Fez, the heart of Morocco

By Seth Sherwood
NY TIMES NEWS SERVICE
Wednesday, Apr 11, 2007, Page 13

A leather-worker toils at the Chouwara Tanneries, Fez Medina, Morocco. PHOTOS: NY TIMES NEWS SERVICE

A strange device, ornate and arcane, looms over the passing mule carts and djellaba-robed masses that daily throng Talaa Kebira, the Broadway of Fez, the 1,200-year-old Moroccan city. Built into the high wall of the 14th-century Bou Inania mosque, just across from a halal butcher and his hanging rows of skinned lambs, 12 finely sculptured windows hover over 13 carved wooden blocks, on which long ago rested 13 brass bowls.

At first glance, the ensemble might be another of the architectural flourishes that adorn Fez's many stunningly decorated medieval religious institutions. But things in Fez are rarely as simple as they seem. The windows, blocks and bowls are thought to have formed an elaborate clock, powered by running water, that sounded the hours of prayer — though no one knows this for certain.

The mechanism, if there was one, has been lost to time. Its operating principle cannot be fathomed. According to local legend, the enigmatic machine was designed by a magician.

The device is an apt symbol for Fez, a city whose cracked and dusty streets hide all manner of beautiful and forlorn relics. Like the water clock, Fez seems to have stopped marking time several centuries ago. And like the water clock, this maze-like city of minarets, shrouded figures and forgotten passages can seem impossible to decipher — yet tinged with a deep enchantment.

A craftsman adding a decorative wire mesh to a ceramic pot in a workshop in the Fez Medina, Morocco.

"It's a mysterious place," said Abdelfettah Seffar, a craftsman and cultural entrepreneur, as he stood on the roof of a beautiful but dilapidated 18th-century Moorish estate that he is restoring into a vast guesthouse and arts center. "It's even a mystical place."

An iron worker toils in a tiny shop along Talaa Kbira, in the Fez Medina, Morocco.

Around crowing roosters and shouts in Arabic and French reverberated through the tangled streets — wholly bereft of automobiles and all but the simplest machines — as black smoke billowed in the distance from the city's old ceramic workshops. Farther off, beyond the ramparts, a late-afternoon glow illuminated the hillside tombs of the Merenid sultans, who presided over Fez's Golden Age in the 14th century.

The courtyard of the Riad Fez Baraka, renovated into a guesthouse, in the center of the old town of Fez, Morocco.

"Fez is really just the medieval city that it was," Seffar went on, contrasting his hometown with its fast-developing jet-set sister and rival, Marrakesh. "We are a little scared of what Marrakesh has become. Fez is the soul of Morocco. It's the last bastion of what Morocco really is."

Faded stately, crumbling but proud, the walled city of Fez might well be the largest and most enduring medieval Islamic settlement in the world. It is indisputably Morocco's spiritual and cultural heart.

You need only watch the daily procession of candle-toting mourners entering the tomb of the city's founder, Moulay Idriss II — believed to be a great-great grandson of the prophet Mohammed — to feel the city's connection to its past. A glance at the ninth-century Karaouine University, widely considered the world's oldest operating institution of higher learning, reaffirms the impression.

As Marrakesh has opened to Tropezian swimming-pool clubs and branches of Ibiza night spots, Fez has turned ever deeper to its history, renovating architectural masterpieces and creating new festivals.

Yet even as it opens, Fez remains a hidden city. High windowless walls hem narrow passageways adorned with flowing Arabic scripts, impenetrable to the outsider. Many men are hooded, many women veiled. In its hundreds of mosques, barred to non-Muslims, worship proceeds beyond public view.

Fez in symbols. Few places on Earth seem so imbued with buried meanings: in the patterns of hand-knotted carpets; in the tattooed faces of Berber peasant women; in the cosmic swirls of carved plaster in its architecture; in the voices of traditional Sufi and Gnawa singers; in the techniques of expert craftsmen; in the ingredients of its cuisine.

Like giant ancient text, Fez requires exegesis. To the casual observer, it might appear a frustrating jumble of bodies, animals, indecipherable voices, strange designs.

To the person who has learned its codes and its lore, the crowded confusion begins to make sense. Patterns form. Colors radiate with significance. Geometric shapes convey ideas. Every number contains a charm. Every flavor enfolds a bit of history.

"People find Fez very confusing," said Ali Alami, a curly-haired, black-robed guide, as he shepherded me through the ever-forking paths of the medina. (Fez also has a modern city, built by French colonials in the early 20th century, though it barely warrants a glance.)

Enfolding than 9,000 streets and a million residents within its timeworn ramparts, the labyrinthine medina would inspire even a minotaur to contemplate a career change. A guide, both to its streets and its hidden layers, is de rigueur.

The first secret to figuring out Fez, Alami said, was what might be called the rule of five.

Geographically, "there are actually five concentric rings," he said. "At the center are the religious places. After those are the working places, like the souks. Then come the residential areas. Then come the walls of the city. Beyond those are the gardens and the cemeteries."

Alami that this sacred number threads through much of daily life. Five calls to prayer structure each day. There are five pillars of Islam to observe. Each neighborhood has five obligatory institutions — a mosque, a school, a shared fountain, a communal bread oven and a hammam. Five types of design — marble, mosaics, carved cedar wood, chiseled plaster and calligraphic inscriptions — typically adorn religious buildings.

For my indoctrination into Fez cuisine, I turned to Lahcen Beqqi. Barely 30 years old, this diminutive, ever-smiling chef has been at the helm of the kitchens of some of the top restaurants in Fez's expanding dining scene and now fills a niche as a culinary guide and guru to outsiders. He teaches them how to buy produce in the souks, explains the interplay of Moroccan ingredients and helps them puzzle together a bona fide Fassi feast.

"First of all, there's a Berber influence," he said, referring to the indigenous people of North Africa — of which he is one — who predated the Arab arrival in the seventh century. "Tagine and couscous are both originally Berber dishes. There's also a Roman influence, notably in the use of ceramic for cooking."

The Arabs, he said, brought many of the spices from the East — ginger, turmeric, cinnamon, nutmeg. Morocco's very good red wine, he said, is produced mostly in nearby Meknes and owes its existence largely to the French.

For the Sufis, Islam's most mystical followers, Fez has long been a hallowed land. The nooks of the medina are filled with Sufi sanctuaries known as zaouias, where brotherhoods meet, worship and sing. Their musical chants are the soundtracks of Fez, the sonic analog of the city's deep spirituality.

During such gatherings, "People suddenly get up and dance as if on a wind or in a kind of spiritual intoxication," Faouzi Skali, a world-renowned Sufi scholar, told me over mint tea in the lobby of the neo-sultanic Jnane Palace hotel. "It feels like you're in a great expansion of consciousness, in a clear and intense light, and in a proximity to God."

In the early 1990s, in response to the Gulf War, Skali founded the city's Festival of World Sacred Music as a means of celebrating the world's diverse cultures and restoring some global harmony. Held every June, the event has mushroomed into a sort of sacro-palooza, drawing the likes of Turkish dervishes, Japanese drummers, the Indian sitar master Ravi Shankar and the Senegalese pop star Youssou N'Dour (a member of the Tidjani Sufi order). This year, it will celebrate the 800th birthday of the Persian mystic poet Rumi.

This month will also see the launch of another ambitious festival devised by Skali. The new event is even closer to his own heart, and that of his beloved city: The first annual Festival of Sufi Culture, from April 27 to May 2.