In the city of Fez, the Makhfiyya Quarter was the residence of the Tihami family. The family was middle class and well off, one of those that enjoyed its own share of wealth and prestige, coupled with a total adherence to traditional values and the maintenance of respect, all within the confines of the society in which it existed – one that did not transcend the boundaries of the quarter where the family resided. Whatever wealth the family members had, however, was both modest and deep-rooted; they remained unspoiled by luxury and felt content and secure within their own environment.
Families like this did not hold themselves above poorer neighbours and workers who lived in the same quarter, nor did they aspire to quit the quarter in which they themselves had prospered. They were friendly with their neighbours and fully accustomed to being treated by them with all due respect. They made full use of the quarter’s facilities – the mosque, of course; the baths; the baking oven; and the merchants who sold foodstuffs. All these different elements tied them firmly to the quarter and made it a society of its own, duly esteemed, respected, and venerated by everyone who lived there.
In the Makhfiyya Quarter the Tihami family had inherited a house with a huge, wide front door, where sheer neglect and a lack of attention had allowed time and decay to form a pact of their own. The crumbling high walls of the house gave evidence of both the extreme care that had gone into its construction and the total neglect that it had suffered ever since it had last had any contact with either builders or decorators.
Anyone standing in front of these lofty walls would have few doubts that behind them was the kind of residence with which Fez was familiar in the days when it was a city for the rich, well off, and privileged – times when people were eager to build huge mansions more like palaces than ordinary dwellings. They too would have large rooms, courtyards, fountains, and other amenities. When owners built them, their idea would be for the houses to serve as major sources of inheritance for children, grandchildren, and near and distant relatives who were less well off.
You would not be far off the mark if, in coming into contact with the Tihami family, you concluded that the house in which they lived had been their residence for generations. At certain times in the family’s history, the house had been as busy as a beehive, filled with family members – fathers, uncles, children, and grandchildren, all of them living in a single social network. It was as though, within the Makhfiyya Quarter, they constituted a state in their own right, all of them orbiting around different tables three times a day for meals in the rooms or in the courtyard: one table for men, another for women, and a third for servants. Later on, the women would all gather – wives, unmarried daughters, and servants – inside the huge kitchen, while the men and boys would all go out to their workplaces and shops. The young boys and girls would either cluster together, yelling and screaming as they played, or else, in the case of the boys, go to the jurist’s Qur’an school where they would learn how to read and write and memorise some suras from the holy book, and, in the case of the girls, to the lady’s house to learn how to sew.
The exterior of the house hardly provided an accurate picture of the inside. Age and decay had not managed to do much damage to the spacious halls and wide rooms that the hands of skilled craftsmen had carefully decorated with mosaics, paintings, and other types of ornamentation. When the original owner had the house built, he was not planning a work of art but rather something that would show the extent of his wealth and luxurious lifestyle. In the house itself and its sheer size the women in the family – wives, daughters, and servants – all found a form of consolation from the highly restricted routine imposed on them by the life they had to live inside this extensive prison. The only time one of them might be prepared to leave the home was when she needed to go to the bathhouse or attend a wedding ceremony. For women and female servants, such opportunities arose only occasionally.
Eventually this mansion, with everything and everyone inside it, had come into the hands of Hajj Muhammad, doyen of the Tihami family. He was a portly man, with a pale complexion and curly beard. When it came to the hair on his head, the local barber gave no one the opportunity to find out whether it was white or black: he came to the house regularly every Friday morning to shave heads and trim the beards of those who had them. The only people who managed to escape his sharp razor were some of the family’s playful children, who seized the opportunity of their grandparents and parents being shaved to take to their heels. That way they could avoid the rough hand that would otherwise clasp their young heads, douse them in soapy water using a decayed chunk of sponge, and then start on them with the razor, which by this time had lost its sharp edge.
Hajj Muhammad tended to his manner of dress with all the attention of an ambitious man. In summertime it would consist only of a single loose-fitting shirt, usually made of a fairly coarse fabric, although repeated washing had somewhat mitigated the roughness. His wife made a point of decorating it with a silken collar, from which a silk cord hung down to create a bow by which the two sides of the collar could be tied together on the left-hand side. This bow took the place of a button, and with it there was no need of a button in any case: the entire arrangement had no need of buttons nor of the civilisation that had introduced buttons into this society. Not only that, but Hajj Muhammad could make use of the dangling part to attach his heavy silver watch, with its cover that protected the glass from breaking. It also meant he did not need to wear a wrist-strap, as the younger folk did and which got in the way of them correctly performing the ritual ablution before prayer. Over this shirt he would normally wear a garment called the mansuriyya, which was really not much different in shape from the shirt itself, except that the fabric was less coarse, and the chest was decorated with a stripe of woven silk and silk ties of the kind made by Jewish women in the Mellah, which possessed a beauty of their own.
During winter, between the shirt and the mansuriyya Hajj Muhammad wore a woollen kaftan of similar dimensions, either red or pink in colour. It could also be blue or violet, so it could be shared whenever his wife needed to borrow it from her husband upon being unexpectedly invited to a reception of some kind.
Hajj Muhammad adorned his head with a turban that was tightly wrapped around a red fez. It was the very same barber who undertook the wrapping of this turban with tremendous skill and dexterity – it was something that only the most proficient barbers could do properly, being genuine specialists on everything to do with the head, even if it involved only measures to protect heads from extreme cold and heat. In addition to all this, there would be one or two jallabas, depending on the seasonal weather, topped by a burnous that in wintertime would be dark black – as protection against the severe cold for which Fez, and the Makhfiyya Quarter in particular, is well known among Moroccan cities. In summertime, when the temperatures were extremely hot, the top layer would be gleaming white. But, whatever the case, the appearance would always preserve a sense of nobility and convey an august demean-our. When it came to footwear, things would differ according to the season. In summer they would be white and light and thinly cushioned; in winter, by contrast, they would be yellow, heavy, and coarse, since they needed to be able to wade through the mud that covered the streets of Fez and to sink into the mire like duck’s legs stuck in a stagnant pond.
Hajj Muhammad would hardly ever leave his residence until all the requirements of his august appearance and his mode of walking had been fully met. He would still criticise younger men who carelessly decided in summertime to drape their jallabas over their shoulders and tilt their fezzes to the sides of their heads. He would frown whenever he spotted them walking and rushing around, shouting and conversing too loudly – in his view, not showing their families in the best light.
‘God have mercy on Hajj al-Tahir,’ he would say. ‘If he were to set eyes on his grandson Hamid, that young man who tears along the street with his fez in his hand, he would not hesitate to strike him with his cane and make him change his behaviour.’
This was the kind of thing Hajj Muhammad would yell to himself every time he spotted a young man who disliked wearing a fez on his head or pulled up his jallaba, ignoring tradition in the hope of shielding himself from the heat or hoping for a snatch of breeze on his legs.