CHAPTER FIVE

Electric Minarets

That night I moved my bags into Mostopha's. After dinner I went to bed upstairs on a long banquette softened with sheepskins. The room, lime white and rectangular, had a tall, grated window in one wall that looked down onto a central courtyard. The courtyard was roofless. The rooms of the house all faced it, Roman style.

Several urnes in the small hours of the morning showers hit the pale tiles downstairs. Imagining the streets swept clean by rain, I woke before dawn and planned an early walk.

When sunlight touched the gratings, I got up, put on a sweater and pants, and slipped the green djellaba into a knapsack. Mostopha had agreed to show me the city's major mosques. Today we were going to visit the legendary Koutoubia. We planned to meet in the djema at noon. This left: five or six hours free for walking.

That year Barnaby Rogerson had published a good guidebook to Morocco. I had already starred one passage, on a small palace named Dar Si Sa'id. For some years it had housed the mad younger brother of Bou Ahmed, a nineteenth-century sultan's vizier. This modest building, reportedly exquisite, was said to be joined by tunnels to the enormous Bahia Palace up the street. I rejected Bou Ahmed's Bahia as being too big, too exhausting, therefore pointless, and drew a line at the idiot's smaller apartments. These days the Dar Si Sa'id was a museum.

The only way out of Mostopha's house was by the big front door, a three-inch slab of ancient wood with rusty steel jambs, slung so low you had to duck to get through it. There was a bolt lock on the inside and a loose knocker without, of heavy iron, forged into the shape of a woman's hand. Unless you pulled the bolt back very gently, the knocker rattled. I was still working the door when a hand touched my shoulder.

“Un moment.”

Ibrahim, Mostopha's teenage son, pointed past the door into the alley. His lids were still crusted with sleep. He crouched to the floor to tie his laces. He was coming with me.

The rains had worked a quick change in the alley. What had been a hardpan lane was now slick mire. In the low spots, patched with stone, puddles brimmed over. The byway was very narrow—an adult could reach out and touch both walls in certain places—and right now it resembled a long sluice: trickling during a light, dawn shower, but with the means to flood at any time. It meant the maze of alleys farther on, connecting Mostopha's home to Mostopha's shop, would be a mud bog. This time I was glad to have a guide.

We walked a hundred yards to a forking path, but rain had turned the shorter route into an impasse. We returned with muddy cuffs through a pink arched gate, taking a back way into the bazaars.

Near Mostopha's shop we reached high ground, and Ibrahim left me. I struck out on my own toward the djema. Rue Semarine was a cobbled thoroughfare, but even this main artery was empty. A stray cat fed on refuse in a corner. Far away I heard a radio.

The rain had stopped, and broken spears of light fell through the trellis. Close to the square a few bazaars were opening for business. I passed three adjoining kaftan shops with hangered garments hung high in the doors. Inside each shop stood a single man—one bronze, one black, one white, the three main races of Morocco.

The bronze man's lineage went back at least three thousand years. His people were indigenous Berber tribesmen. Like Qadisha's parents, many worked small farms throughout the hill country. Today they made up 40 percent of the population. They spoke their own language, in three main dialects. Some knew French and Arabic as well.

The white man one stall over was an Arab, descended from the millions of Caucasians who came here from Arabia in the seventh century, bearing the Qur'an and Arabic. Compared with the Berbers, they were new arrivals, though not nearly so recent as the blacks.

The blacks were brought north as slaves, from the Niger River, beginning in the sixteenth century. Today many Marrakeshis show Negroid features—a flatter nose, the smoother lips, spring-curled hair. From the beginning the progeny of marriages with slaves were treated as children of the household and regarded as Moroccans. Intermarriage was not an unusual affair. Even at the palace some of the great sultans have been jet black. Today I saw no distinctions based on skin color. A rich man, a poor man, a cabinet official might be any color.

There was nothing extraordinary about these vendors. Men like them worked side by side all day and often were family or blood relations throughout the country.

The djema was in transition. The rain had washed away the dust; the night troupes and musicians were packing up now. Meanwhile basket ladies and grilled-meat vendors had started setting up their stalls and wooden tables. In one corner a family of snake charmers brewed their morning tea. They drank it while seated on wooden boxes with air holes poked in the sides and heavy locks. Only one café was serving at this hour. I sat down on the terrace and ordered coffee. As the waiter returned, I saw Brahim wave from across the square, then come toward me.

He had a man about seventy on his arm, in a white and gold turban. Shaped like a fireplug, this man was anything but frail. Halfway across the djema he broke into a grin, dislodged himself from Brahim's arm, and strode to the table. Brahim introduced him. They sat down.

Si Hadj Mallek had been to Mecca several times. According to Brahim, the man was hafiz Qur'an, meaning that he had learned the whole book by heart. Si Mallek spoke fractured French, but he started right in on me. First I was welcomed to Dar al-Islam, then I was quizzed—the usual opening I met with as a Westerner, half-charitable, half-testing, a quick run-through of the Muslim fundamentals and a shield against impostors. As he ticked off Islam's five pillars, I managed the appropriate replies.

Si Mallek gave short shrift to three pillars: Ramadan (the fourth) was over; the pilgrimage (the fifth) was still a few months off; almsgiving (the third) took a backseat to prayer and declaring God's Oneness.

Qul huw-Allahu Ahad,

Allahu-samad,

lam yalid wa lam yoolad,

wa lam yakun

lahoo kufuwan ahad.

Say: He is God,

The One, unique

Whom no one forgoes,

Whom everyone is seeking.

The One never born

Who never gave birth,

The One beyond compare.

Si Mallek sang the lines and raised two fingers. I knew the words of the Ikhlas, they were famous, but his exposition eluded me. It was gently insistent, with many mentions of the number two. I glanced at Brahim when it was over.

“He's saying that everything but Allah comes in pairs. Good and bad; life and death; the poor, the rich. Even our families are divided. He says that on earth the sweet note and the sour note play together. We have wars and we have surrender. Nothing is hopeless. Nothing lasts forever. All life comes in twos, except the heart.”

Si Mallek, I decided, was a mystic. The quoted verses were straight from the Qur'an, but equating Allah with the heart was a Sufi image. Its content went beyond orthodoxy. Or might have. Si Mallek moved quickly.

From Oneness he turned to prayer, for it was Friday, and he wanted, I think, to be sure I knew my lines. He started by repeating the Fatihah, the prologue to the Qur'an, which even Mostopha's unschooled daughter knew. He flushed like a tickled infant when I joined in. Then he motioned me to stand and perform the prostrations.

“Right here?”

Si Mallek nodded with enthusiasm. The terrace was still deserted. I stood up, flustered, and turned to Brahim.

“He says don't pray. Just go through the movements. He has something to show you.”

I stood and placed my right hand on my left above the navel. I bowed at the waist and set my hands on my knees, forming right angles. From this position I sank down to the ground, then doubled over, touching my forehead to the tiles. “Alif, dhal, mim,” Si Mallek said.

The words he pronounced were Arabic letters, corresponding to a, d, m in English. Prostrate on the terrace, I looked up.

“Alif, dhal, mim,” Brahim repeated. “Adam.”

The old man asked Brahim for pen and paper. Brahim had the pen. They called to a waiter, who brought a napkin. Looping on a pair of wire-rimmed glasses, Si Mallek set down stick figure drawings of the positions. When he finished, the napkin looked like this:

Beside the figures he had put letters.

As I took in the drawing, Si Mallek's face appeared ready to go to pieces from sheer pleasure. Brahim beamed, too; I'm not sure why. Did they see what I saw? Did they know that after a year of lip-synched Arabic, I had finally been given more than a stiff translation? All at once I was being informed that the words I had learned by rote were contained in a larger word spelled out with the body, a word I could read and make sense of: the collective name of Man.

The implications were astounding to me. If flesh could be formed into writing, did that not make the world a book? And if so, what sort of book was it? Were we sentences in it, as we sat here? And who would read it? Who could read it? Who was turning the pages?

Brahim interrupted. “He says you should think about this at the mosque today.”

I got up from the terrace.

Si Mallek was already on his feet. We shook hands, and I watched them move away, growing smaller quickly as they crossed the djema.

The Dar Si Sa'id Palace lay in a carpet souk twenty blocks away. A palace wall formed one side of the alley. Over this, merchants draped their rugs. There were knotted Tazenakht carpets from the highlands, with vivid lozenges and diamond peaks, and fine kilims from the Middle Atlases, employing motifs I'd seen on plates in Qadisha's kitchen. There were woven Rabats of living room dimensions, based on thirteenth-century Persian patterns. The carpets hung within easy reach. The street was closed to traffic. I might have been walking through an open air museum.

This neighborhood had not always been so calm. A block away, in 1907, a French physician named Muchamp had wired a radio aerial to his rooftop. The appearance of this “electric minaret” raised the suspicion of local businessmen. Muchamp, one of a half dozen Frenchmen in the city, was noted for his commercial acumen. A few days later a mob of merchants marched to his door, claiming (rightly) that with his device Muchamp could divine the price of goods still on the dock at Essaouria and so strike deals before their arrival here. Muchamp was accused of sorcery, too, and hung by the neck for meddling and witchcraft.

This event had major consequences, providing France the pretext it had sought to occupy Morocco. A first fleet reached Casablanca two months later. It took five years to conquer Marrakesh.

Bou Ahmed, across the street in the Bahia Palace, was at the height of his reign when Muchamp was hanged; his idiot brother lay in the Dar Si Sa'id. I went in for a peek, but the grandeur was wasted on me. If the plaster faience was any good (a lot of the late work is clumsy), I could not judge. My head was too full of Si Mallek's words and drawings.

As I walked back to the square to meet Mostopha, the spare Koutoubia tower marked my way. This minaret, the city's tallest structure, has formed the town's hub since its construction in 1158. The Koutoubia takes its name from a bookseller's market that once stood here. It has a twin, the more famous Giralda, in Seville. As I approached, the three hundred feet of stone came and went around corners, dived behind walls, reemerged looking larger than ever, and doubled in size every few blocks. Each of its four huge faces has a unique decorative scheme, so that sometimes, reappearing at a new angle, I took it for a different minaret. This morning I felt an irrational urge to get up in it.

Mostopha was at a table when I reached the Genowa café. He showed me back into the tiny kitchen, where a teapot of warm water sat on the cookstove. After making our ablutions, I drew the green djellaba from my sack and slipped it on. The fabric covered the street mud spattering my knees. I felt immediately pristine. As we turned to leave, I remembered the prayer cap in my pocket. I put it on my head. Mostopha frowned.

He adjusted the cap's edge lower on my forehead.

“Why do you want to wear something like that?”

Men often wore caps at the mosques in California.

He said, “That's different. Here people wear them to prove something. They wear perfume or a pair of fancy slippers; they put on a cap, and they think it makes them better Muslims. On a foreigner it's worse. He buys the wrong cap. It makes him look like a tourist.”

“Is this a tourist cap?” I asked.

“No, it's a good one.”

I removed the cap. We left the café and crossed the square.

We were soon near enough the minaret to have to crane our necks to see the top. It resembled a landlocked lighthouse, or a military watchtower. Its first three floors were occupied by cloisters. The height of the sills would afford good views, I thought. I wondered whether hermetic scholars still used them. Perhaps a huge Qur'an stood at one of the windows. It reminded me of Thomas Merton's poem:

The monks come down the cloister

With robes as voluble as water.

I do not see them but I hear their waves.

The inner courtyard of the mosque is different from Ben Yusef's. It looked broader and more open, and the reflecting pool was vast. The Koutoubia is one of Africa's great landmarks. But because it stands outside the medina, its buildings look stranded. The surrounding land is covered by a park with many paths, where the heads of huge cypresses hang nodding.

The prayer hall inside the building was a forest of white pillars. Six feet square at the bottom, set on piers, each pair of columns tapered to a massive horseshoe arch. The arches were everywhere. I stopped counting at one hundred. They interlocked in ranks to hold up ceilings and split the floor in checkered squares. Viewed on a diagonal, they formed dozens of telescoping tunnels. Straight on they created horizontal aisles. I never succeeded in analyzing the secret of these perspectives. My wife had once tried from a photograph to work it out on canvas and given up.

Several thousand people sat in rows between the columns. Mostopha and I found a patch of carpet at the rear and settled down. I made an attempt to collect my thoughts, but it was difficult. Over the public-address system a group of qurra was chanting verses with terrible vigor. Qurra are professional reciters trained in special schools to chant the Qur'an. Their phrases came out punctuated by crisp percussive explosions, like rattled teeth. The effect was riveting. When the chatter ceased, my head was ringing.

A moment later everyone in the hall was on his feet, lifted like a body on a wave. The imam began reciting the Fatihah. Each man repeated the prayer to himself, in a whisper, and then we moved en masse through the salat.

Today I performed the prostrations with greater clarity. My word-for-word grasp of the prayers had been blurred before, by phonetic approximation and stiff translation. Now, thanks to Si Mallek, I possessed an overview. The old man had cut me a perfect mental window. Through it I could look out on the crowd and read the word we were spelling. It was one more means to grasp the shape of prayer.

Being by this time Mostopha's guest, I lunched in his sala every afternoon and slept there every night. It was the largest room in the house and the family's social center. It also held their only television. When I suggested that my occupancy might be an imposition, it took some time to explain the remark to Qadisha. The concepts of imposition and guest did not seem to cohabit in the Berber language. In fact, my question puzzled everyone.

I slept well on the sheepskins. I went walking every morning in the souks. When I returned from these outings around lunchtime, Raschid, Mostopha's second son, would often meet me in the courtyard with a water bowl and towel to clean my hands. Then we and his brother Ibrahim, Mostopha, and Qadisha bearing the infant Yusef on her back would go upstairs and settle on banquettes. Nishwa had usually preceded us. She liked my quarters and passed a lot of time there, singing and drawing.

Today Ibrahim was in the sala, too, playing with my shortwave radio. I had lent it to him during the day, to help improve his English. We ate lunch and listened to music. After a while Mostopha told a story.

After his mother's death, he said, he'd been sent to his grandparents’ farm in the country. This was the usual collection of rammed-earth huts and houses where a handful of large, tribal families farmed and lived. His grandfather Yusef, a big man with a white beard, had owned the first radio there. It ran off two six-pound batteries, each with its positive and negative cables. The batteries were expensive and did not last long. The aerial was tacked to a beam in a manger. The old man hooked up the receiver twice a week: on Friday afternoons for jum ‘a prayer and on Sunday nights for the news from Casablanca. On these occasions, before he turned it on, forty men from the hills were called to listen.

Technology arrived late to Morocco. Dry cell receivers were state-of-the-art in 1950. In 1980, Mostopha bought his first TV. By then the medina rooftops were thick with aerials. Many mountain villages had them, too. Ten years later he owned a VCR and thought nothing of it. He and his friends might wear togas and pray in thousand-year-old mosques, but the glow from their windows at night was modern.

For about a year his set had been hooked to a French cable network that carried movies, travelogues, and world news. It also brought the occasional bare nipple into his sala. France is a topless country, its advertisements and musicals are racier than most, and nudity does not end at the neckline. God knows how this affected the Muslim psyche of Morocco. I had passed, one day in the New Town, a pornographic movie house of the sort one finds in every Western city. The marquee announced Les Plaisirs Interdits. The ticket booth was empty. The stills in the glass display case had been doctored with tape.

Mostopha dealt with nipples very simply: he had a remote control for switching channels. When a breast or haunch appeared, he flicked a button. Temptation dissolved into a soccer game.

We watched a lot of soccer, and we often watched cartoons. Nishwa loved these mostly American vintage shorts featuring Popeye, Daffy Duck, or Uncle Scrooge. From France came Babar, the elephant-child adopted into a classic bourgeoise family. I never tired of Babar's comic predicament. It was, somehow, a mirror image of my own. Nishwa and I formed a rapid bond through this program.

In a matter of days I forgot about hotels. Qadisha's meals were the best I had ever eaten in Morocco. Their scheduled appearances put new order in my life, and the bed and board saved a certain amount of money. Most important, I felt at home. Even at the foot of the Atlases, in a land of dates and honey, the need for simple relations can sap you dry. Mostopha's bustling household kept me from pining away for my family. I chipped in for food. I brought the children sweets.