Abdul-Lateef sits in the shade at the front of his shop, a glint in his eye and a week’s growth of beard on his cheeks. With care, he weighs out half a dozen dried chameleons, wraps them in a twist of newspaper, and passes the packet to a young woman dressed in black.
“She will give birth to a handsome boy child,” says the shopkeeper when the woman has gone.
“Are you sure?”
Abdul-Lateef stashes the money into a pouch under his shirt. He scans the assortment of wares — mysterious pink powders, snake skins, live turtles, bundles of aromatic bark — and he smiles.
“We have been helping women like her for five centuries,” he says slowly, “And never has a customer come to complain. Believe me, I speak the truth.”
Walk through the bustle of Fez’s medina and it’s impossible not to be catapulted back in time. It is as if the old city is on a frequency of its own, set apart from the frenzied world of the Internet and iPods and all the techno clutter that fills our daily lives. Abdul-Lateef and his magic-medicinal stall are a fragment of a healing system that stretches back through centuries, to a time when Fez was itself at the cutting edge of science, linked by the pilgrimage routes to Cairo, Damascus and Samarkand.
These days the low-cost airlines shuttle the curious back and forth to Europe. And everyone they bring is tantalized by what they find. Fez is the only medieval Arab city that’s still absolutely intact. It’s as if a shroud has covered it for centuries, the corner now lifted a little so we can peek in. Once the capital of Morocco, Fez is one of those rare destinations that’s bigger than mass tourism, a city that’s so self-assured, so grounded in its own identity, that it hardly seems to care whether the tourists come or not. Moroccans will tell you that it’s the dark heart of their kingdom, that its medina has a kind of sacred soul.
Wander the labyrinth of narrow streets and you can feel it. It’s all around you — in the meat bazaar, where shanks of mutton nestle on fragrant beds of mint, and it’s down in the most ancient quarter, at er-Rsif, where the seed of Fez fell more than a thousand years ago. But perhaps the spirit is felt strongest of all at the ancient leather tanneries, whose dying pits have endured since the days of Harun al-Rachid.
Visitors to other Moroccan cities like Marrakech, snatch up bargains without realizing that many of the wares on offer are actually created within the old city walls of Fez. Stroll through the medina and you’re never far from the sound of a craftsman beating a pattern into a sheet of burnished brass, or the hum of a homemade loom, or a lathe shaping a piece of scented argan wood. The slender sidestreets are packed with hundreds of one-room workshops where master craftsmen toil from morning to night, as their ancestors have done since antiquity.
Their wares fill the little tourist shops on Talaa Kabira, the medina’s main thoroughfare. Unlike Marrakech, with its sprawling tourist emporia, there’s an innocence about searching for a bargain in Fez. Many of the shops aren’t geared to tourists at all. There are just as many outlets selling bath plugs, bras and sewing thread to the locals as there are those offering embroidered yellow slippers, kaftans and heavy metal castanets to the waves of tourists who flock through.
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