by Tahir Shah
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.
THIRTY-TWO
Of All the Medinas in the World
IT WAS THE PROSPECT of the real world that first lured me to Morocco.
I was living in a pokey London flat, but spent very little time there. I would walk the streets angry and desperate – enraged at the exorbitant taxes and at the crippling kindergarten fees, desperate for affordable sunshine and for danger. The way I saw it, England had become a nanny state par excellence. Any problems and the system would pick you up and dust you down. I yearned for a place where the safety nets had been cut away, where ordinary people walked on a high-wire of reality.
Rachana, my wife, didn’t share my lust for jeopardy. She clutched our toddler to her pregnant belly and ordered me to not be so irresponsible. Taking little notice of her concerns, I flew back and forth from London to Marrakech, where I had been taken often as a child. I remembered the droves of fire-eaters and snake-charmers in the Jma el Fna, the main square, and searched for a cosy little house to buy.
Unfortunately, just about everyone in Europe seemed to have already come up with the same idea. Prices for ‘riads’, courtyard houses in the medina, were soaring, with the influx of the Euro-jetset. Someone suggested to go house hunting in Fès. So I did, and eventually found a crumbling merchant’s house there.
Colossal in size, it was owned by seven ghoulish brothers, each one greedier than the last. In Morocco, before you even get to the matter of the sale, you have to coax the owner to sell. I sat with them for hours, coaxing, cajoling, begging them to allow me to buy their home. Spitting out a fantasy price, they narrowed their eyes with greed. I leapt up and ran out shouting. In that moment I broke the first rule of the Arab world.
Never lose your cool.
At long last, we were offered a wonderful sprawling home in the coastal city of Casablanca. It was called Dar Khalifa, meaning ‘The Caliph’s House’, and from the first moment I set eyes upon it, I was in love.
All I knew about the city, I had learned from the film. I expected it to be a showcase of the mysterious East, half-expecting Bogart and Bergman and be living it up at Rick’s Café Americain. But instead I found a French-built haven of fabulous Art Deco buildings and palm-lined boulevards.
On the night that I took possession of the great notched iron key to the Caliph’s House door, suicide bombs went off across Casablanca. I cursed myself for courting danger so openly, and feared for what Rachana would think watching the news at home. It was a terrible moment. A few weeks later she gave birth to our little son, Timur, and we moved to Morocco.
My father, an Afghan, could never take my sisters and me to his ancestral home in the Hindu Kush. It was always too dangerous. So, often in our childhood, the family station-wagon would be laden with tattered old suitcases, and we would all be lured inside. With our gardener at the wheel, we would drive south from the verdant county of Kent, through France, Spain, and would take the ferry over to Tangier.
The journeys were a chance for my father to reveal fragments of his homeland. As he would point out frequently, the cultures of Morocco and Afghanistan are remarkably similar – mountainous landscapes, Islamic customs, and fiercely proud tribal clans.
When we bought the Caliph’s House, I thought we’d be finished with all the work in about three months. But at the start I had no concept of the elastication in North African time.
With no power tools or specialized equipment, work progressed very slowly indeed. And as for money – renovate a large house anywhere and you exceed original budgets many times over. I was forced to take out huge bank loans to pay the bills which were stacked two feet high on my desk. Having had no previous experience in renovating a house – large or small – I found it impossible to ever see the big picture. I would go around buying last minute details, when I should have been concentrating on the structure of the project, and all the tedious stuff like water and wiring that no one ever sees.
Buy a house in a foreign country and, it seems, that anything which can go wrong usually does. Our experience was no exception. The first weeks and months were beyond miserable. There was no electricity, water or furniture, and there were so many rats that our shoes were eaten in the night. We found dead decapitated cats in the garden, supposedly left by someone who didn’t want us to live at the Caliph’s House.
Then there were locusts, followed by a swarm of ferocious bees. After that a workman fell through a glass roof, and hordes of police tried to break down the front door. If in England you found a troupe of bobbies trying to batter their way into your home, you would probably ask them why they were there. But in Morocco the police are kept out at all costs. I quizzed one of the guardians as to why we were the focus of such police attention.
‘Because the architect doesn’t have permission to do the work,’ he said.
‘Doesn’t he?’
‘No of course he doesn’t. In Morocco no one ever gets permission.’
The architect brought a trailer full of the most savage men I had ever seen. They had unusually-developed shoulder muscles and were all armed with sledge hammers. In a very short while they managed to smash down a large number of walls, ripping out wiring and water pipes as they went.
Then they ran off and the rain began.
Many weeks of stormy weather followed in which the architect was an infrequent visitor. The reason for this was that, as I later found out, I had broken the second rule of the Arab world – paying in advance. On those long windswept nights, I would huddle in a blanket on a green plastic garden chair and congratulate myself for having broken free from the cycle of school fees, zombie-commuting and triangular chicken tikka sandwiches. My friends in London, I would tell myself over and over like a mantra, weren’t having nearly as much fun.
Eventually the architect’s building team arrived.
They spent most of their time camped in our unfinished sitting-room brewing up enormous pots of chicken stew. When they did do any work it was during the short time in between their feasts and long naps. The construction phase was completed at a snail’s pace. After that we moved on to laying the floors with handmade terracotta tiles called bejmat, and coating the walls in tadelakt, a Moroccan form of Venetian plaster, made from eggs, lime, and marble dust. The architect brought a team whose work was so atrocious that I fired them all in a fit of fury. It meant sacrificing all the money I had paid to the architect in advance.
There was no choice but to locate and then to deal directly with real moualems, the master craftsmen. Morocco has an astonishing number of cowboy craftsmen. For every thousand there are one or two true masters who have learned their skills by long and ruthless apprenticeship. Moualem Aziz was one of them. A great barrel of a man, his bulk poised above nimble feet, he was in charge of the floors.
Over months, his team brought magic to the Caliph’s House. The only time he was caught out, was whilst laying a complex pattern of glazed tiles in the children’s nursery. On reaching the final row they saw they had misjudged the shape of the room. Without so much as a murmur they lifted the entire floor, rotated it through five degrees, and laid it again.
Now that the house is restored, I watch my little son and daughter in the courtyards, splashing in the fountains, prodding their tortoises across the lawn. I understand now that the difference between absolute failure and total success is less than a hair’s breadth. And I see that success is about endurance. Keep standing and you will get to the end. But most of all I see that a life without steep learning curves is no life at all.
THIRTY-THREE
Old Cape Town
ON MY LAST VISIT to Cape Town a decade ago I remember asking directions to the Company Gardens, from a homeless guy.
‘They’ll take ya shirt and ya shoes,’ he said dreamily, looking me up and down.
‘Who will?’
‘The Banana-men will,’ he said.
Unsure quite what he meant, I made a hurried escape, back to the plush Waterfront District from where I had come. In the years that passed, I’ve often found myself wondering about the dreaded Banana-men, and have come to conclude they were a fantasy conjured by a troubled mind.
Far less fantastic though was the very real danger lurking in Cape Town’s historic heart. In the old days, it was a no-go-zone, where muggers preyed on the unsuspecting, and where you were likely to be relieved of far more than just your shirt and shoes.
But with time – and a massive injection of cold hard cash from both private and public funds – the city’s magnificent colonial quarter has now been completely revamped.
And what a jewel it is.
Stretching out a few blocks in each direction, it comprises an assortment of old world architecture, most of it restored to perfection, and all of it spotlessly clean. Part of a colonial legacy, the buildings hark back to when the Cape Colony stood as a byword for bullion and diamonds, and for wealth on an unknown scale.
After decades of despair, it seems as though the good times are here again. And, in these glory days of Cape Town’s Renaissance, there’s nowhere in the city quite so alluring to roam as the old downtown.
A good place to set off is from the corner of Wale Street and the pedestrianized St. George’s Mall. On that intersection stands the old Reserve Bank of South Africa, a granite fortress and an erstwhile beacon of power. It’s recently been given a painstaking renovation, and is now home to the Cape Town Taj Hotel.
Beyond it, on St. George’s Mall, are a throng of bistros, bars, and cafés serving gourmet fare and fine wines from the Cape. There’s an old-fashioned sense, a primness that makes you feel warm inside and genuinely fortunate at being anywhere near there at all.