A Handful of Honey

by Annie Hawes

  A marabout, says Yazid. The tomb of a Sufi saint.

  A marabout? I remember the Algerian brothers telling me that marabouts were wise and holy men who could advise you in times of trouble – and make up amulets to protect you from harm, too. Do they have them here in Morocco as well?

  They certainly do have them here. And all through the Maghreb. The tombs are called marabouts, as well as the Holy Men themselves, it seems.

  And can we stop and have a look?

  If you really want to, says Tobias, but the countryside is littered with the things, we’ll pass plenty more. He gives in to my whim, though, and pulls over. I climb out to inspect the shrine, blindingly white in the sunshine. Only just repainted, too, by the look of the splashes of fresh whitewash adorning the tufts of grass and clumps of violets around it. The dome is not really round, but four-sided; irregular and home-made looking, as if its mud-plaster and the zigzag decorations round the deep doorway had been applied by hand, like the icing on a cake. I step down into it, poke my head into the cool darkness within – and discover that the place is already occupied. There is a powerful scent of incense, and three women are kneeling around what must be the actual grave of the marabout, a long narrow stone with a green fringed carpet draped over it. They are murmuring prayers, their hands held out, palm-upwards, and their eyes closed. But not entirely closed, evidently, because as I start to reverse back out, not wishing to disturb their devotions, the woman nearest to me stands up, grabs my hand, and starts talking animatedly, doing a lot of that hand-on-the-heart action. Now all of them join in at once – not in any language I can understand, unfortunately, but still, I can tell their intention is friendly. The one who is holding on to me throws up her hands in despair when I try some French on her, says something long and complicated in her own language, laughs at my incomprehension, and gives me a pat on the cheek. She is wearing a complicated arrangement of patterned scarves and shawls over her head, knotted and draped; one of those stripy shawl-like things is tied round her waist. A Berber, I deduce.

  Her friend, similarly dressed – no boring pastel jellabas in here – has a fine tattooed line running from the bottom of her lower lip right down the middle of her chin, as does the older woman with the heavy gold earrings and the hennaed palms and fingertips who is sitting in the corner with one leg outstretched towards the grave. The hennaed fingertips, with their golden-brown tinted nails, give her the look of an extremely committed smoker.

  I soon gather that the women want me to crouch down along with them and join in whatever it is they’re doing. They are pulling at me and making kind of sweeping movements with their arms, from the tombstone towards the old lady with the outstretched leg. Willing though I am to participate (probably), I don’t have the faintest idea what this gesture might mean. The old lady clearly appreciates the absurdity of the situation: she has started giggling behind her hand.

  Wait a minute, I say, holding up a finger – a gesture easier to understand, I hope, than the ladies’ mysterious sweeping motions – and nip back out to call Yazid. He refuses to come into a marabout filled with females – not socially acceptable at all, evidently – but is prepared to go so far as to stick his head round the doorway. And with his help, I discover that the imitation-sweeping is simply the motion they want me to join them in doing, so as to transfer the saint’s baraka – a mystical power somewhere between good luck and divine grace, it seems – out of the grave of the marabout and into the leg of the old lady, whose knee-joint has been swollen and sore for several weeks. Her helpers feel that my presence will confer extra baraka upon the scenario, and could make all the difference to the cure.

  But why would that be, when I’m not even a Muslim?

  Yazid doesn’t know. Some things have more baraka than others, that’s all, he says testily, keen to get away. A soup made with seven vegetables has more baraka than one made with six. A white camel has more baraka than a brown one. How should he know why?

  There being no deeper meaning to the ladies’ desire for my presence than if I were a camel or a bowl of soup, it would certainly be curmudgeonly to refuse. And I know how painful a sore knee can be. So, crouching down, I join with a will in the rhythmic sweeping of divine grace across the room and into the leg of our patient, who has turned her golden-red palms upwards and begun quietly chanting again. Now the others join in the chant. The language barrier prevents me from helping with this part of the procedure, so I gaze interestedly around the tiny domed room. There is a kind of shelf around the wall at the bottom, sooty smudges on the whitewash: a few tiny fragrant cones of incense smoking away. Nearby, a saucer with more smouldering burnt-offerings, a tiny piece of lit charcoal heating some chips of brown resin-like stuff, some translucent white pebble-things, a few fragments of what looks like dried seaweed, and another cone of incense. The more I gaze at the contents of this dish, the more I think I’ve seen them somewhere before. Yes indeed. Never again will I be at such a loss outside that Tetuan perfume-shop.

  Back in the car, I find that Guy is trying to get Yazid to show him how to wind a chèche. I knew it. Must get to place that bet quickly. Yazid is resisting, though. It’s impossible in such a small space, he says: there are a good five metres of cloth in a chèche. Later, yes, when we get out. I save him from Guy’s importuning by seeking more information on marabouts.

  People come on mass pilgrimages to these shrines, Yazid tells us, every year on the saint’s holy day, to celebrate his miracles. There is drumming all night, music, singing – people keep it up till they’ve danced themselves into communion with his spirit, into Oneness with Allah. This marabout must have had his feast-day recently – the pilgrims always whitewash the shrine as part of the festivities.

  But there are still marabouts alive today? Not like the Christian tradition, where you have to be respectably dead before you can become a saint?

  Of course there are: because a Holy Man’s baraka is hereditary. At least one of his descendants, sometimes more, will take up his mantle in each generation; has done throughout the centuries.

  And how come there was nothing about marabouts in any of the stuff we read on Islam? Are they not really Islamic?

  Yazid hums and has about this one. There certainly are Muslims who call the marabout ways un-Islamic – those bearded boys in the Dutch mosques, for example. But they know nothing, according to Yazid. They are just aping the puritans and the intellectuals, the city imams, who want Islam turned into a religion for lawyers, a set of rules and regulations for how to live every detail of your life in the Ways of Allah – and nothing more. Fundamentalists, Wahabis and Salafists. That is another reason why Yazid wouldn’t bother going to their prayer-meetings. What sort of religion is that, no fire in its belly, where nothing is miraculous or mystical, and a Muslim can have no personal relation to his God?

  We must have got the wrong sort of book, anyway, he says. Did it not mention the Sufi variety of Islam? Those Muslims who withdraw from the world to seek mystical union with God? Yes? Well, a marabout is another word for a Sufi saint – the Holy Man whose followers set up a Sufi brotherhood, a zawiya, many centuries ago. And if it wasn’t for the Sufi brotherhoods, Yazid himself never would have learned to read and write. He got the only schooling he ever had at the local zawiya. The Brothers were the kindest and most pious of men, and nobody is going to tell Yazid that they were un-Islamic!

  Aptly enough, the midday call to prayer interrupts this conversation. The call is taken up by one muezzin after another, half a dozen invisible mosques in invisible villages up and down the hillsides all weaving together into one plaintive and beautiful chant that echoes across the dry, sun-baked slopes above us, and the luscious green valleys below.

  The call to lunch, says Tobias, irreligiously. And he is starving!

  Yes. I did read something along those lines. For many centuries the zawiyas of the Sufi brotherhoods – kind of Muslim monasteries – ran the only schooling there was in much of the Maghreb, teaching reading, writing
and the holy texts, just as the Christian Church did in Europe until pretty recently. And also the historical explanation of the country people’s preference for the Sufi version of Islam: that a countryside dotted with the tombs of miracle-working saints, where they could seek Holy Grace and communion with God without having to leave their flocks and herds, suited the nomad lifestyle a lot better than a network of bookish, mosque-bound city imams. More importantly still, the Holy Man’s living descendant, imbued with the powers and wisdom of his (and even, sometimes, her) ancestor, was essential to peace and social stability. Whenever there were major disagreements between tribes about rights to pasture or to water – which might, unresolved, escalate into warfare and bloody chaos – the Holy Man was called in. Thanks to his innate baraka, his decisions would be accepted by both parties as final and binding. Only he could keep the peace.

  Does anybody happen to know which kind of Islam the Algerians have just voted for in these cancelled elections, then? Is it the kind with, or without, marabouts? The puritans, or the old church?

  My French experts think it was unspecified. The Front for Islamic Salvation just talked about respect and decency, an end to government corruption, more justice and equality – things anyone in their right mind would agree with, but couched in Islamic vocabulary.

  Well, who is going about shooting policemen?

  The Dutch! says Yazid.

  Twenty minutes of steepness later, we arrive at Tobias’ first stop, a small town whose road-sign is written in Arabic only, with no transliteration beneath it. Help. Where are we? A horrible new experience. We are, all of a sudden, illiterate. Imagine if Tobias and Yazid should up and leave us now! We don’t know where we are, and we couldn’t even look it up on our map to find out. How useful is the art of reading that we take so much for granted! And how scarily shapeless the world becomes without it. Gérard starts leafing feverishly through The Little Cunning One in search of an Arabic alphabet.

  Passing a pretty domed mosque with a tall ochre-painted minaret, Tobias turns off the main street through a low archway, into a wide, dirt-paved walled courtyard. A beautiful, if very scruffy-looking, courtyard, with an espaliered pomegranate against one wall and an ancient-looking fig tree in the centre. A slightly depressed and dusty grapevine trails along the balustraded first-floor balcony, which runs round all four walls, supported by columns and arches, barrel-vaulted porticoes sheltering a cobbled area. Threads of smoke are rising from the embers of a bonfire, while a donkey and a mule stand in the opposite corner, under their own private bit of portico, tethered to iron rings in the wall. The donkey is wearing a couple of big sacks of something, flour maybe, while the mule is as nature intended him. There must be twenty or thirty of these tether-rings built into the walls, though, right along the back: how many people do they get in here, on a good day? Is it a mule-park? Or maybe a mule-market?

  A fat brown chicken clucks at us; a closer look and I see that it too is tethered, by a piece of string round one of its legs, to an old bit of iron – a ploughshare, is it? On the back wall beneath the porticoes there is a row of rough wooden doors: one of them, a half-door, is open, and two goats rest their chins on the closed lower part, munching and staring us out rudely.

  Tobias won’t be long, he says, heading for the opposite corner from the donkey, where he opens a door into the heart of the building. There seems to be a quite startling amount of clattering, clanging, crashing, and shouting going on behind it. He heads into the racket regardless, calling out hola! in Spanish, and then something in Arabic, as he vanishes inside.

  We all clamber out of the car and stretch. Gérard is making an I-told-you-so sort of a face. How come Tobias knows these people deep in cannabis-country, in the middle of nowhere? Guy feints a backhand slap across his chops. Gérard dissolves into laughter. Thank goodness. I don’t mind him having a wild fantasy life, as long as he doesn’t get all anxious about it. As far as Guy and I can see, if the only viable crop round here is the kif-leaf, and if everybody’s doing it, it’s hardly going to be associated with gangsters, crime and violence, is it? More with farming folk, you’d think: tractors, wellies and horse-manure, or whatever the Rif mountain equivalent of that may be. Oxen, sandals and donkey-droppings?

  I take a seat on the log beside the chicken-plough and now realize that we are not alone in the yard. Across from us, under the shade of the portico, there’s an old man in one of those classy white-wool robes, sitting stock-still. He has a very tidy white beard, a white crochet skull-cap under the draped bit of his robe, and is puffing gently on a home-made-looking pipe with a very long reed and a tiny, round bowl.

  Kif! says Gérard, nudging me.

  I think he’s right: there’s a certain sweet perfume in the air. Still – a nice, respectable old man, nothing scary about him. If he was in France, he’d be sipping a cheering glass of red wine; here, he’s puffing some soothing kif. No hint of the evil gangster about him, for sure.

  The old man raises his pipe in a slow, dignified greeting. Gérard and Guy raise their hands back, but without the pipe. Not having yet attained the John-Wayne level of dignity required to share in such manly, silent greetings, I decide to try my first Arabic one, as prescribed by the Petit futé.

  As-salamu aleikum, I say, Peace be upon you.

  The correct answer to this greeting is, the book claims, Wa aleikum salam, And upon you be peace. The old man just stares at me, looking positively astounded. After a moment or two of silence, Gérard helpfully repeats the greeting, in case this makes my intention clearer. Or in case respectable old men here are not used to having peace wished upon them, unprovoked, by unknown females. This seems a horribly likely explanation. It’s only a decade, after all, since old men in Italy stopped being appalled by unsolicited remarks from unknown females. No – what am I saying? They never did stop being appalled. They just died out.

  Gérard’s greeting seems to work better than mine, whatever the reason. The old man takes the pipe slowly from his mouth, nods and responds. Alas, whatever he may be saying, it is certainly not the reply prescribed by the guidebook. It sounds like ‘labass’. Probably he’s just never got round to reading the Petit futé.

  Labass, echoes Guy and receives a polite nod in return. A smug look comes over his face. Another thumbs-down for The Little Cunning One.

  There’s someone else in the courtyard too, I now register. A woman, swathed in a black haik from head to toe, with only her eyes and the bridge of her nose showing, is sitting a couple of yards behind the old man, in the darkest corner under the portico. Are the two of them together? They’re ignoring one another completely, but I suppose that doesn’t mean much, in any culture. I decide not to venture another hello. She doesn’t look at all as if she’s expecting to join in any public greetings. A potential minefield, and I’m already exhausted by the first attempt.

  Yazid arrives in the yard to join us now, with a brisk and competent labass all round. Surely he can’t have been looking for a phone again? A different perfume has begun wafting our way, out through the noisy doorway behind us: a delicious, spicy, savoury one. Guy sticks his head round the door, curious, and comes back out grinning. A restaurant kitchen, he says. We’ve come in the back way, that’s all.

  I nip over and look out through the gateway onto the street. Yes, there’s even a sign, out on the street side. Chez Ismail, it says, and in an alphabet I can read, too.

  Restaurant Ismail, nods the old man from under the portico, looking as if he thinks we’re slightly deranged. I suppose it must seem a little odd, a bunch of foreigners coming into a restaurant and then acting all surprised that it is one.

  Tobias bounces back out, looking pleased as punch, and introduces us to two cheerful-looking men, both called Mohammed. Mohammed the father and Mohammed the son. Or Mohammed bin Mohammed: that’s how you say it in Arabic. They are the father and brother, respectively, of one of Tobias’ neighbours in Ceuta.

  Labass, they both say, shaking our hands. Labass, we say back. />
  It means ‘No harm’, Yazid tells us. A lovely expression. Even better, you can use it both for hello and for goodbye, simplifying life a lot.

  The three of them go over to the car, Mohammed the father chatting away to Tobias in fluent Spanish. Tobias opens the boot, and the two Mohammeds heave out a large cardboard box, which they carry off into the restaurant. What on earth can be in it? Tobias has sat down next to me on the log, so I ask. He gives me a sidewise look and lays his finger along his nose. OK. None of my business.

  Guy can’t believe what a nation of linguistic geniuses the Moroccans are. Does everyone speak Spanish and French, as well as their own language? Yazid says they get a good start in this Berber part of Morocco. Once you’ve learned one new language, especially as a small child, the whole thing becomes simpler. Children who grow up in Berber-speaking homes will start learning Arabic as soon as they set foot outside the house. Moroccans have always had two languages of their own to deal with. Adding a working knowledge of the colonizers’ tongues was no trouble at all to bilingual Arabic- and Berber-speakers.

  Gérard has heard, he says, that they don’t like being called Berbers these days. At least, the Algerian Berbers certainly don’t. Not only is ‘Berber’ not their own word, but it’s derogatory too – a rude name given to them by foreigners. The word ‘barbarian’ is derived from it, and ‘barbaric’. They want their own language, Tamazight, officially recognized as a national language. And to be called by their own name for themselves: Amazigh, which means ‘the free’.

  Yazid says Berbers feel the same way in Morocco, but here it’s kept very low-key. The king does not like to see Berbers taking pride in their cultural differences from the country’s Arabic-speakers, or demanding that their language be recognized as a national one, even though a good third of the nation grow up speaking Tamazight. The king is afraid he might end up with a Berber separatist movement on his hands. And it’s no joke. A good friend of Yazid’s back home, a Berber who runs a café, let a foreign academic who was studying Berber culture sit in his bar, collecting Tamazight expressions from his customers. Next morning Yazid’s friend was dragged off by the police, who shoved him into a chair and forcibly shaved off his beard. Nearly ripped his face off. He didn’t dare speak his own language with his clients for weeks afterwards.