V
MEDERSAS, BAZAARS AND AN OASIS
Fez, for two centuries and more, was in a double sense the capital of
Morocco: the centre of its trade as well as of its culture.
Culture, in fact, came to northwest Africa chiefly through the Merinid
princes. The Almohads had erected great monuments from Rabat to
Marrakech, and had fortified Fez, but their "mighty wasteful empire"
fell apart like those that had preceded it. Stability had to come from
the west; it was not till the Arabs had learned it through the Moors
that Morocco produced a dynasty strong and enlightened enough to carry
out the dream of its founders.
Whichever way the discussion sways as to the priority of eastern or
western influences on Moroccan art--whether it came to her from Syria,
and was thence passed on to Spain, or was first formed in Spain, and
afterward modified by the Moroccan imagination--there can at least be no
doubt that Fazi art and culture, in their prime, are partly the
reflection of European civilization.
Fugitives from Spain came to the new city when Moulay Idriss founded it.
One part of the town was given to them, and the river divided the Elbali
of the Almohads into the two quarters of Kairouiyin and Andalous, which
still retain their old names. But the full intellectual and artistic
flowering of Fez was delayed till the thirteenth and fourteenth
centuries. It seems as though the seeds of the new springtime of art,
blown across the sea from reawakening Europe, had at last given the
weltering tribes of the desert the force to create their own type of
beauty.
Nine Medersas sprang up in Fez, six of them built by the princes who
were also creating the exquisite collegiate buildings of Salé, Rabat and
old Meknez, and the enchanting mosque and minaret of Chella. The power
of these rulers also was in perpetual flux, they were always at war with
the Sultans of Tlemcen, the Christians of Spain, the princes of
northern Algeria and Tunis. But during the fourteenth century they
established a rule wide and firm enough to permit of the great outburst
of art and learning which produced the Medersas of Fez.
Until a year or two ago these collegiate buildings were as inaccessible
as the mosques, but now that the French government has undertaken their
restoration strangers may visit them under the guidance of the Fine Arts
Department.
All are built on the same plan, the plan of Salé and Rabat, which (as M.
Tranchant de Lunel[A] has pointed out) became, with slight
modifications, that of the rich private houses of Morocco. But
interesting as they are in plan and the application of ornament, their
main beauty lies in their details, in the union of chiselled plaster
with the delicate mosaic work of niches and revêtements, the web-like
arabesques of the upper walls and the bold, almost Gothic sculpture of
the cedar architraves and corbels supporting them. And when all these
details are enumerated, and also the fretted panels of cedar, the bronze
doors with their great shield-like bosses, and the honeycombings and
rufflings of the gilded ceilings, there still remains the general tinge
of dry disintegration, as though all were perishing of a desert
fever--that, and the final wonder of seeing before one, in such a
setting, the continuance of the very life that went on there when the
tiles were set and the gold was new on the ceilings.
[Footnote A: In _France-Maroc, No._ 1.]
For these tottering Medersas, already in the hands of the restorers, are
still inhabited. As long as the stairway holds and the balcony has not
rotted from its corbels, the students of the University see no reason
for abandoning their lodgings above the cool fountain and the house of
prayer. The strange men giving incomprehensible orders for unnecessary
repairs need not disturb their meditations, and when the hammering grows
too loud the _oulamas_ have only to pass through the silk market or the
_souk_ of the embroiderers to the mosque of Kairouiyin, and go on
weaving the pattern of their dreams by the fountain of perfect bliss.
One reads of the bazaars of Fez that they have been for centuries the
central market of the country. Here are to be found not only the silks
and pottery, the Jewish goldsmiths' work, the arms and embroidered
saddlery which the city itself produces, but "morocco" from Marrakech,
rugs, tent-hangings and matting from Rabat and Salé, grain baskets from
Moulay Idriss, daggers from the Souss, and whatever European wares the
native markets consume. One looks, on the plan of Fez, at the space
covered by the bazaars, one breasts the swarms that pour through them
from dawn to dusk--and one remains perplexed, disappointed. They are
less "Oriental" than one had expected, if "Oriental" means color and
gaiety.
Sometimes, on occasion, it does mean that: as, for instance, when a
procession passes bearing the gifts for a Jewish wedding. The gray crowd
makes way for a group of musicians in brilliant caftans, and following
them comes a long file of women with uncovered faces and bejewelled
necks, balancing on their heads the dishes the guests have sent to the
feast--_kouskous_, sweet creams and syrups, "gazelles' horns" of sugar
and almonds--in delicately woven baskets, each covered with several
squares of bright gauze edged with gold. Then one remembers the
marketing of the Lady of "The Three Calendars," and Fez again becomes
the Bagdad of Al Raschid.
[Illustration: _From a photograph from the Service des Beaux-Arts au
Maroc_
Fez--the bazaars. A view of the Souk el Attarine and the Quaisarya (silk
market)]
But when no exceptional events, processions, ceremonies and the like
brighten the underworld of the _souks_, their look is uniformly
melancholy. The gay bazaars, the gaily-painted houses, the flowers and
flute-playing of North Africa, are found in her Mediterranean ports, in
contact with European influences. The farther west she extends, the more
she becomes self-contained, sombre, uninfluenced, a gloomy fanatic with
her back to the walls of the Atlantic and the Atlas. Color and laughter
lie mostly along the trade-routes, where the peoples of the world come
and go in curiosity and rivalry. This ashen crowd swarming gloomily
through the dark tunnels represents the real Moghreb that is close to
the wild tribes of the "hinterland" and the grim feudal fortresses of
the Atlas. How close, one has only to go out to Sefrou on a market-day
to see.
Sefrou is a military outpost in an oasis under the Atlas, about forty
miles south of Fez. To most people the word "oasis" evokes palms and
sand; but though Morocco possesses many oases it has no pure sand and
few palms. I remember it as a considerable event when I discovered one
from my lofty window at Bou-Jeloud.
The _bled_ is made of very different stuff from the sand-ocean of the
Sahara. The light plays few tricks with it. Its monotony is wearisome
rather than impressive, and the fact that it is seldom without some form
of dwarfish vegetation makes the transition less startling when the
alluvial green is finally reached. One had always half expected it, and
it does not spring at a djinn's wave out of sterile gold.
But the fact brings its own compensations. Moroccan oases differ one
from another far more than those of South Algeria and Tunisia. Some have
no palms, others but a few, others are real palm-oases, though even in
the south (at least on the hither side of the great Atlas) none spreads
out a dense uniform roofing of metal-blue fronds like the date-oases of
Biskra or Tozeur. As for Sefrou, which Foucauld called the most
beautiful oasis of Morocco, it is simply an extremely fertile valley
with vineyards and orchards stretching up to a fine background of
mountains. But the fact that it lies just below the Atlas makes it an
important market-place and centre of caravans.
Though so near Fez it is still almost on the disputed border between the
loyal and the "unsubmissive" tribes, those that are _Blad-Makhzen_ (of
the Sultan's government) and those that are against it. Until recently,
therefore, it has been inaccessible to visitors, and even now a strongly
fortified French post dominates the height above the town. Looking down
from the fort, one distinguishes, through masses of many-tinted green, a
suburb of Arab houses in gardens, and below, on the river, Sefrou
itself, a stout little walled town with angle-towers defiantly thrust
forth toward the Atlas. It is just outside these walls that the market
is held.
It was swarming with hill-people the day we were there, and strange was
the contrast between the crowd inside the circle of picketed horses and
the white-robed cockneys from Rabat who fill the market-place of Salé.
Here at last we were in touch with un-Arab Morocco, with Berbers of the
_bled_ and the hills, whose women know no veils and no seclusion, and
who, under a thin surface of Mahometanism, preserve their old stone and
animal worship, and all the gross fetichistic beliefs from which
Mahomet dreamed of freeing Africa.
The men were lean and weather-bitten, some with negroid lips, others
with beaked noses and gaunt cheek-bones, all muscular and
fierce-looking. Some were wrapped in the black cloaks worn by the Blue
Men of the Sahara,[A] with a great orange sun embroidered on the back,
some tunicked like the Egyptian fellah, under a rough striped outer
garment trimmed with bright tufts and tassels of wool. The men of the
Rif had a braided lock on the shoulder, those of the Atlas a ringlet
over each ear, and brown woollen scarfs wound round their temples,
leaving the shaven crown bare.
[Footnote A: So called because of the indigo dye of their tunics, which
leaves a permanent stain on their bodies.]
The women, squatting among their kids and poultry and cheeses, glanced
at us with brilliant hennaed eyes and smiles that lifted their short
upper lips maliciously. Their thin faces were painted in stripes and
patterns of indigo. Silver necklets covered their throats, long earrings
dangled under the wool-embroidered kerchiefs bound about their temples
with a twist of camel's hair, and below the cotton shifts fastened on
their shoulders with silver clasps their legs were bare to the knee, or
covered with leather leggings to protect them from the thorny _bled_.
They seemed abler bargainers than the men, and the play of expression on
their dramatic and intensely feminine faces as they wheedled the price
of a calf out of a fierce hillsman, or haggled over a heap of dates that
a Jew with greasy ringlets was trying to secure for his secret
distillery, showed that they knew their superiority and enjoyed it.
Jews abounded in the market-place and also in the town. Sefrou contains
a large Israelite colony, and after we had wandered through the steep
streets, over gushing waterfalls spanned by "ass-backed" Spanish
bridges, and through a thatched _souk_ smelling strong of camels and the
desert, the French commissioner (the only European in Sefrou) suggested
that it might interest us to visit the _Mellah_.
It was our first sight of a typical Jewish quarter in Africa. The
_Mellah_ of Fez was almost entirely destroyed during the massacres of
1912 (which incidentally included a _pogrom_), and its distinctive
character, happily for the inhabitants, has disappeared in the
rebuilding. North African Jews are still compelled to live in ghettos,
into which they are locked at night, as in France and Germany in the
Middle Ages, and until lately the men have been compelled to go unarmed,
to wear black gabardines and black slippers, to take off their shoes
when they passed near a mosque or a saint's tomb, and in various other
ways to manifest their subjection to the ruling race. Nowhere else do
they live in conditions of such demoralizing promiscuity as in some of
the cities of Morocco. They have so long been subject to unrestricted
extortion on the part of the Moslems that even the wealthy Jews (who are
numerous) have sunk to the habits and appearance of the poorest; and
Sefrou, which has come so recently under French control, offers a good
specimen of a _Mellah_ before foreign sanitation has lighted up its dark
places.
Dark indeed they were. After wandering through narrow and malodorous
lanes, and slipping about in the offal of the _souks_, we were suddenly
led under an arch over which should have been written "All light
abandon--" and which made all we had seen before seem clean and bright
and airy.
The beneficent African sun dries up and purifies the immemorial filth
of Africa, where that sun enters there is none of the foulness of damp.
But into the _Mellah_ of Sefrou it never comes, for the streets form a
sort of subterranean rabbit-warren under the upper stories of a solid
agglomeration of tall houses--a buried city lit even at midday by
oil-lamps hanging in the goldsmiths' shops and under the archways of the
black and reeking staircases.
It was a Jewish feast-day. The Hebrew stalls in the _souks_ were closed,
and the whole population of the _Mellah_ thronged its tunnels in holiday
dress. Hurrying past us were young women with plump white faces and
lovely eyes, turbaned in brilliant gauzes, with draperies of dirty
curtain muslin over tawdry brocaded caftans. Their paler children
swarmed about them, little long-earringed girls like wax dolls dressed
in scraps of old finery, little boys in tattered caftans with
long-lashed eyes and wily smiles, and, waddling in the rear, their
unwieldy grandmothers, huge lumps of tallowy flesh who were probably
still in the thirties.
With them were the men of the family, in black gabardines and
skull-caps, sallow striplings, incalculably aged ancestors,
round-bellied husbands and fathers bumping along like black balloons,
all hastening to the low doorways dressed with lamps and paper garlands
behind which the feast was spread.
One is told that in cities like Fez and Marrakech the Hebrew quarter
conceals flowery patios and gilded rooms with the heavy European
furniture that rich Jews delight in. Perhaps even in the _Mellah_ of
Sefrou, among the ragged figures shuffling past us, there were some few
with bags of gold in their walls and rich stuffs hid away in painted
coffers, but for patios and flowers and daylight there seemed no room in
the dark _bolgia_ they inhabit. No wonder the babies of the Moroccan
ghettos are nursed on date-brandy, and their elders doze away to death
under its consoling spell.
