Tangier

by Angus Stewart

  Meti bought a second-hand moped with the proceeds of a volume of my verse for which he had made two drawings but was understandably mystified by the publisher's having shrunk his two-foot originals to two inches. He knows no compatriot who can explain the process to him.

  One day he asked, 'When you fly to England is it in a white aeroplane with a funny, sagging nose?' I said 'No in a silver one with the red and green bands of Royal Air Maroc; but Meti seemed unconvinced. 'M'zziane' he said distantly. 'Marvellous.'

  It proved, that an expensive piece of Anglo-French technology called Concorde had broken down and was in hiding at Tangier's airstrip, Boukhalf.

  10. Islam

  It is often said that Islam is fatalistic: the word means 'submission', which is something very different. Allah is the first mover, Himself immovable. The Moslem (or 'submissive') worships Him., he does not petition, or pray for favours. Mohammed was purely human and, while venerated as God's prophet, first receiver (for he was illiterate) of his dictation which became the Koran, and subsequently law interpreter, has no part in the single deity, The prophet is neither prayed to, nor is his aegis invoked. Only God can help men. The word 'Mohammedan' insults Moslems as suggesting idolatry of the prophet.

  The tenets of Islam are Mercy and Compassion. The Moslem is enjoined to live his life with constant regard for both, but also with humility, and generosity towards his fellow men, because these qualities are the nature of Allah who, eventually and individually, will judge him. Heaven and Hell (there are seven categories of each) are conceived of in practical, sensual, even sensuous terms, The advantage of locally comprehensible images in any teaching is obvious. But the Moslem is invited to take the sura, or chapters of the Koran, both metaphorically and literally.

  . . . by their side shall sit bashful, dark-eyed virgins, as chaste as the sheltered eggs of ostriches.

  . . . We have prepared fetters and chains, and a blazing Fire.

  . . . They shall be served with silver dishes, and beakers as large as goblets; silver goblets, which they themselves shall measure; and cups brim-full with ginger-flavoured water from the Fount of Selsabil. They shall he attended by boys graced with eternal youth, who to the beholder's eyes will seem like scattered pearls,

  . . . let him tie a rope to the ceiling of his house and hang himself.

  There is a suggestion in the Koran that Hell is not eternal.

  The seeming fatalism of, for instance, the fifth commandment is again powerful rhetoric. It also best defines the nature of Islam:

  Attribute everything to God, because everything comes from Him. Let your resignation be such that if Good and Bad Luck were transformed into two horses and you were offered your choice of a mount, you would leap unhesitatingly on to the back of that which was nearest, without seeking to know which it was. Since both Good and Bad Luck are sent by God, it is not for you to make a choice.

  Sensibly the only Sexual sin fiercely jumped on is adultery. The virginity of brides is more a commercial asset than a religious injunction. The Koran enjoins the enjoyment of sex per se.

  Perhaps it's naive to call a monolith beautiful, Stanley Kubrick raises one out of the desert among pre-man apes and early tigers with luminous eyes to present Arthur Clarke's thesis in visual terms: a supreme wisdom exists; it seeks to guide; and has been doing so through millennia. Its visible form (in fact both a studying and teaching machine) is a rectangular monolith, which appears in the desert to those ape-dressed special effects men and tiger skins with quartz-iodine eyes. Islam is conceived by its followers as just such a monolith. I refer of course not to the Ka'ba, the cuboid shrine at Mecca built by Abraham about a stone fallen from Heaven and pantheistically worshipped before the prophet's lifetime, which is the most venerated in Islam, but to the spiritual and psychological solidarity of Moslem,

  This sense of communion is why a Tangier flower-seller has fellowship with a Saudi prince. A businessman from Birmingham visiting Ethiopia tends not to think, 'Thank God I'm among Coptic Christians'. Or it's unlikely to be his first thought. A Cairo merchant holidaying in Tangier may not consciously remind himself he is among fellow Moslems. But that will be because he doesn't need to.

  The principal claim of Moslems is direct knowledge of Allah, who is the same God as glimpsed less fully by Abraham and Jesus Christ. Christ was not crucified and, while of virgin birth, was emphatically not God's Son. It is this direct knowledge of God which makes Islam the fastest expanding religion today, particularly in Black Africa; while paradoxically the simple monolith is threatened by science, if only as being less coolly flexible than the older Christianity. But youth (to take human analogy) tends towards inflexibility only to evolve change more ingeniously.

  Islam's refusal to compromise upon the premise that God controls all things conflicts with modern science - for instance the laws of cause and effect. A great discomfort was man's landing on the moon. Ironically the achievement would not have been possible perhaps without Islam's major practical legacy to the west; our Arabic numerals (though these derive from India), and simplification of arithmetic. Try a long-division sum with Roman numerals.

  Apparently the Americans had landed two men on the moon. I was prepared to believe this. Meti was not. It was Meti's night to cook dinner. We had agreed on fish. Mackerel was the only fish regularly within his experience. I thought of childhood tales of their eating dead sailors, of Tangier's sewage effluents which the resident knows and the tourist doesn't, but of how as a post-war boy, with dried eggs and bananas and whale steaks, I'd virtually been reared on the stuff.

  'Jolly delicious, Meti.' I mopped up oily gravy with bread.

  'Cakes?' Meti mumbled, just big eyes above pounding mouthfuls.

  'With tea on the terrace. I'll get it,' I said.

  And so, sipping Lapsang and nibbling honey and almond stuffed pastry, we sat on the night terrace. Quite terrestrially a large owl flapped silently from the neighbouring building. A yellow mist was rolling in from the bay as it does sometimes with evening, filling the street canyons with wet cotton wool, muffling the traffic sounds, distorting the beam of vehicle headlights. Above, the Plough was sharp as in a planetarium, and the moon huge. I found myself staring at it with a vague concentration which deliberately invited notice.

  'It's bad to look at that,' Meti said, stooping over the cakes.

  'It's beautiful - bright. Look,' I said,

  Med shrugged off a boring phenomenon, but with a casualness not wholly natural. He went indoors to fill his cup with condensed milk: the opaque brew then became in his understanding coffee. When he returned it was with a remaining mackerel, which three fingers picked to extinction with the concentrated fastidiousness of a cat. He wouldn't look at the moon.

  'Met,' I began, 'it's very strange, but up there tonight two Men –'

  'No!' said Mai, with a violence that showed he'd heard the heresy in town.

  I tried again.

  This time Meti's 'No!' was fiercer. His mouth arrogantly full of food, he was not so playfully about to chuck the scalding tea-coffee, But I saw also he was frightened. Not the embarrassment of an aunt faced by impropriety, say; or the calculated scepticism of a science that was sure of itself, but a simple, naked fear, Meti was turned in on himself. There was nothing to say. He crouched over his plate eating mackerel fastidiously still, but with a concentration that could only be equated with a dangerous, all-excluding growl.

  It is strange,' I said again. And that was the end of man's violation of the moon.

  In this context of the unbridgeable, I remember pathetically trying to comfort an American who had known Tangier for about two years. He'd some way been betrayed by his girl, Fatomah.

  'Angus, she lied to me.'

  'Pete, Moslems have a different idea of "truth" from ourselves - particularly in regard to Christians. It's as it were a floating concept –'

  'Angus, I do know! Moslems are different. But what upset me was that when Fatomah lied - lied to me - it was just at Christmas-time.
'

  A Moslem prays five times a day, at specified hours. He may do so in any place provided the chosen spot, and he himself, are clean, This, rather than tourists' sensibilities, is the reason for the cleanliness of the open tracts of land between many of Tangier's buildings. In Tangier a man praying faces south-east because that is the direction of Mecca. The ritual consists of standing, kneeling with hands upon thighs, repositioning hands upon the ground in order to rock forward and touch the forehead against the ground; and of reciting formulae, learnt when the Moslem was a child, and often before he understood the words' meaning. The salat expresses only praise of, Allah; the emotions submission to Him.

  The Arabic word for Friday', el-jumaa, means 'the assembly'. It is also the word for 'mosque'. Corporate prayers are led by an imam, or prayer-leader; a hezzab recites from the Koran; and a khatib gives a moral address. These functionaries are not priests, but teachers. In theory any educated Moslem may perform any of the roles. A fourth dignitary, the muezzin (correctly mu'adhdhin), makes the several daily calls to prayer from the minaret of the mosque. Happily, whether through tactful arrangements, or simply the distance between minarets, the hauntingly beautiful calls never compete with each other, or seem to conflict with their harmony. The best heard is that made an hour before dawn, and which reminds the faithful that 'prayer is better than sleep'. A rewarding insomniac's diversion is to stalk the haoumats of Tangier with small tape recorder. Some muezzins wake the cockerels; others are anticipated by them. The muezzin of one mosque had a tubercular (rather presumably than smoker's) cough. A year later he had been cured or replaced: it's difficult to tell which, because an apprentice may precisely imitate the pitch and timbre of the master. In 1974 the muezzin of the Emsallah mosque had the most beautiful voice in the city. In Tangier some of the calls are amplified: not (as one's heard impiously suggested) pre-recorded and wired to a timing mechanism. Moslems take their religion very seriously, but privately too where infidels are concerned. If I ever wire my favourite muezzin's call to an alarm clock for aesthetic reasons the device will be locked away when there are Moslems in the house.

  Morocco is one of the few Moslem countries where non-Moslems may not enter a mosque under any circumstances. By law, any religion may be practised; all proselytising is forbidden, The first clause is respected to the letter, not least when warring in wisely token capacity against Israel; the second is principally, and frequently, abused by westerners.

  At 9.00 a.m. I opened my door to a preternaturally neat American. He said there were a lot of problems in the world. I said I knew that. He wondered whether he and I shouldn't discuss them. I suggested, as I would to any total stranger, that he come in and have a drink some evening at six o'clock. The ardent young man never came back. I had no intention of insulting him. Jehovah's Witnesses et al are invariably on the level in Tangier, and usually have some tract to sell for a good cause. It may be that my soul has greater need of salvation than most. Over thirteen years I received eleven disconnected Christian assaults, The most intelligent came from two Scots medical students from Edinburgh working selflessly in Tangier. They did accept a cup of tea at six in the evening. I told them what I knew; they told me much which I didn't. The conference on my terrace, when cups with unmatching saucers and a tooth-mug came unself-consciously into service, was a success. Tangier has two principal mosques; the Great Mosque, rebuilt by Moulay Ismael after the departure of the British in 1684, which is whitewashed; and the New Mosque, the slenderer minaret of which is tiled in many colours. There are numerous other mosques. The haoumats of Ain Haiani, Suani, Dradeb, Emsallah, and others have their own. One says 'and others' advisedly. There is no tax upon new mosques; and communities build them in their haoumats in proliferation, and with a pride and self-sacrifice unknown certainly in England since church building in the Middle Ages. I've no doubt that churches currently sprout like mushrooms in, say, Florida. But their denominations will not be the same, never mind identical.

  I was able to glimpse inside one of the new mosques for about thirty seconds. It wasn't clear whether the spontaneous invitation of my guide was a conscious hope I be killed, momentary bloody-mindedness towards his own people, or simple local pride. I saw a fine area of black and white tiles and simple arches patterned with coloured mosaic. A mason was still at work. He shot three vituperative sentences at my guide, who shrugged and spoke six sulky words back to him. The mason nodded some formal acceptance. He went on shaping intricate concrete with a trowel resignedly, uncaring of the infidel audience as a chef icing a cake.

  Because the new mosques are obviously being built in new 'native' haoumats, it is not easy to study their construction, even from the flat roof of a friend's house. Bringing field-glasses to such a vantage would embarrass one's host, less because of the mosque than because one would he overlooking his neighbours' womenfolk as well. There would be little point in the exercise. A mosque's floor is laid, and necessarily the interior, particularly the often elaborate mihrab or niche indicating the direction of Mecca, only decorated after the roof is on. The exterior is like any other domestic structure: breeze-blocks or hollow brick mortared together, skim-plastered with cement, and then white- or colour-washed.

  The Christian, or foreigner, in Morocco is a Nesrani (a Nazarene): more politely he is a Rhomuri (a Roman). Conversion 'of infidels is not a duty of the Moslem, though it happens, more often through persuasion than force, particularly in the wake of jehad, or holy war. Islam is seldom ever mentioned to the Nesrani, who usually has the manners to refrain from mentioning it as well, On the one occasion I was fool enough to leave a translation of the Koran on my bookshelf it was spotted and removed. I didn't remark on its disappearance.

  Among adults in Tangier my experience of uninvited proselytizing has been: a simple man's silence and wry look over several years; and an educated man's 'Islam is one of the great religions of the world. Like your Christianity. I want you to see the motor-bike I bought Aisha. She rides shopping.'

  But Meti commenced holy war when he had been living under my roof only a few months. Sometimes it was violent: a seizure by the ear-lobes; or a savage elbow between fifth and sixth ribs, where the heartbeat is more politely listened to. The exhortation never varied, 'Hangus, say after me. Please. "Achadour an la ilaha illallah wa Mohammadan rasoul Allah" [I bear witness that there is no god but God and Mohammed is his prophet].' This was just softening up or rehearsal because, although the phrase, if uttered, is sufficient to prove conversion, it properly requires great solemnity, two witnesses, and the raising of a hand. My hand was usually twisted behind my back.

  Within three years the technique had become more sophisticated. It was rather as though an Anglo-Saxon schoolboy in Brighton were to pin a black or a yellow man against his, the foreigner's, rented floor and explain: 'Look, there's this God bloke, all right? But He had a son, Jesus Christ, who was a part of Him. Okay? Well, Jesus Christ was part of God because . . .' Meti's similar, though simpler and different rationale, invariably ended the same way: 'Now say after me, "Achadour an la ilaha . . ." '

  The appeal of Islam to a foreigner in Tangier is the colour and music of the feast days of Aid el-Kebir, Aid el-Seghir, Mooloud, and Achoura; and one of the two amaras, or religious fairs, Sidi Ali and Sidi Kacem, held at the shrines of the respective saints, just outside Tangier. (Tangier's Sidi Kacem should not be confused with the festival held at the town of Sidi Kacem.)

  The Aid el-Kebir, or Big Feast, commemorates Abraham's sacrifice of the sheep in lieu of Isaac; and the Aid el- Seghir celebrates the ending of the Ramadan fast. The fast, marking Mohammed's first vision, lasts a month because it is not known on exactly which day during the Arabic month of Ramadan the prophet received this. Mouloud is the prophet's designated birthday: and Achoura is the equivalent of New Year. The dates of the holidays are of course set by the Moslem calendar, not the Gregorian. Aid el-Kebir is most conspicuous for the small children fattening the family sheep upon a string, grazing about grassy slopes and hol
lows for several days before the feast; for the heads, blood and horns to be tripped over on the day itself, and the vast number of sheep fleeces for sale shortly thereafter. The other holidays are more overtly marked by people parading in their best clothes, or the sudden appearance of a fraternity of old men in white djellabas marching, rather loosely, behind a banner and a small orchestra of pipes and drums.

  On any of these holidays a group of Gnawa, Negroes whose music is predominantly Black African. or of Aissawa, a North African sect following the rule of Sidi Aissa, may drum and dance in the streets. Both are religious fraternities. The more esoteric rites of the Aissawa, wounds self-inflicted in trance, or even, as has been alleged, the hurling of a live animal in to the air and consuming it in toto as it descends so that there is nothing left to hit the ground, are reserved for less public places than the streets of Tangier. Stories of the miraculous raw animal consumption refer, I suspect, to a more violent sect, the Hamadchi. The music of these groups is designed for cumulative effect, and is sustained for longer periods of time. It is riveting in small doses; hypnotic in larger, or longer ones.

  The addict of Moroccan music in Tangier is best satisfied at an amara. For one thing he is most likely to find it; both in the form of an Aissawa group inducing trance, and of Toqtoqa, a gentler music to which young boys dance. This is Berber music, though Arab influenced, and the djibli or lowland hills' boy who performs it, is sometimes called a Chleugh dancer. It is an erotic dance and, since the boy plays the part of a woman, could be called effeminate.

  An amara has a fixed location, but no precisely fixed date. This, and the duration of the festival, depends upon the weather and the number and enthusiasm of the pilgrims who turn up at the saint's shrine. Both Sidi Ali and Sidi Kacem last at least two days and nights nonstop. The compelling thing is the way a small, haphazard village — cane-sheltered cafés, bright streets of sweetmeats, alleys devoted to cloth trading or butchery — springs up seemingly in the middle of nowhere; then disappears as spontaneously.