered by the Moors in 1294, its commander, Alonzo Perez de Guzman, saw his nine-year-old son put to death, allowing this to happen rather than surrender, throwing down his own dagger from the walls for the purpose with the words, ‘I prefer honour without a son, to a son with dishonour,’ for which act of fortitude he was subsequently ennobled by Sancho IV of Seville who created him Duke of Medina Sidonia, one of whose descendants some 300 years later commanded the Spanish Armada.

Here, down on the shore at the end of an isthmus at the end of a road covered with drifted sand, there was a castle and a lighthouse on the Punta Marroqui, the southernmost point of mainland Europe, on 36°N. It was an inspiring place. Only a few miles away across the Strait to the south was Africa, mysteriously and romantically wrapped in what was a mixture of mist and the fine spray that was being raised on its shores by a strong breeze, and westwards an enormously long beach extended as far as the eye could see to where the coast became more hilly out towards Cape Trafalgar and the sand piled up against it in huge dunes.

It was here that the Moors first landed from Africa, and it was probably in the plain beyond that they won the first of a series of battles with the Visigoths who had been masters of the peninsula for some 250 years, having finally put to an end the dominion of the Romans and defeated the Sueves, another Germanic tribe who had marched with the Visigoths and the Alans into Spain, whom they subsequently absorbed.

Here, the Mediterranean world came to an end. Westwards, where the rollers fell on other similar enormous beaches of gleaming white sand, the traveller was on the shores of the Atlantic.
Beyond this point even the shops in the little villages were different, shops which sold gumboots which hung from the ceiling on strings, shops which were exactly the same whether they were on the coast of Portugal, or at the head of one of the long
rios
in Galicia, or in Brittany, or on the coasts of Kerry, Clare, Galway, Mayo and Donegal, or in the west of Scotland and the outer isles, as far north as the Butt of Lewis and Cape Wrath.

As our business was with the Mediterranean, we turned back towards the west and those parts of Andalucia familiar to the Moors.

The Moorish conquest of Spain was swift and almost complete, meeting with little resistance from the Celtic-Iberian inhabitants who found the Muslims no more disagreeable to live under than they had found the Visigoths or the Romans before them. Slaves found their situation noticeably improved, Muslims having a far more humane attitude to them than owners of other religions, while the Jews, who had been consistently persecuted by the Christian clergy of the Visigoths, also experienced a change for the better.

In 711, Tarik, the lieutenant of Musa, viceroy of Walid I, the Umayyad Caliph who had occupied the whole of North Africa, landed by the Rock of Calpe, the northernmost of the Pillars of Hercules, which was subsequently named Jebel Tarik in commemoration of this event, a name that eventually became corrupted to Gibraltar. There, on the tip of Europe, with a force of between five and seven thousand Berbers, on 26 July 711, he utterly defeated the army of Roderick, the recently crowned king of the Visigoths, either in the Plain of Salado near Cape Trafalgar or near Jerez on the bank of the River Guadelete, Roderick being slain in the action and earning for himself the unenviable title of ‘Last of the Goths’.

Tarik subsequently took Cordoba and, in 712, Toledo, with
such apparent ease that Musa became both jealous and alarmed at his subordinate’s success. Putting himself at the head of an army of some 18,000 men drawn from a variety of sources in the Islamic world, Musa crossed the Strait into Andalucia and took successively Seville, where the widow of Roderick soon married the son of the conqueror; Carmona, which was betrayed to him; and Merida, which capitulated on 23 October 715, a place of such Roman magnificence that the Moors exclaimed when they saw it, ‘All the world must have been called together to build such a city.’

Imprisoned by Musa, Tarik was released by the Caliph and both men went on to conquer the peninsula, their armies, aided by constant dissension among their Visigothic opponents, flowing like quicksilver through the passes in the high sierras, over the burning plateaux of Aragon and La Mancha, along the green river banks where the cattle grazed, until they came to a halt at the feet of the Pyrenees, having conquered all Spain with the exception of Galicia and the Asturias where a Goth, Pelayo, was elected king. Recalled to Damascus by the Caliph and arriving there in 715 in time to see him breathe his last, Musa was fined an enormous sum by the Caliph’s successor, Suleiman, and died broken-hearted on the Mecca pilgrimage. What happened to Tarik is not known.

The Conquest led to a period of political confusion, with Berbers, Moors (Muslims of mixed Arab and Berber descent), Arabs, Egyptians and Syrians quarrelling among themselves in the Muslim fashion, and no sooner had the new empire reached its greatest extent than it began to disintegrate. The defeat of the Muslims at Tours in 732 by Charles Martel marked the furthest extent of their advance and by 759 they had been forced to retreat south of the Pyrenees.

They were saved by the arrival in Spain of Abd al-Rahman, the only survivor of the Umayyad dynasty at Damascus. He founded a new Umayyad dynasty at Cordoba and obtained
recognition of his new dominion from the Caliph, whose capital had been transferred to Baghdad in 756. It was not until some twenty years later that the Golden Age of the Moors could be said to have arrived and Cordoba became what was perhaps the most civilized city in Europe. But in 1031 the Caliphate of Cordoba disintegrated, fragmenting into several parts under separate dynasties, and in 1085 Alfonso VI of Castile succeeded in taking Toledo for the Christians. It was then that Yousef ben Tachfin, leader of the Almoravids, appeared on the scene. The Almoravids were those religious Berber warriors from Mauretania, otherwise known as the Lemtounline, the Veiled Ones, who under his leadership in North Africa had united El Maghreb, the Muslim West, and had founded Marrakech, from which Morocco takes its name, making it the capital in 1063.