In Arabian Nights

by Tahir Shah

  'Clear your minds,' he would say. 'Close your eyes. Listen to the sound of my voice.'

  We would be squirming at first, unable to keep still. Then the voice began, soft as silk, precise, calm . . . 'Once upon a time in a kingdom far away . . .' Within a moment it had pulled us in, taken over, and we were lost in its realm. That was it. My father never told us how the stories worked. He didn't reveal the l ayers, the nuggets of information, the fragments of truth and fantasy. He didn't need to – because, given the right conditions, the stories activated, sowing themselves.

  The Caliph's House has the ability to suck you in and tantalize your senses. There are courtyards shaded by fragrant honeysuckle and blazing bougainvillea vines; fountains crafted from hand-cut mosaics, gardens hidden behind secret walls, terracotta tiled floors, carved cedarwood doors, and acres of Venetian plaster, etched with intricate geometric designs.

  When we bought Dar Khalifa, we were newcomers to the local culture and its layers of superstitious belief. The learning curve was a steep one. Spend more than a few weeks living in Morocco and you understand that daily life is inextricably linked

  to an ancient Oriental system. A good way to make sense of the society, which at first seemed so daunting, so incomprehensible, was to read it as if it were a kingdom from the time of Harun ar-Rachid. From the first day, I found the reality of our new lives mirroring the make-believe world of A Thousand and One Nights.

  Almost as if through some medieval right of sale we inherited three guardians with the Caliph's House. Their leader was Hamza. He was tall, solemn and stooped, as if the world's burdens were laid on his shoulders. Then there was Osman. He was the youngest and had worked at the house since his childhood. He had a smile that was permanently fastened to his lips. The third guardian was called Mohammed, but known by all as the Bear. He was strong as an ox, had enormous hands, a hooked nose and a nervous twitch.

  Hamza, Osman and the Bear spent most of their time skulking in the stables at the bottom of the garden, hoping that I would forget about them. On the rare occasions that they ever spoke to me, it was to remind me of the grave dilemma, the predicament of the jinns.

  In the West, a house that has been boarded up for years on end might attract squatters. They can damage the place and be near impossible to evict. But in Morocco there is the threat of a far more turbulent force awaiting the unsuspecting. Leave your home empty for more than a moment, and it could fill from the floor to the rafters with an army of invisible spirits, called jinns.

  The Qur'ān says that when God created Man from clay, he fashioned a second form of life from 'smokeless fire'. They are known by many names – genies, jnun, jinns – and they live all round us in inanimate objects. Some jinns are good-natured, but most are wicked, enraged by the discomfort they believe that humanity has caused them.

  We spent many months renovating the house and cleansing it of the jinns. The guardians insisted they were lurking in the water tanks, in the toilets and under the floor. Living with jinns or, worse still, around people who believed in them caused unimaginable stress.

  Most of the time I was trapped in Casablanca. The days and nights were filled with builders, artisans and an ever-expanding staff, all of them fearful of the paranormal forces they said encased our lives. From time to time I did manage to break free. I crisscrossed Morocco on the trail of building supplies, craftsmen and exorcists capable of dispatching the wayward jinns. It was easy to forget that out there, beyond the wilds of the shantytown, there was a land ablaze with vitality, history and culture: a kingdom waiting to be discovered.

  One morning I found Osman sitting on an upturned bucket staring out at the hibiscus hedge. It was early summer and already far too hot to work, too hot even to think. I had taken the guardian a cup of chilled orange juice, droplets of condensation running down the side.

  He smiled broadly, teeth glistening, thanked me, then God and, after a long pause, he said,

  'Monsieur Tahir, you have been here at Dar Khalifa for more than three years.'

  'It's gone fast,' I said.

  The guardian gulped down the juice and turned slowly until his watery brown eyes locked into mine.

  'And what have you learned?'

  'What do you mean?'

  'About our kingdom . . . what do you know?'

  I thought for a moment, considering the journeys I had made in search of mosaics and exorcists, tortoises and cedarwood.

  'I've seen a lot,' I said. 'I've travelled north to the Mediterranean, right down south to the Sahara and all the way into the High Atlas.'

  Osman slid a sleeve under his nose. He kept my gaze.

  'You don't know us,' he said sharply. 'You don't know Morocco.'

  A jab of disbelief pricked my stomach. What's he talking about? I thought.

  'I know Morocco as well as anyone who's lived here for as long as I have.'

  The guardian put his thumbs in his eyes and rubbed very hard. Then he looked at me again.

  'You have been blind,' he said.

  'What?'

  'Blind.'

  I shrugged.

  'Morocco may have passed under your feet, but you haven't seen it.'

  'I'm sure I have.'

  'No, Monsieur Tahir, believe me. I can see it in your face.'

  Many of my earliest memories are of listening to stories. Our childhood home was filled with A Thousand and One Nights, or, as they are more popularly known, The Arabian Nights. I would sit there enthralled hour after hour at the exploits of Aladdin and Ali Baba, of Sindbad, and the world of the Caliph Harun ar-Rachid. There was always talk of chests overflowing with treasure, of princesses, and handsome princes charging on stallions liveried in gold, of ghouls and efrits, dervishes, divs and jinns.

  My father always had a tale at hand to divert our attention, or to use as a way of transmitting an idea or a thought. He used to say that the great collections of stories from the East were like encyclopedias, storehouses of wisdom and knowledge ready to be studied, to be appreciated and cherished. To him, stories represented much more than mere entertainment. He saw them as complex psychological documents, forming a body of knowledge that had been collected and refined since the dawn of humanity and, more often than not, passed down by word of mouth.

  When he died a decade ago, I inherited my father's library. There were five reinforced boxes of books labelled STORIES: VALUABLE, HANDLE WITH CARE. Among them were Aesop's Fables, Hans Christian Andersen, and the Brothers Grimm. There were many others, too, on the Arab collections, and volumes of tales from every corner of the world – from Albania and China, Cambodia, India, Argentina and Vietnam, from sub-Saharan Africa, Australia, Malaysia, from Papua New Guinea and Japan.

  Once the Caliph's House was renovated I had more time to spare. So I sat down to read the five boxes of stories from my father's library. I would often come to pencilled annotations in his small, neat hand. Many of the notes hinted at wisdom locked within a tale, or likened one story to another from an entirely different region of the world.

  The only set of volumes missing was my father's copy of A Thousand and One Nights, the rare edition translated by the Victorian scholar and explorer Richard Francis Burton. As a child I remember seeing the set in his study. It stood on a shelf at ankle height. My father prized the edition very highly, and would point out the quality of the workmanship, or tell of how he came upon the seventeen volumes as a young man. He said that he had saved for months to afford the books and would go each afternoon to spend time admiring them in the shop. I realized later it was the prized first 'Benares' edition of Burton's Alf Layla wa Layla, A Thousand and One Nights.

  The volumes were bound in waxy black cloth, with bright gold lettering on the spines. I was young and inexperienced, but they were just about the most beautiful thing I had ever seen. They were so exquisite that I would stroke my fingers over them and stoop down to smell their scent.

  They smelled like cloves.

  One rainy winter afternoon a visitor arrived at my
parents' home. He was overweight, flat-footed, and chain-smoked from the moment he stepped inside until the moment he stepped out. I was too small to be told anything, but I remember my parents muttering before he came. I don't know who he was, but he was important enough to drink tea from our best china and to have slices of lemon served on the side.

  From behind the banisters, I watched him greet my father and move through the hall into the study. The door closed behind them and, when it was eventually opened, the visitor was struggling under the weight of the Arabian Nights. At dinner, I asked what had happened to the black and gold books.

  My father's face seemed to darken. He looked at me hard, and said: 'In our culture a guest is respected and honoured very greatly, Tahir Jan. If he is under your roof, then he is under your protection. Your possessions are his for the asking. If he was to admire something, it is your duty to present him with it. Remember this, Tahir Jan, remember it for your entire life.'

  At Dar Khalifa, the guardians said they were too busy raking the leaves to waste time telling tales. I grilled them one at a time, but all they could tell me was that stories were not what they had once been.

  'There used to be time to while away the hours, talking and listening,' said Hamza, 'but these days there's too much work. None of us has a moment to spare.'

  'There's no time even to scratch our heads,' Osman chipped in. 'Our traditions are disappearing, all because employers are working their employees like slaves.'

  The Bear appeared through the hibiscus hedge and the three guardians fell into line, leering at me as menacingly as they could. Relations had been strained between us since I had implemented my brave new master plan. Unable any longer to afford painters and gardeners, builders and handymen, I had initiated a fresh regime, which involved the radical idea of everyone on the payroll doing actual work. The scheme had been unpopular from the start. As long as any of them had been employed at the Caliph's House, the guardians were used to lazing about down at the stables, swapping stories and fanning the flames of their own supernatural belief. But with the exorcism and the banishment of the jinns, a new era had been ushered in. They never said it, but I could sense that the guardians secretly longed for the old days, a time steeped in fear of the spirits, when they had had the upper hand.

  Every Friday afternoon I would take a notebook and a newspaper and walk down through the shantytown to my local café. Sitting in a coffee shop is considered a waste of time in the West, like watching daytime TV – a pursuit for the man who has no life at all. But after a few months in Morocco I came to realize that café life is the gateway into the clandestine world of Moroccan men. No woman with any self-respect would ever venture to a male-only café, a point that provides the clientele with unprecedented pleasure, and with security from their dominating wives.

  To be valued as a member of masculine Moroccan society, a man is expected to put in his time, sitting, thinking, talking, or doing nothing at all.

  My friends came to know that on Friday afternoons I could be found at the same table, and at the same seat, in Café Mabrook, a ramshackle haunt perched at the end of the Corniche. As soon as word spread that I frequented a male-only café, my standing in society was raised immeasurably. Everyone, from my bank manager to the guardians and the plumber, seemed to regard me with genuine respect.

  Café Mabrook was like a down-at-heel gentlemen's club. The walls were grey-black, and the air so smoky that if it were anywhere else there would have been a health warning nailed to the door. The chairs were all wobbly and broken, and the floor permanently concealed by a thick layer of cigarette ends. The only waiter, called Abdul Latif, was middle-aged, hunched over and missing both his thumbs. The deformity made counting out the change all the more difficult. He didn't take orders, but instead slapped down a glass of syrupy black coffee and an ashtray to anyone and everyone who walked through the door.

  From the first time I poked my head inside Café Mabrook, I was hooked. There was an irresistible charm, a faded grandeur. But to glimpse it, you had to look beyond what the eyes or the other senses showed. You had to rely on your imagination. Take a seat, inhale the nicotine smog, swill a mouthful of the pungent café noir, and pause . . . Allow the atmosphere to seep inside, and you found yourself connected to generations of Moroccan men who had sought salvation within the grey-black walls.

  Most of the clients were henpecked local men, all hiding from their wives. Their faces bore the same pained expression, the look of men hunted every waking hour. Their wives were all clones of the same alpha female, beefy and fearless, the kind of woman who preyed on the weak. But, thankfully, the henpecked husbands had come to learn that they were safe from persecution in the no man's land of Café Mabrook.

  Each Friday afternoon an assortment of downtrodden characters would individually make their way to my table and balance on a broken chair – retired professors and medical men, librarians, police officers and postal clerks. Anyone who enters a Moroccan café knows that there's no such thing as respecting privacy. Your presence is a signal that you are ready and willing and available to chat.

  Over the months, I came to meet a cross-section of Casablanca's male society, most of them wrapped in fraying jelabas, feet pressed into tapered yellow slippers called baboush. There was a sense of fraternity, a common bond reached through their communal fear – fear of the women in their lives.

  Friday afternoons are a time when most of Casablanca's men are cleansed, at ease and ready to relax. They have washed thoroughly, prayed at the mosque and gorged themselves on platters of couscous in their homes. When the feasting is over they are tossed out of the house by their wives and ordered not to return until the sun has dipped well below the Atlantic surf. With no more than a few dirhams to spend, and no courage to ask for more, they go in search of coffee and conversation.

  The henpecked husbands and I discussed all manner of subjects on Friday afternoons – from Al-Qaeda and the state of the Middle East, to the subtle flavour of argan oil and the ancient code of honour that bonds all Arab men. Each week, I learned a little more about Moroccan culture and each week it seemed as if I was welcomed a little deeper into their fold.

  Of all those who patronized Café Mabrook, the best informed was a calm retired surgeon named Dr Mehdi. Slim and dark-skinned, he had a sharp jaw line that ended with a patch of trimmed beard on the tip of his chin. He was a man adrift on an ocean of self-confidence and was regarded as a kind of champion by the other henpecked husbands. From time to time he would clap his hands and order them all to stand up against their ferocious wives at home.

  Dr Mehdi once told me he was eighty-two. His hands, though flecked with liver spots, were as steady as they had been fifty years before. 'A good pair of hands', he would say, 'can kill a man or can save his life.'

  One afternoon I told him about the storytellers I had seen as a child, crouching outside the city walls at Fès.

  He stared into his glass of café noir, narrowed his eyes and said: 'They are the heart of Morocco.'

  'But hasn't the tradition been lost?' I asked. 'After all, Morocco's becoming so modern.'

  Dr Mehdi cracked his knuckles once, then again.

  'You have to dig,' he said. 'If you want to find buried treasure, you must buy a spade.'

  'Is the treasure still there, though, under the ground?'

  The doctor put the glass to his lips and took a sip.

  'You may not see them,' he said, 'but the stories are all around us. They are in our bones.'

  I was surprised, as I assumed the tradition of storytelling had been replaced by the tidal wave of Egyptian soap operas, which has deluged most Arab lives. I must have looked disbelieving, because the old surgeon jabbed his index finger towards me.

  'The stories make us what we are,' he said. 'They make us Moroccan.' Dr Mehdi drained his café noir. 'The storytellers keep the flame of our culture alive,' he said. 'They teach us about our ancestors and give our children the values they will need – a sense of honour and
chivalry – and they teach what is right and what is wrong.'

  It was as if my father was sitting before me again, preaching to his children. Dr Mehdi touched his fingertips together in thought. He closed his eyes for a moment, sucked in a chest full of second-hand smoke, and said: 'The stories of Morocco are like a mirror. They reflect society. You can live here a hundred years and not understand what this country is about. But if you really want to know us, then you have to root out the raconteurs and listen to them. You see, it's they who guard the treasure. They can teach you but only if you are ready. To hear them, you must close your eyes and open up your heart.'

  THREE

  An Arab horse speeds fast. The camel plods slowly, but it goes by day and night.

  Saadi of Shiraz

  FIVE DAYS LATER I FOUND MYSELF STANDING IN JEMAA EL FNA, the vast central square in Marrakech whose name means 'Place of Execution'. The medina's labyrinth of narrow covered alleys stretched out behind in an endless honeycomb of riches, every inch of it bustling with brass lamps, silks, and rugs woven in kaleidoscopic colours, spices and perfumes, sweetmeats and dried chameleons for use in spells. The shade of the medina was contrasted by the searing light in the square. Only the brave or the mad endured it, crouching low on their haunches, whispering, waiting. I noticed a group of gnaoua, the famous Saharan musicians, dressed in indigo jelabas, their caps trimmed with cowrie shells. Next to them sat a travelling dentist with his tin of second-hand teeth. Beside him was a knot of medicine men, touting snake oil, ostrich eggs and rows of slim brown mice tethered on twine.

  I crossed the square, dodging the pools of melted tarmac, wondering how a city could take root and thrive in such a furnace. I thought of Osman's comment – that I was blind to the real Morocco. At that moment I caught sight of an elderly donkey being led into the middle of the square. Its muzzle was grey and there was an unusual white blotch on its rump.