by Tahir Shah
As you sit in the shade of the central courtyard, you’re lulled by the sound of birdsong, and water issuing gently from a marble fountain. The air is still, scented by orange blossom, the sky above indigo blue.
‘The secret of Fès is not to be in a hurry,’ says Fred, lounging back on a chaise longue, ‘if you hurry, all sorts of obstacles appear as if by magic. We had about fifty craftsmen working with us for a year and a half. They were so incredibly skilled, doing work that relies on pure expertise and not on power tools as is so often the case in the West. When we finished Riad Laaroussa I didn’t want to lose the craftsmen, and so we now renovate homes for other people who, like me, have been bewitched by the spell of Fès.’
A few streets away, back at the Glaoui Palace, Abdou is lowering his eyelids for a second siesta of the day. The only sound is the honking of the geese in the background and the muffled call to prayer far away. One day, Abdou’s home will surely be transformed into a name-brand chain hotel, the rot, old tin cans, and the geese long gone. There’ll be bell boys in smart little uniforms, piped music, and plumbing that actually works.
My own dream is that Fès – Morocco’s Sleeping Beauty – dozes off again like Abdou, and that the future waits a while longer to arrive.
SEVENTEEN
Friendship, Morocco
A POPULAR MOROCCAN PROVERB goes, ‘A man without friends is like a garden without flowers’.
It was told to me in the first week I arrived to live in Casablanca, by a plumber who had turned up to clean out the drains. He seemed distraught that I could have moved to a new home in a foreign land where I knew no one at all. I told him that it felt liberating.
‘I don’t have to avoid people any more,’ I said, beaming.
The plumber wiped a rag over the crown of his bald head.
‘But how will you live if you don’t have friends?’ he replied.
Looking back to that first week, I now understand what he meant.
For us in the West, friends are sometimes little more than people we go to the pub with so we aren’t there alone. That may sound bitter, I know. But in Morocco, friendship is quite a different thing. It’s a support structure par excellence, a system by which the old values of chivalry and honour are passed on. But more than that, it’s something that’s actively nurtured and raised, like a seedling in a garden.
My story is not unusual.
I had been lured to Morocco from London, to escape the damp grey sky and the exorbitant British living costs. My dream involved buying a rambling mansion, renovating it, and learning to live again.
Move to a new country and you quickly see that visiting a place as a tourist, and actually moving there for good, are two very different things.
Over the first year we renovated the house, exorcised the wayward Jinns who supposedly inhabited it, and battled the waves of conmen who beat a path to our door. At times I would find myself wondering if I would ever find anyone I could trust, a real friend.
Then, one Spring morning I met Abdelmalik.
I was having my hair cut in a rundown barber’s shop near to my house, when a tall, suave man strode in and sat on the chair beside mine. He asked for a shave. A pair of dark glasses were worn like a tiara across his slicked back hair. He smiled a great deal. I supposed he was in his late thirties. While the barber sharpened the cut-throat razor on a leather strop, the man made conversation.
He asked me if I missed England.
‘How do you know I’ve come from England?’ I asked.
‘Because you look too pale to be Moroccan and too content to be French.’
The man’s cheeks were shaved, and anointed with a home-brewed Cologne. He pressed a coin into the barber’s hand.
‘I will wait for you at the café opposite,’ he said.
I was still unfamiliar to Moroccan society and wondered if I should accept the invitation. But unable to resist, I crossed the street and found the man, Abdelmalik Leghmati, sipping a café noir. We both sketched out the broad details of our lives – wives, children, work, and exchanged telephone numbers. He expressed his great love for Arab horses, and his lifelong dream of owning one.
It was an interest we both shared.
We chatted about horses and life for an hour or more. Then Abdelmalik glanced at his watch.
‘We will be friends,’ he said firmly, as he left.
From then on the suave clean-shaven Moroccan swept into my life. He saw it as his duty to solve every one of my abundant problems and to help me settle in. First, he taught me local etiquette – how to be regarded as a local, how to receive and entertain a Moroccan guest, and how to prepare the sweet mint tea which everyone drinks constantly.
From the outset, Abdelmalik stressed again and again that I could ask anything of him. As my friend, it was his duty to be there for me. I found it strange at first that someone would make such a point about friendship, rather than just letting it develop as we do in the Occident. We would meet at least every two days on the terrace of Café Lugano, near Casablanca’s coast road, where we always sat at the same table. At the other tables the same people were usually seated as well. I commented on this, that the same people were always in position.
‘Of course that’s how it is,’ said Abdelmalik. ‘You see they are friends.’
In Morocco there is no occupation more honourable for a man that to be seen with his pals sitting at a café, drinking sweet mint tea. In the West, we might frown on spending so much leisure time in such a way. But, for Moroccans, time spent working on a friendship in public is extremely important indeed.
When I told an expatriate acquaintance about Abdelmalik, he waved his arms in caution.
‘Beware!’ he shouted. ‘Before you know it, this man will be demanding you to repay his kindness. What happens if he gets into a family feud?’ The expatriate paused. ‘You could find yourself at war,’ he said. ‘All because you’re his friend.’
After we had known each other for a month, Abdelmalik invited me to his apartment. It was small, cosy, and dominated by a low coffee table. On the table were laid at least ten plates, each one laden with sticky cakes, biscuits and buns. I asked how many other people had been invited.
‘Just you,’ replied my host, confused.
‘But I can’t eat this much,’ I said.
Abdelmalik grinned like a Cheshire cat. ‘You must try to eat it all,’ he lisped.
A few days later, he called me and announced he had a surprise. An hour later, I found myself in the steam room of a hammam, a Turkish style bath. For Moroccans, going to the hammam is a weekly ceremony. Abdelmalik taught me how to apply savon noir, and the ritual of gommage, scrubbing myself down until my body was raw. In the scalding fog of the steam room, he presented me with an expensive wash-case packed with the items I would need. When I choked out thanks, embarrassed at the costly gift, he whispered:
‘No price is too great for a friend.’
Months passed, and I found myself waiting for Abdelmalik’s ulterior motive. I felt sure he would eventually ask me for something, some kind of payment for our friendship. Then, one morning, after many coffee meetings, he leant over the table at Café Lugano and said:
‘I have a favour to ask you.’
I felt my stomach knot with selfishness.
‘Anything,’ I mumbled, bravely.
Abdelmalik edged closer and smiled very gently.
‘Would you allow me to buy you an Arab horse?’ he sked.
EIGHTEEN
Gendercide
AMBIKA RECLINES ON A STRETCHER as Dr. Gupta applies a patch of sticky gel to her stomach.
She lies quite still, staring up at the makeshift clinic’s bare lightbulb. The doctor gazes into a computer monitor as he runs an electrode across her belly. Then, as if peering deep into a crystal ball, he searches for an answer. Ambika clenches her fists and waits.
Suddenly the physician moves over from the machine, looks at Ambika, and shakes her head from side to side.
She is p
regnant with a female foetus – a daughter.
Ten minutes later, Ambika, who had her twenty-first birthday a week before, is undergoing a termination.
Ambika lives in the small town of Sirsa, in north-west India. Under pressure from her husband and his family to a produce a son, she is one of millions of women in India whose families consider bearing a daughter to be a disgrace, especially when there’s no male heir.
India’s ancient custom decrees that, when wed, the bride’s family must pay a dowry to the groom’s – meaning that girls are far less wanted than boys.
For centuries female infanticide has been quite common in India. But, now, advanced technology is enabling women to determine the gender of the foetus during pregnancy. The result: hundreds of thousands of female foetuses are aborted each year in India alone.
Ambika is no newcomer to Dr. Gupta’s infamous surgery.
The waiting area with its aborted female foetuses preserved in formalin (proof to clients that females are being hunted down and disposed of) no longer impresses her. For she’s undergone five abortions already. Each abortion followed a brief scan using state of the art Ultrasound equipment.
Billboards all over Sirsa remind people about the joys of bearing a son, and they give details of clinics which will help mothers realize their dream. At least five thousand female foetus’ are estimated to be aborted in Sirsa (a town of about 120,000 people) each year.
Across the Indian subcontinent, often with only the most rudimentary training, doctors are purchasing Ultrasound diagnostic equipment, and setting themselves up in business.
Since the mid 1980s Ultrasound equipment has been filtering into India. Making use of bank loans to buy the apparatus, unscrupulous physicians can recoup the initial expenditure in a matter of weeks, or even days. For those who can’t get a bank loan, companies across India lease out advanced Ultrasound units.
At least two electronic corporations are known to be manufacturing Ultrasound diagnostic equipment in India. Groups such as the Mumbaibased Forum Against Sex Determination believe that this will lead to less control in the standards and quantity of units being produced.
The Forum seems to be fighting an uphill battle.
Mumbai’s state, Maharashtra, was the first in India to proclaim S.D.T. (Sex Determination Tests) illegal. Far from reducing the Ultrasound testing, the ban has merely driven such clinics deep underground. The billboards have been taken down, but the surgeries are still booming. Diagnostic testing is far from a lower or middle class phenomenon. High society requires male heirs for its business empires. Women come from across India and even from abroad (particularly the Arab Gulf), to have S.D.T. in Mumbai. Ultrasound equipment in the city is probably the best on the Indian Subcontinent.
Chaitna, a twenty-three year old mother living near the southern city of Bangalore, has two daughters and has been trying to conceive a son. When she gave birth to a third daughter, her husband’s mother fed the baby the sap of the lethal Errukum plant mixed with milk. Death came instantly. The next time Chaitna was pregnant she solicited the services of a surgeon who arrived at her village with mobile Ultrasound unit – powered by a generator. The scan was done. Chaitna was assured that the foetus was female. She opted for abortion: which was performed a few minutes later. Only then was it discovered that the foetus had in fact been male.
Misinterpretation of Ultrasound images is extremely common. Most systems are completely operator dependent. When in the hands of an inexperienced user, the results can be anything but accurate. If in doubt, doctors generally maintain the foetus is female – so curtailing the chance of a daughter being born. Other, even more dissolute physicians are known to assert that the foetus is female when it is not, thus assuring themselves extra business: through abortion.
Despite its relatively short history in India, Ultrasound sex testing is having a devastating effect on the ratio between men to women. A recent census found there were 929 females to 1,000 males in India. Ten years before, there were 972 females to 1,000 males. Across the nation there’s a distinct lack of girls aged twelve or below.
During a meeting in one reputable clinic, in the southern city of Chennai, the telephone rings. On the line is a pregnant woman who wants to know if she’s carrying a son. The doctor shakes his head wearily, and replies:
‘Why do you want to know? Why? This is God’s greatest surprise to you, why do you want to kill that joy?!’
One state in southern India, Tamil Nadu, openly acknowledges that female foeticide is a major problem. In October last year, the state government launched a ‘cradle scheme’. Now, every state hospital or clinic has to provide a cradle – often just a cardboard box – outside its doors, twenty-four hours a day, so women can anonymously leave their unwanted daughters. These girls are sent to the main hospitals for medical check-ups before being sent to orphanages. Later, the fortunate ones are adopted. Although not providing a solution, this system at least gives the girls a chance to live a life that’s otherwise denied to them.
NINETEEN
Goldeneye
IN A SPRAWLING APARTMENT block, a stone’s throw from Oxford Street, half a dozen well-dressed Arab men are crammed into a tiny office.
Mobile phones pressed tight to their cheeks, they are all calling out numbers, frenetically bidding in auctions around the world. Stacked all over the desks, the floor, and the shelves, are hundreds of auction catalogues. From this office one of the men peers nervously towards a spacious sitting-room decorated with indigo silk curtains, exquisite red leather chairs, and dotted with simple pieces of modern art.
One wall is covered with bookshelves; another is taken up with three large glass tanks, each containing brightly coloured Amazonian poison-arrow frogs. Every few minutes the door swings open and a courier staggers in with crates of fine art. In the hallway a dealer waits patiently to show off his wares. In the background there’s the constant buzz of telephones ringing, and feet hurrying across the polished parquet.
Watching the frenzy of activity from the far corner of this room, swishing a set of tiger’s eye worry beads, is Sheikh Saud bin Mohammed bin Ali Al-Thani. At thirty-seven, he has already overwhelmed the art world with his astonishing buying power.
He is in a restless mood.
One of his team is bidding for an important piece of Islamic glasswork. The price is going up and up. The sheikh swishes in anticipation. He crosses the room and peers into one of the tanks at the turquoise frogs, but his mind is on the sale. Just as the tension becomes almost too much, the aide puts down his mobile phone. He nods to his master.
Success.
Five years ago Sheikh Saud slipped quietly on to the international art scene and began to buy. It takes a great deal to stir the restrained world of fine art and no one took much notice of the softly spoken collector – not at first, anyway.
But auctioneers and dealers have realized that this buyer is different. His pockets are very deep indeed. With unprecedented zeal he has bought and bought: Mughal treasures and Islamic art, royal French furniture and vintage cars, statues, leather-bound libraries, even dinosaur skeletons. But what the dealers have also seen is that the mysterious Arab, widely regarded as the biggest buyer of fine art in modern times, has more than money. He has an eye for artistic excellence, and he has vision.
The sheikh has attained near legendary status as a collector, for the quantity of high-quality art he has procured on behalf of his country, Qatar. His buying power is so great that many established foundations and private collectors have been driven off. They just can’t compete.
Dealers all tell the same tale: if Sheikh Saud wants something, he will buy it, irrespective of the price.
At some auctions he has been known to acquire almost everything. Yet, remarkably for such a dominant force in the art world, Saud remains an enigma. Almost nothing has been written about him as little is known. Until now, he has never given an interview.
Born into the ruling family of Qatar, the tiny oil-rich peninsu
la in the Persian Gulf, he is first cousin to the country’s Emir, Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa Al-Thani. Educated in Doha, the capital of Qatar, where he is based with his wife and their three young children, Saud never studied antiquities or art. He’s self-taught.
Only now is the extent of the dream that lies behind his buying spree becoming clear. Backed by the Emir himself, he plans to put the fabulously wealthy nation of Qatar firmly on the cultural map, with the capital becoming the chief artistic and architectural centre for the Persian Gulf.
Sheikh Saud is in charge of building half a dozen museums and a national library, as well as a new residence for himself. Once they are finished, he is going to fill them all with treasures. Many of the world’s foremost architects and artists are already involved.
The architect I. M. Pei has been commissioned to design the National Museum of Islamic Art; Santiago Calatrava (who built the Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport) is planning a photographic museum; and Arata Isozaki is working on the National Library of Qatar, as well as the sheikh’s private villa. This will have a sculpture garden, with major pieces by Richard Serra, Jeff Koons and Eduardo Chillida (the veteran Spanish sculptor has produced his largest piece ever, which will stand seven metres high and weigh more than a hundred tons). David Hockney is said to be in discussions over designs for the swimming pool.
Qatar is lodged between the ancient traditions of the nomadic Bedouin people and the trappings of the modern world. The population of about three hundred thousand Qatari Arabs is easily outnumbered by migrant workers, largely from India and Pakistan. Islam is the bedrock of the society. Alcohol is forbidden, and most of the Arab women choose to wear the veil. In this tiny country, the size of an English county, crime is virtually unknown, the skies are crystal clear, and there’s almost no income tax to pay.
Until oil was discovered in the 1930s Qatar was a quiet, impecunious Emirate, famous for its pearls, tribal handicrafts and Arab hospitality. The peninsula has been ruled since the mid-1800s by the Al-Thani family. It formed part of the Ottoman Empire and became a British protectorate before gaining full independence in 1971. The reigning Emir overthrew his father in a bloodless coup in 1995, and has recently launched a major industrial modernization drive. The new commercial agenda has been accompanied by considerable cultural growth. Much of the money Sheikh Saud spends, is on behalf of the Qatari government.