HICHAM HARRASS LIVES in a one-room shack he built himself on the western-most edge of Casablanca.
The walls are made from third-hand breeze blocks and the roof is laid with rusting tin. His home does not have an address, but it does have a number. It is number 2043. All around it there’s a jumble of other shacks, each with their number daubed on the wall in dripping red paint. If you turned up at the bidonville, the shanty-town, you’d have no hope in finding Hicham’s place in the maze of alleyways. But ask for him by name and every man, woman and smallest child, will jab a finger towards his door.
I met Hicham because of his passion for postage stamps.
Our house is half a mile from the Atlantic. Its gardens are an oasis of date palms and mimosa trees, and are surrounded on all sides by the breeze block shanty-town. When we first moved into the house I must admit I was anxious. We had no idea how our neighbours would greet us, whether they could get used to a family of foreigners living in their midst.
One morning during our first week in Casablanca, there was a tap at the door. I went to open it, and found an elderly man standing in the frame. His skin was the colour of roasted almonds. He had a long shiny face with a scrub of white beard at the end of his chin. He wore a frayed black and white wool jelaba, and old yellow baboush slippers on his feet.
Before I could ask how I could help him, the man extended a hand, smiled, said his name was Hicham, and that he collected postage stamps.
‘Do you have any to spare?’ he enquired politely. ‘I could pay you money for them, a few dirhams.’
I thought for a moment.
‘We haven’t received any mail yet,’ I replied. ‘We’ve just arrived.’
Hicham’s smile melted. I told him to come back in a week.
‘Will you forget?’ he asked.
I promised not to.
A week later Hicham was at the door again. I had collected five British stamps, all bearing the Queen’s head. I handed them over, and a remarkable friendship began.
After that I collected all the stamps on my letters and gave them to Hicham. He was a proud man and insisted on paying me, although he had almost no money at all. I didn’t want to offend him by refusing payment, and so we came up with a solution.
We agreed to meet at his home at the same time each week. I would pass over the postage stamps and, in return, he could tell me about his life.
Hicham Harrass was born in a village three days’ walk from the southern city of Agadir. His father had been a farmer, with half an acre of dusty land. Along with five brothers and a sister, he grew up in a house made from flotsam, gleaned from the Atlantic waves.
When Hicham was seven years old, a sehura, a witch, came to the house and declared that he would drop dead within the next cycle of the moon. The only way to avoid such a fate, she said, was for Hicham’s parents to give the boy away to a stranger. The family was very upset but, believing the witch’s prediction would come true, they gave him to the next man who came into the village. Fortunately for Hicham, that man was a trader, a man called Ayman.
‘He needed a boy to help him,’ said Hicham, ‘and so I travelled around Morocco with him and his cart, buying and selling scrap metal as we went. On the long journeys between small towns he taught me,’ Hicham continued. ‘He taught me about life, and how to live it.’
I asked what he meant.
The old man’s wife flustered over with more mint tea.
‘Ayman taught me to be selfless,’ he said. ‘That means giving more to the people you meet than you take from them. And it means walking softly on the Earth.’
As the years had passed, Ayman and the young Hicham crisscrossed the Kingdom again and again. They travelled from Agadir to Essaouira, from Marrakech to Fès, from Tangier to Casablanca, always on the donkey cart piled high with scrap metal.
‘We visited places that aren’t on any maps,’ said Hicham. ‘It was adventure. Real adventure. You can’t understand what it was like – it was like waking from a dream! Every mile that we travelled, Ayman would talk. Every mile was a lesson. He taught me about honour, and to tell the truth. It’s because of Ayman that I cannot lie. Truth is the backbone of my life. It’s my religion.’
‘But Islam is your religion,’ I said.
‘It’s the same thing,’ said Hicham. ‘Islam is Truth. It’s the truth to believe in yourself, in those around you, and in God.’
Almost every week for a year, Hicham and I met and talked and talked, in conversation paid for in postage stamps. There are so many memorable conversations in my head, but few have ever been quite so revealing as those with Hicham. Over the months, I found myself grasping the basics of what must surely be real Islam.
One afternoon, Hicham invited me in, served me a ubiquitous glass of steaming mint tea, and said:
‘You are young, your eyes are wide open, your mind is clear. But you must take care to understand.’
‘To understand what?’
‘To understand the right Path.’
Hicham called out the door to his wife, who was chatting to a neighbour in the street. He apologized.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said, ‘she forgets the duty of honouring a guest with food.’
I asked about the Path.
‘To understand the right Path,’ Hicham said, stroking his tuft of beard, ‘you must understand what it is not. It’s easy. It’s a lesson in life. Islam is not complicated, or cruel, or unfair. Anyone who cannot describe it in the most simplistic way is telling falsehoods. He’s telling lies. He’s as bad as the fanatics.’
I asked about the fanatics – about Al-Qaeda, and other radical groups.
Hicham rubbed his eyes.
‘They pretend that what they are doing is in the name of Allah, but it’s in the name of Satan,’ he said very softly. ‘They are hijacking our religion. Open your eyes and see it for yourself! Islam teaches tolerance and modesty. It doesn’t tell people to fly passenger jets into skyscrapers, or to strap plastic explosives to the waists and to slaughter innocent women and children. These people must be stopped.’
The next week, I handed over a fresh crop of postage stamps.
As always, the old man spent a few moments poring over them, commenting on each one. His favourites were from England but, ‘not those silly ones with the Queen,’ he would say. ‘I like the big, more unusual ones. They hint at the society, the tradition.’
I steered the conversation away from postage stamps, and onto the problems of the world. I asked Hicham how Islam could stop Al-Qaeda. He didn’t say anything at first; he was too busy sorting through the stamps.
‘I’ll tell you,’ he said at length. ‘You have to starve them of publicity. That’s what to do. Don’t report their misdeeds. Ignore them. Pretend they don’t exist.’
‘Won’t that just make them wilder for publicity?’
Hicham laughed. He laughed and he laughed until his old sagging cheeks were the colour of beetroot.
‘Of course it would,’ he said. ‘But it doesn’t matter how angry they get, so long as we rise up tall and spread the truth about Islam. We must tell people the facts, the real facts. That’s what I’m saying.’
‘What are the real facts?’
‘Tell them that Islam doesn’t order women to veil,’ he said. ‘The tradition was copied from the Christians of Byzantium. And tell them that Islam doesn’t say you cannot drink wine – it just says you can’t become intoxicated. And,’ Hicham went on, his voice rising in volume, ‘you can tell them that Islam says that all Muslims are equal. We are brothers. That means an imam or a religious scholar is equal to us. He can’t tell us what to do!’
Three weeks ago I flew to London for a few days, leaving my wife and the children at our oasis in the shanty-town. On the evening I returned to Casablanca, there was a knock at the door.
‘That will be Hicham,’ I said to my wife, ‘he’ll be wondering where I have been.’
I opened the door, expecting to see the old man’s face. But it wasn’t him. It was his wife, Khadija. She was crying.
‘My husband died three days ago,’ she said. ‘He told me if anything ever happened to him, that I should give you this.’
The old woman was holding a box. She held it out towards me. I thanked her. A moment later she was gone. I went inside to my desk, turned on the lamp, and opened the box.
In it were Hicham’s stamp albums. I sat down in the dim light. I was sad to have lost a wise friend, but at the same time I was happy – happy that we had found each other at all, and had so many good conversations, each one paid for in postage stamps.