Almost two years ago, a close friend enthusiastically recommended Paul Bowles’s 1955 novel The Spider’s House — set in Morocco during the struggle for independence from France — as a prescient commentary on Muslim attitudes toward the west (and vice versa), the quagmire in Iraq and so forth. Eager to read it on my recent return from Fes, I was amazed to find that Bowles’s story takes place in that very city, and includes descriptions of places I’d just been.
“[Fes] is no longer the intellectual and cultural center of North Africa; it is merely one more city beset by the insoluble problems of the Third World,” Bowles wrote in a 1981 preface to the book. This accorded well with my first impression of Morocco, although the Festival of World Sacred Music certainly has done something to restore Fes’s historic position.
To reach Fes, I took the train from Casablanca’s Mohammed V Airport, a journey of well over five hours that involved a change of trains early on. Processing my reserved ticket at the airport train depot was a farce I can laugh about only now. Suffice to say it involved my nonexistent foreign language skills, a pink booklet of blank receipts and a crumpled slip of carbon paper, an impatient line of customers forming behind me, and two clerks who acted as though they were being asked to split the atom.
With the tickets finally in hand, I scrambled to the first train, a rusted iron hulk with windows you could barely see through. We began to pass shantytowns on the airport’s periphery, a picture of appalling squalor: temporary cinderblock dwellings with tin roofs covered by tarps, held in place with rocks or tires. Some had no roof at all; forget plumbing and electricity. These depressing, dust-choked settlements popped up in many spots during the trip, often on just the other side of the tracks from relatively developed urban areas. At one point I watched a man graze his herd of goats on an expanse of garbage.
Getting off to change trains at Casa Voyageurs, I began noticing men in business suits and a level of general prosperity. The station was modern, with polished brick flooring and digital signs announcing departures and arrivals — nicer, in fact, than a typical Metro North station in suburban New York. I bought a mango soda and a bag of paprika potato chips and waited for my connecting train, which was in far better shape than the first but had no air-conditioning. Despite the scorching midday sun, people were ordering coffee from the drink carts that occasionally passed through. A teenage girl across from me was wearing jeans, a t-shirt, a collared shirt over that, and finally a v-neck sweater — three layers in the choking, miserable heat.
A man in his mid 40s to early 50s sat near me at one point and said something lighthearted in Arabic. Seeing my confusion, he began to suss out where I was from. We were soon speaking English, and though I was still carefully gauging folks’ feelings toward Americans, this man shook my hand warmly when he heard I was covering the Fes Festival (he was born in Fes). He talked to me about Morocco’s Arab and Berber communities and told me I really must visit the Mellah (he called it “Jewish town”). Without any prompting from me, he seemed to take a certain pride in Morocco’s Jewish heritage, and I realized he reminded me very much of my wife’s Israeli stepfather.
Arriving in Fes at last, I was greeted by a driver and taken to a new black Mercedes with black leather interior — embarrassing luxury in this setting. The parking lot was tiny, sheer chaos, cars backing up and turning around in every possible direction. Somehow the driver extricated us, but then took me to the wrong hotel. We sorted the problem out, and before long I was showered and sitting at the evening concert at Bab El Makina: flamenco music and dancing from the Compagnie Belen Maya of Spain. After 26 hours on the road, there was a real chance of me nodding off and falling from my chair. I had to get up and circulate. But somehow I made it to 11pm to hear the Tijania Sufi Brotherhood, the first of the brotherhoods I’d hear perform at the open-air venue Dar Tazi, tucked away inside the Fes Medina (the medieval walled city).
In The Spider’s House, Paul Bowles portrays a teenage boy named Amar, who clings to a doctrinaire Islam in the midst of the colonialist-nationalist clashes going on around him. Late in the book, Amar finds himself at a Sufi gathering in a place called Sidi Bou Chta. Recalling the experience, he says:
And then we watched the Aïssaoua and the Haddaoua and the Jilala and the Hamacha and the Derqaoua and the Guennaoua and all that filth, because the Nazarene [protagonist John Stenham] liked to see the dancing … It makes you sick to your stomach to look at it, all those people jumping up and down like monkeys.
Thus does Bowles capture fundamentalist loathing of the mystical, ecumenical Sufis, who were a major attraction at the Fes Festival. While there I was able to hear three of the brotherhoods — Aïssawa, Darkaouiya and Hamadcha — specifically condemned by Amar. The fourth, the Tijania, was purely vocal, no drums, no dancing. The following clip is a bit indistinct, but gives you a sense of the hypnotic power of the chanting and the strange, almost random quality of the harmonization:
Days later, on a guided tour of the Medina, I was told that Sidi Ahmed Tijani, the namesake of this brotherhood, was responsible for bringing Islam to Senegal some thousand years ago. As we neared his shrine in the Medina, I began to notice groups of black Africans milling about, talking. These were Senegalese pilgrims who make regular trips to Fes to honor their forebear Tijani.
Senegal is of course another former French colony, one I learned a bit about during my February trip to Dakar, where I and many other colleagues were briefed on Youssou N’Dour’s microfinance project Birima. N’Dour, an extraordinary singer and songwriter, came to the Fes Festival several years ago to premiere his Egypt project, one of the most subtle political salvos of the post-9/11 era, an album that highlighted a tolerant face of Islam, something “that in recent times has come to be both misunderstood and misinterpreted by many commentators and adherents alike.” To recall N’Dour’s work and my Senegal trip, and to be in the midst of these Senegalese as they journeyed to the birthplace of their Sufi heritage in Fes, was something visceral, something I may never be able to describe.
As for the experience of walking through the Medina, I’ll leave that to Paul Bowles:
Eleven hundred years ago the city had been begun at the bottom of a concavity in the hills, a formation which had the contours of a slightly tilted bowl; through the centuries as it grew, a vast, eternally spreading construction of cedar wood, marble, earth and tiles, it had climbed up the sides and over the rim of the bowl. Since the center was also the lowest part, all the passageways led to it; one had to go down first, and then choose the direction in which one wanted to climb. Except the paths which followed the river’s course out into the orchards, all ways led upward from the heart of the city. The long climb through the noonday heat was tiring.
Heck yes. It’s a dizzying place, but just incredible. Mules, not cars, are the mode of transport. I have many pictures up, but here’s a commanding rooftop view (click to enlarge):
My travel companion Derek Beres has pics up as well. I’ve already directed you to my take on the festival itself, as published in the Forward; also see these interesting reports from the BBC and the Guardian.
More than most musical events, the Fes Festival is virtually impossible to separate from politics. By spearheading this call for global and interfaith dialogue through the arts, Morocco positions itself as a progressive force in the Arab and Muslim world. And still it has to contend with the fact that Moroccans are very heavily present in the ranks of jihadist movements, including Algerian-based Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, about which the NY Times has just reported in vivid detail. These tensions were very much in mind as I sat with friends on the top floor of the Kasbah restaurant. Looking over the balcony at a house painter hard at work, I tried to make out the English words on the back of his t-shirt. Away from the sun’s glare, they came into focus:
Things are falling to pieces in Albany, the capital of my home state, as we witness one of the most spectacular political downfalls in recent history. But I’m posting a quick comment on a different scandal — far less important, but worth noting.
I’m speaking of Congressman Steve King’s convoluted remarks on the middle name of Barack Obama. King plays the old “I’m not a racist, but” card, yet his comments are the real unfiltered stuff. And under the gun, he stands by it:
[Obama's] middle name is the name of the grandson of Mohammad. It’s used many, many times throughout the Muslim world and it associates itself with the religion and with the heritage and with the struggle and with some of the violence that’s over there as well.
Leave it to Americans — or should I say Republicans — to conclude that a presidential candidate’s firsthand knowledge of other cultures, including Islamic culture, is a liability, not an asset, at a time when the U.S. is embroiled in conflict in the Muslim world.
But that’s not all. King’s understanding of “the violence that’s over there” appears to be nearly nonexistent. He doesn’t realize that the people he’s alluding to would cut Barack Hussein Obama’s throat just as quickly as they’d cut King’s. They’ve already slaughtered a great many people bearing the name Hussein. The car bombers and assassins of al-Qaeda reserve their most gruesome violence for Muslims, especially Muslims who betray their cause. Obama is an American who has pledged to use force against al-Qaeda. A lot less than that would make him an al-Qaeda target.
But for King, all that matters is Obama’s middle name, his identity. And because King is a racist, he wrongly assumes that Muslims feel the same way.
A piece in the NY Times today concerns the wearing of the niqab, the full face veil, by Muslim women in Britain. The issue has drawn plenty of controversy, in other countries as well. Here in Philadelphia, go run an errand and you’re likely to come across at least one woman covered head to toe in black — very much like the women I saw last year in Cizre, in southeast Turkey. These are not immigrants, they are African-Americans. If there’s any controversy here about their wearing of the veil, I’m not aware of it. Interestingly, in 20 years of living in Manhattan, I do not recall ever seeing a veiled woman.
As a firm proponent of secularism and women’s rights, I cannot fathom the wearing of the veil for reasons of “empowerment” and such. But I have no more problem with the veiled women in my community than I did with the Hasidic Jews in New York. I realize that the social and political dynamics in Europe are different, however.
In his book 100 Myths about the Middle East, Fred Halliday rejects the notion that Islam requires veiling, listing it as Myth No. 90:
…the practice of compulsory covering … has no canonical authority. Veiling of this kind was not associated with the time of the Prophet, but came in the ninth century with the Abbasid Empire, and probably reflects a pre-Islamic Persian influence associated with that dynasty. Of the five major legal schools of Islam, none enjoins compulsory veiling. This is a social custom that has spread with modern fundamentalism and a misconceived and illiberal “identity politics.” Needless to say, the majority of women in the Muslim world across the ages, who worked in the fields, did not cover their faces and do not do so to this day. Full veiling is an urban and largely modern institution.
The NY Times piece points out that “only a tiny percentage of women among Britain’s two million Muslims cover themselves completely.” It’s wrong, therefore, to attribute a uniform stance on veiling to the various Muslim minorities in England or anywhere else — just as it is wrong to subject fully veiled Muslim women to any sort of insults or prejudice.
It is entirely fitting, however, to question the political views of any person, Muslim or not, veiled or not. On that note, I was struck by a comment from one young woman who chooses to wear the veil:
“For me it is not just a piece of clothing, it’s an act of faith, it’s solidarity,” said a 24-year-old program scheduler at a broadcasting company in London, who would allow only her last name, al-Shaikh, to be printed, saying she wanted to protect her privacy. “9/11 was a wake-up call for young Muslims,” she said.
I have no idea what that last sentence means, but I find it deeply suspect. And it certainly shores up Halliday’s point that this is about identity politics, not religiosity.
I’d like to take a moment to applaud the UK for knighting Salman Rushdie, one of the most brilliant artists of our time. I’d also like to denounce the outpouring of hate and igorance from Pakistan and other places. According to Pakistan’s Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Tasnim Aslam, “Salman Rushdie has tried to insult and malign Muslims through his writings….” As I commented here about a year ago, citing Fred Halliday, this is a pernicious falsehood. The satirical portions of The Satanic Verses are not blasphemous — they are are based directly on medieval parables from the Islamic tradition itself. Today’s hardline Islamists have declared war on major portions of their own history — much like hardline Hindus have done with theirs. No one should take their arguments at face value.
[Update: There's a UK-only petition to support Rushdie here. Scrolling through some of the comments, we find naysayers — one of them Tony Francis, who alleges that Rushdie "has stirred up racial hatred in the world," of course citing no evidence because there is absolutely none. About the high officials in Iran and Pakistan who are very definitely stirring up hatred in the world, Francis has nothing to say. It's all the novelist's fault. Let his books burn. This is what passes for multicultural "sensitivity" today.]
I remarked on the pope/Islam controversy when it first erupted in September. At the time, a friend directed me to this commentary by a scholar of Byzantine texts. I’m linking to it now that the pope’s trip to Turkey has rekindled the discussion:
Contrary to many treatises of anti-Muslim polemics, which we find in Western Christendom as well as in the Byzantine Empire, this text [i.e., the one quoted by the pope] is the written record of a discussion that really took place. Manuel [i.e., Emperor Manuel II Paleologus, quoted by the pope] presents his Muslim partner in a positive way, as a host respectful and curious to know the religion of his host. The discussion is as cordial as frank, since neither of the two hesitates to expose what he doesn’t like in the religion of the other. The relations between both men are not altered by it. This text is one of the first interreligious dialogues, where each people displays his own truth and looks for dialogue without disavowing anything of what he believes.
Read the rest — it’s worthwhile and not very long.
Following up my post of Oct. 21, here is an arresting comment about militant Islam and the notion of holy land. Noah Feldman’s NY Times Mag piece on nuclear arms and the Muslim world includes reflections on bin Laden’s mentor Abdullah Azzam — specifically his treatise “Defense of Muslim Lands”:
In it, Azzam argued that not a single hand span of Muslim territory anywhere could ever be ceded to the enemy “because the land belongs to Allah and to Islam.” Though Azzam would never have acknowledged it, his account of the divine ownership of Muslim lands was probably influenced — unconsciously, to be sure — by religious-Zionist claims about the holiness of the Land of Israel.
In this post-9/11 symposium, Robin D. G. Kelley opined that U.S. foreign policy should be based, among other things, on “respecting Islamic concerns regarding Western occupation of sacred land.” But such occupations are right or wrong for political, not religious, reasons. The context here is the U.S. troop presence on Saudi soil. The militants’ objection is political — they are angry at the Saudi regime for colluding with the U.S. military, most notably during the first Gulf War. The religious claim — that the U.S. is profaning Muslim holy sites — is basically demagogic in nature, useful for recruitment purposes. Of course, there is conviction behind it, but it is a profoundly illiberal conviction — indeed, ideologically akin to the claims of the most right-wing Zionists. Moreover, the idea that the entire Arabian peninsula is “holy” is tendentious, and not shared uniformly among Muslims. So when Kelley invokes “Islamic concerns,” he’s being reductive and not very helpful.
It’s not often that I find myself in a Catholic church. But this past weekend I happened to hear a priest deliver a noxious homily, one that sheds light on the current controversy involving the pope’s remarks on Islam.
In this homily, a priest and a Buddhist monk are trekking through the Himalayas in search of a remote monastery. Along the way they come across a stranded traveler with a broken leg, laying helplessly in some ravine and calling out for help. The Buddhist insists that they continue on, that the wounded man “just has to work it out.” (I’m sure Buddhist monks in the Himalayas speak this way.) The priest, inspired by a correct love of Jesus, argues that they must save the injured fellow’s life. At the end of the tale, the Buddhist monk gets his — he freezes to death in the snow, just before reaching his destination.
Having heard this only two days ago, I am all too aware of the tendency of Catholic officials to demean and caricature the religions of others.
The pope caused offense by quoting Byzantine emperor Manuel II Paleologus to the effect that Mohammed gave the world “things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached.” Slate has interesting commentaries this morning from Hitchens, Anne Applebaum and Timothy Noah. The first thing to note is the Catholic church’s historical predilection for the spread of its faith through violence. The next, as Hitchens notes, is the perniciousness of Benedict’s “steady attack on the idea that reason and the individual conscience can be preferred to faith.”
So yes, the pope’s remarks were hypocritical and reactionary. And so are the reactions of those Muslims who long for any exuse at all to take to the streets, set fires and call for censorship or worse. As Applebaum writes, “[N]othing the pope has ever said comes even close to matching the vitriol, extremism, and hatred that pours out of the mouths of radical imams and fanatical clerics every day of the week all across Europe and the Muslim world, almost none of which ever provokes any Western response at all.” Once again, as in the Danish cartoon controversy, we see Muslims objecting to characterizations of Islam as violent by carrying out violence.
It’s worth noting that Al Qaeda in Iraq has registered its disapproval of the pope’s speech. Such sensitive souls! Never do they hesitate to spill the blood and entrails of Muslims all over Mesopotamia, most recently in Kirkuk.
