A MAN WITH A HEAVILY scarred face and a limp, sidled up and asked me to follow him.
I was standing in the central square of Moulay Idriss, Morocco’s most sacred and sinister town, peering at a map. I asked the man what he had to show. He tapped a finger below his eye, and motioned towards a narrow alleyway. My curiosity piqued, I slipped after him into the cool shadows behind the main square.
At the far end of the alley there was a turn, followed by another lane, then another, and another. Realising that I was deep in the labyrinth, I called out, but the man didn’t stop.
After fifteen minutes of trailing behind him, he tapped his eye again, and pointed to a door.
‘What is it?’ I asked in a timid voice.
‘A secret.’
‘What?’
The man nodded, pushed the door inwards, and led me into a dark building with a low ceiling. My nose picked up the scent of sandalwood, sparking a memory from childhood. I pushed open one of the shutters, while the man pointed at the floor. As light flooded in, I waited for my eyes to focus. Then I gasped in surprise.
Nestled on a cushion in the middle of a room was a large glass jar filled with what appeared to be olive oil. In the liquid was part of a human skull. It looked like it had been trepanned and was missing the lower jaw.
‘Where did you get it?’
‘In the ruins, near Volubilis. A farmer came across it in his field,’ the man paused, and rubbed a thumb and forefinger together. ‘It’s for sale,’ he said.
I didn’t want to appear rude, but explained that I’d be in the doghouse if I went home clutching a trepanned human skull. Making excuses, and smiling as widely as I could, I retraced my steps back to the main square. As I tramped back out of the maze, I found myself wondering what kind of maniac would buy part of a skull from a total stranger, in a place that seemed to scare most visitors away.
Read any of the guidebooks to Morocco and most of them tell the same story – that Moulay Idriss, the ancient spiritual heart of the kingdom, is unwelcoming to tourists, and unforgiving to any planning on sleeping there. Living in Casablanca as I do, I have often overheard travellers in the ramshackle cafés down by the port recounting the myth: that only the foolish or the unhinged would be crazed enough to stay over in Moulay Idriss.
When I asked my Moroccan friends about the town, which was founded by the great grandson of the Prophet Mohammed, most of them smiled. ‘It’s a little secret,’ one said, ‘a way of keeping the very best for ourselves.’
Unable to resist the temptation any longer, I dropped everything and jumped into the car. I headed north, following the coast road, and was soon turning inland away from the Atlantic on the road which runs eastwards to Fès.
Many visitors tend to think of Morocco as a desert land which, of course, is true. But the kingdom is a realm of contrasts, and none is starker than the nut-brown farmland of the Saïss Plateau, where vines have produced wine since Roman times.
Barely two hours after leaving Casablanca, I was trundling through Meknès, one of the most impressive walled imperial cities of all. Following the signs north towards the Roman ruins at Volubilis, I caught my first glimpse of Moulay Idriss.
Blazing white against a cobalt sky, it clings to the mountainside like a cluster of limpets bleached by the sun. A huddle of green roofs near the middle, stands as a reminder of why foreigners have felt threatened until now. Within the shrine beneath the green tiled roofs lie the mortal remains of Idriss I, the founder of the powerful Idrissid dynasty, and the man who brought Islam to Morocco in the first place, twelve centuries ago.
It’s easy to imagine Idriss I standing on the hillside, surveying the fertile plateau below, dreaming of a time when the new religion would be practiced by every man and woman between him and the horizon. He had fled the Abbasid Caliphate in Baghdad, and brought Islam to the Berber tribes, despite the disapproval of the Caliph, Harun ar-Rachid. After winning over the Berbers, and founding the city of Fès, Idriss I was poisoned, supposedly on the orders of the Caliph himself.
Each summer a moussem is held in honour of the founder of Islam in Morocco. Tens of thousands of pilgrims come from across North Africa, and beyond, to pay reverence at the shrine dedicated to Idriss I. The town of Moulay Idriss swells with visitors then, many of them covering the distance from his second capital at Fès, on foot. For the rest of the year, Moulay Idriss is almost silent, a landmark photographed from a distance by tourists as their coaches rattle up the road to Volubilis.
The Roman ruins there are no more than a couple of miles away. They boast some exquisite mosaic floors, triumphal arches, and capitals crowned by giant stork nests. Local children weave about between the tour buses, offering fossils they have dug from the fields, and splinters of quartz dyed ruby red with ink.
One of the reasons the tourists have always sidestepped Moulay Idriss is because of the general sensitivity of Islamic shrines. Non-Muslims visiting Morocco rarely have the opportunity of entering the mosques or other religious buildings. The exception is the great Mosque of Hassan II in Casablanca, which holds regular tours. The Qur’an and the teachings of the Prophet mention nothing about forbidding those of other faiths from entering holy Islamic sites – far from it.
The Prophet himself is known to have welcomed Najran Christians into a mosque at Medina, where they held talks and prayed together. The resolution to prohibit non-Muslims into mosques in Morocco was apparently a political one, introduced during the era of the French Protectorate. It’s likely that the Governor, Hubert Lyautey, made the decision to avoid intruding upon local sensitivities.
Another explanation for the lack of visitors to Moulay Idriss may be been the shortage of reliable places to stay. After the high-end riad-style boutique hotels of Fès and Marrakech, lodgings in Moulay Idriss have always been far more modest and thin on the ground. Since the ’seventies, when the hippy trail linked Casablanca with Kabul, local people in the town have taken in the odd visitor, squeezing them into their communal guest rooms. Anyone offered to stay as a guest in a Moroccan home should take advantage, as the hospitality is second to none.
Fortunately, it’s unlikely that things are going to change fast at Moulay Idriss, but there is change afoot nonetheless. Mike Richardson, an exuberant young redhead restaurateur, formerly maitre d’ at London’s prestigious Ivy Restaurant, is a partner in a tiny inn that’s just opened its doors.
Boasting five guest rooms in all, Dar Zerhoune as it’s called, has been renovated with painstaking care.
‘It’s about eight hundred years old,’ says Richardson, ‘which is nothing out of the usual for round here. The last thing on our minds is to turn the town into a tourist magnet, but we do want to encourage people to fall in love with Moulay Idriss as we have done.’
The main square of the town is ringed by arched arcades, in which locals hide in the shade, and barter for plastic buckets, cardamoms, and pastries dripping with syrup. The wonderful thing about the place is that life continues as it has done for centuries, and that no one’s very impressed when a fresh-faced tourist blusters in. They get on with what they’re doing – weighing out dried chameleons, measuring skeins of wool, tasting spices before they buy, and haggling for great domed tagines.
The pace of life must have been how things were everywhere at one time, before mechanization forced everything to go fast forward. I watched as an aged shopkeeper woke from his siesta, prayed, sipped a cup of tea, chatted to his neighbour, and lay down to sleep once again – all in the space of ten minutes. There was a sense of simplicity which Morocco’s cities lost long ago. The danger with Moulay Idriss is that the longer you spend there, the easier it is to forget a world ruled by reality of paperwork, traffic jams and e-mail. Stay there too long and one might never be able to go home.
I moved from one café to the next, following the sun, drinking tea and dreaming of escape to such a tranquil place. From time to time a beggar would amble up. The café’s owner would take a coin from his apron pouch and hand it over in the name of God. At the third café, the waiter slipped a glass onto the cracked vinyl tabletop, and raised the teapot above his head as he poured. With a cloud of steam billowing out from the arc of boiling liquid, he glanced at his wristwatch.
‘It’s almost dark,’ he said in a whisper, ‘are you not going to leave?’
I asked what he meant.
‘Foreigners always depart Moulay Idriss before dusk,’ he said darkly. ‘They’re frightened to spend the night.’
‘Well, I’m staying,’ I said defiantly.
The waiter scratched a thumbnail down his nose.
‘You are very brave, Monsieur,’ he said.
I drank more tea, and found myself talking to a pair of footloose backpackers from Auckland, their possessions in a fetid heap beside the table. The woman told me that they’d taken a communal Mercedes taxi from Fès to Mèknes, and then another up to Moulay Idriss. I asked how the journey was.
‘It was the most terrifying ride of my life,’ said the man. It was the only time he spoke.
I told them about the skull.
‘He offered it to us as well,’ said the woman coldly.
I asked if they were planning on spending the night in Moulay Idriss.
The man looked at the woman, and she combed a hand through her hair.
‘After the ride here on the old road from Fès nothing could scare us,’ she said. She then mumbled something about a quest for turquoise beads and they ambled away.
The waiter sauntered over again, poured yet more tea, and described the moussem held each summer.
‘It’s then that Moulay Idriss comes alive with people and dancing, and tremendous noise,’ he said. ‘All day and night there is the sound of voices, and the beating of drums. Thousands of people pour into the shrine, and the cafés are filled to bursting.’ His eyes glazed over as he relived the spectacle in his mind. ‘If only the moussem was every day of the year!’ he exclaimed.
I sipped my tea, peered out at the serene square, and watched a group of boys playing tag in the dusk light. A dog limped into the middle of their game, curled up and fell asleep.
Then I smiled to myself, thankful that Moulay Idriss was exactly how it was.