It was a tangerine dream that brought me to Morocco. South of Cordoba, the ornament of the world, home to the Moors, into the Arabian heartland in the blazing heat of Africa.
Ultima Thule, the furthest place. Setting off from the silk roads of the east into the western edge of the Islamic world, this was truly the furthest place towards Fez, the Athens of Africa. Or, depending on which way one looked, like the 14th century Moroccan explorer Ibn Battuta, who travelled the length of the Islamic world from his home in Tangier, it was the beginning of the journey.
No taxi came to greet me, as arranged with the Riyadh where I would stay. By now I was already used to such scummy behaviour, as I made my way to the taxi-rank to haggle with the shouting taxi-drivers for a ride into the city. Arguing over money is impossible here and a coarse, angry man ushered me in to his dilapidated taxi when I agreed to his money-demand, just to be free from the oppressive heat.
He said he knew where my Riyadh was, wagging his finger to emphasise the point, but of course both of us knew that he did not as my best hope was to be dropped off somewhere near the medina, the old town, where I would then get lost and try to make my own way there. So it was, and I jumped out of the taxi and into the blazing heat of Marrakesh.
My first impression of Morocco was one of dilapidation and dirt. I walked through the city walls into the medina, and entered a cluster of winding back alleys and claustrophobic streets, that disappeared immediately into a large and impenetrable maze.
Swarming with a throng of busy momentum, in these cramped back-streets, I immediately got lost. Filthy and faded, dust on the path, looking for adventure. This place was a beehive of activity, and I knew that sooner or later, I would get stung.
Here, I could see life itself, the back-streets teeming with energy, loud with noise and colour, as they wound their way in and around the souk, the market-place selling spices, clothes and anything anyone could get their hands on, freely on display. Live roosters, useless glowing lamps, decorative kaftans, the souk is an Aladdin’s Cave, where if one goes in to haggle, he emerges angrily with a lighter wallet and a false treasure that glitters but is not gold.
I wandered around for hours, and eventually somehow found myself in conversation with a crooked young man, with a dent between his eyebrows, who offered to be my guide. I have always somehow been attracted to these types, hustlers, con-artists, pickpockets, like Augie March in the novel by Saul Bellow, grown street-kids that might pass on some knowledge of the hustle that they have experienced on the hard edge of life.
As Dostoevsky once wrote, “the degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering its prisons. A society should be judged not by how it treats its outstanding citizens but by how it treats its criminals. If he has a conscience he will suffer for his mistake. That will be his punishment, as well as the prison”. Since we are all the same in many ways and each life is important to learn from, I wanted to hear his story.
He led and I followed him, but he taught me nothing but a monotonous anecdote about his cousin’s tannery. Of course he did not know where my Riyadh was either, but he barked some exchanges with another curious loafer in a pathway on our winding walk, and soon I was joined by these two illegal guides, who mercifully found my Riyadh at the very end of the winding medina, near the city walls.
Immediately they began angrily shouting for money, threatening “that I did not want a problem”, for they would wait for me here outside my Riyadh, after I had given them each a fair amount, of around one euro, when they demanded eighty. I should not have laughed, but I stood firm and direct and told them exactly what I thought of their stupidity. Of course no-one would fight me, and the world is not dangerous. It is not a question that I am physically bigger than most, but that even the hardest street-hustler has a moral conscience, exactly as Dostoevsky described, and if you give the appearance of not being weak, they will eventually turn around and walk away, shoulders hunched, having hissed “Fuck you”, with an emphasis on the first word, for maximum insult.
Later in my Riyadh, the friendly and talkative owner of the accommodation told me not to talk to people on the street, for “these are crazy people”, but I was glad that I did. Having experienced so much wonderful hospitality, generosity and human warmth along my journey, I could not however help but feel a little hurt by the insult hurled at me on the streets of Marrakesh.
I stepped out once again into the teeming beehive of claustrophobic back alleys, on my way to the main square, the Jemaa-el-Fna. This is a large square where all of the life of the city is on display, snake charmers, jugglers, story tellers, and numerous stands selling fresh orange juice, the frowning owners looking for an opportunity to short-change the customer, to squeeze their tourist as well as the orange.
I found a cafe, giving off a grand, colonial air of French aristocracy. Having eaten a poor meal of a tagine, with three shrivelled meatballs topped by a dry, overcooked fried egg, I thought about the legacy that French colonial oppression had left behind, here in the emptiness of North Africa. It was written about by the philosopher Albert Camus, who used his novel “The Outsider” to show a dispassionate man with no ethical feeling, who is driven by the blazing heat of the sun to kill an Arab. Curiously, though it purports to be an ironic statement of the dangers of losing the belief and love of other humans in the face of a world free of religion and structure, it was produced as a result of the harshness of the colonial world, in that this empathy for others was sorely missing at the time of colonial empire - and hence was seen as an ideal that ought to be striven for.
In the modern world, of an interconnected and highly social globalised network of people, the scenario of such a central character is an extreme anomaly that bears little utility. It resulted in the principle of existentialism, propagated by philosophers such as Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus. With its insistence on humanism, it is the sanctimony of cheap anthropocentric morality, born of an age before science; and an ignorance of the wider holistic networks of the environment, of which the human being is a small part and whose morality is an evolutionary adaptation and is not some kind of purpose or meaning in itself.
But it seemed to me that in an age of co-operation and scientific advancement, Morocco was truly left behind. I looked at the portraits on the walls of some of Morocco’s famous citizens. Politicians mainly, but none had freed their people from the historical oppression of the French, intellectually, culturally or economically. Everywhere was resentment, and in his public appearance, each man thought mainly of himself.
These were once a proud and prosperous people. In the magnificent “Islamic Empires: Fifteen Cities that Define a Civilisation”, Justin Marozzi writes that “the Marinids’ mid-century rise to power coincided with, and enabled, the return of European gold minting” and that “the Dar al Islam was awash with gold. As early as the eleventh century the territory of today’s Morocco - especially Fez, Marrakesh, Sijilmasa, Nul and Aghmat - was renowned for gold production. Of the two gold routes from sub-Saharan Africa recorded by Ibn Kaldun, one brought 12,000 caravans a year to Egypt, the other headed north from Timbuktu to Fez and the Mediterranean coast. The security of these trade routes, enabled by Marinid military might and the strength of the dynasty’s administrative institutions, lit the touch paper of economic growth as huge shipments of gold bullion and gold dust passed through Fez on its way to Europe. Traders, merchants and commercial agents flocked to the metropolis”.
The power and might of a dynasty built on gold was accompanied by the foundation in 859 of the Khizanat Qarawiyyin, which grew to include a university and library. “Today, almost 1,200 years after is foundation, it is internationally recognised as “the oldest existing and continually operating educational institution in the world””. Yet somewhere along the course of history, these people lost their way. It is not due to the prevalence of Islamic religion, and I write further on this issue in the chapter on Oman. It is more likely that Europeans with bigger guns and more aggressive dispositions came and traded labour and lives for gold and bank digits, ironically based on the same gold trade that the people of Dar al Islam, the Muslim world, helped to establish. “Guns, Germs and Steel”, as Jared Diamond wrote in his influential book, environmental factors having a significant impact on the course of evolutionary adaptation of cultures around the world.
I stepped out once again into the main square, this time to witness a snake charmer pretend to swallow a snake, his assistant shouting at me to pay him an exorbitant amount for the photograph, threatening me to delete the photograph. I did that and walked away. I was tired of this game.
And here in the Jemaa-el-Fna, I sat on the terrace at the top of the Cafe de France, from the top of the world, looking down at the teeming life in the square below. Here, slowly sipping a bitter orange juice, I watched the day turn to night, as the tangerine sunset of the dying day spread into darkness.
The next day, the burning heat was truly oppressive. The African sun in the summer blaze was 43 degrees Celsius. Two litres of water later, I bought a one-piece black-and-gold kaftan in a bazaar in the souk, and I was bothered no more. Surprisingly this magnificent one-piece dress is extremely versatile in the burning heat. It allowed me to walk for around ten hours in my Islamic outfit, exploring every nook and cranny I could of the back-streets of Marrakesh.
The grimy streets wore coarse against the poetic soul, weathered and hard.
But stepping out again among the noise, among the dust, in the burning sun, I had to find shade. I ducked into a back alley behind the swarming packs, into a quiet street. Rose red city, glowing softly in the lull of the afternoon sun. The mud and clay-baked walls of houses in the ancient heart of these back-alleys, found caressed by soft light, into their rose-red glow. No one around for as far as the eye could see, a solitary black cat crossed my path and disappeared behind the end of the alley, through an opening that the eye could not.
I now found my way into the entrance of a mosque. Having explored the area, I was at an impasse, as well as completely lost. And then I saw a street-kid at the edge of the street, leaning against his bicycle. He would be my guide. In many ways, I felt that I was that street-kid, exploring the beauty of the world in all its excitement and adventure, for the very first time.
Like a tale in the Arabian nights, the kid guided ahead at a distance and I followed. He ducked in and out out of the crowds, disappearing into the crowded back-alleys of the teeming souk and emerging out again after I had caught sight of him. I wound in and out, ducking and weaving among the packs of shouting street-vendors, propelled along by the swarming movement of the crowd, wading through slowly, searching for the way out.
Back in the centre, the Jemaa el-Fna, we parted ways. This time I was happy to be able to help a genuine child of these grimy streets, with some much-needed change. I felt for all the poor, lonely street-kids of Morocco and their expectations of the future. There was fear in their hearts, there was doubt in their minds, but there were seeds of hope in their dreams.
They were heirs to forgotten kingdoms of the Islamic world, but here, at its very edge, was a coarseness and squalor that time did not erase. In Marrakesh, no-one could hear you scream.
From the troubled darkness of waking dreams, the words of Anne Bronte rang out:
“But he who does not grasp the thorn
Should never crave the rose”.
I was a richer man for having seen the dirty, empty darkness of the world. I had taken many a wrong turn, but I was not defeated. As night fell upon me once again, I knew that I would always find my way from out of the darkness, into the light.
Read on for the next chapter via the home page, as we are about to enter our journey together to - OMAN......