EXCERPT FROM SARA’S JOURNALJune
19, 1999
Fez, Morocco
Shopping Without Windows
We decide to take Abdou’s advice and hire a guide for the largest medina in the
world. There’s a man at the tourist office with shaky hands. He assures us a guide
will meet us at 8:30 and take us around the old city for half a day.
Hassan straightens his tie. It’s got tiny Airedales all over it. He introduces
himself and we hop into a taxi and head off on our adventure in guided tourism. First
things first. This is not the Arab world. It’s the Islamic world. Hassan is Berber.
The beautiful architecture and crafts of Morocco are the result of both Arab and Berber
talents.
Now we’re walking along a strip of cobblestone, into the darkness of a street so
forebodingly dingy I wouldn’t attempt it in my own backyard. A donkey strains under
the weight of Coca-Cola crates. Asses behind it are almost lame, with bloody knees and
whipping masters pushing them up the steep slopes of the river valley with the weight of
leather and copper and wool. I smell cedar, hash, kebabs, the sewer. Children take sips
from a filthy fountain, then replace a tray of dough to their heads and carry on down the
alley. UNESCO has designated Fez a World Heritage Site, but this is unworldly. As we
follow Hassan through uncertain tunnels, under rotting beams, along the edge of the
medieval mud-packed walls of the medina, we enter a world and its heritage beyond any we
know.
Hassan grew up with eight brothers and sisters in a Berber village in the Middle Atlas
Mountains. He knows the medina well because he came to Fez like his older siblings to
attend university here. He studied English and tourism. He explains the ritual of washing
before Islamic prayer and takes us to the Qaraouine Mosque, established in 859, where
students trained in logic, math, rhetoric and the Qur’an while Europe stumbled
through the Dark Ages. Pope Sylvester II was educated here before he introduced algebra
and the modern number system to the world.
The souqs around the mosque are the most prestigious. The Attarine, or spice souq
enjoys the closest proximity, selling the once prestigious piles of ochre dust –
cinnamon, ginger, paprika, saffron. A man grinds and then sifts the powder like gold.
Beside it is the henna souq. Brides are temporarily tattooed for their wedding day, and
not to do a lick of housework until the dye has worn away. There’s a cloth market
selling pointed Arabian slippers with ornate embroidery. Nobody’s slippers fit and
their heels drag the dust and filth of the street. Jelabas (the long robes with the
tasseled hoods) come in earth tones and jewel tones and primaries. The dried fruit market
is dates and apricots and raisin jewels - amber and onyx. Figs are strung on burlap ropes,
pushed together like enormous, flattened pearls. "You must try, you must try!" A
vendor coaxes us with handfuls of gleaming dates. Rich is creative with his refusals.
"Dates no good for me" (rubbing stomach).
Beyond the Place Seffarine, where the metal souq deafens with the pounding of brass
cauldrons, there is a place like no other. It’s like looking down at a Roman prison
camp. The leather souq and its adjoining tanneries are the oldest in the world. Tanning
the hides of sheep, goats, and other unfortunate creatures has not changed here since the
11th century. From a terrace we watch workers stand knee-deep in what appear to
be stone vessels, like honeycombs, filled with different coloured liquids, dying the arms
and legs of the bony men. Skins are soaked in diluted acidic pigeon excrement or
waterlogged wheat husks for suppleness. In the blistering heat workers transfer soaked
hides to other vessels containing vegetable dyes – henna, saffron, mint – or
pull weighty, wet piles from rinsing machines and pile them onto back-broken donkeys to be
transferred to the roofs of the medina for drying. Between the street and this patio is a
series of small rooms, intense with the smell of cured leather, hanging like a
slaughterhouse with skins and purses and slippers and jackets and cushions. A man tries a
medium-sell – asking me which colours I like. Rich’s hushing response:
"She’s a vegetarian."
