Part 6 (1/2)
This odd a.s.sociation of uses recalls the fact that Kairouiyin is not only a church but a library, the University of Fez as well as its cathedral. The beautiful Medersas with which the Merinids adorned the city are simply the lodging-houses of the students; the cla.s.ses are all held in the courts and galleries adjoining the mosque.
El Kairouiyin was originally an oratory built in the ninth century by Fatmah, whose father had migrated from Kairouan to Fez. Later it was enlarged, and its cupola was surmounted by the talismans which protect sacred edifices against rats, scorpions and serpents; but in spite of these precautions all animal life was not successfully exorcised from it. In the twelfth century, when the great gate Ech Chemman was building, a well was discovered under its foundations. The mouth of the well was obstructed by an immense tortoise; but when the workmen attempted to take the tortoise out she said: ”Burn me rather than take me away from here.” They respected her wishes and built her into the foundations; and since then women who suffer from the back-ache have only to come and sit on the bench above the well to be cured.
The actual mosque, or ”praying-hall,” is said to be formed of a rectangle or double cube of 90 metres by 45, and this vast s.p.a.ce is equally divided by rows of horseshoe arches resting on whitewashed piers on which the lower part is swathed in finely patterned matting from Sale. Fifteen monumental doorways lead into the mosque. Their doors are of cedar, heavily barred and ornamented with wrought iron, and one of them bears the name of the artisan, and the date 531 of the Hegira (the first half of the twelfth century). The mosque also contains the two halls of audience of the Cadi, of which one has a graceful exterior facade with coupled lights under horseshoe arches; the library, whose 20,000 volumes are reported to have dwindled to about a thousand; the chapel where the Masters of the Koran recite the sacred text in fulfilment of pious bequests; the ”museum” in the upper part of the minaret, wherein a remarkable collection of ancient astronomical instruments is said to be preserved; and the _mestonda_, or raised hall above the court, where women come to pray.
But the crown of El Kairouiyin is the Merinid court of ablutions. This inaccessible wonder lies close under the Medersa Attarine, one of the oldest and most beautiful collegiate buildings of Fez; and through the kindness of the Director of Fine Arts, who was with us, we were taken up to the roof of the Medersa and allowed to look down into the enclosure.
It is so closely guarded from below that from our secret of vantage we seemed to be looking down into the heart of forbidden things. s.p.a.cious and serene the great tiled cloister lay beneath us, water spilling over from a central basin of marble with a cool sound to which lesser fountains made answer from under the pyramidal green roofs of the twin pavilions. It was near the prayer-hour, and wors.h.i.+ppers were flocking in, laying off their shoes and burnouses, was.h.i.+ng their faces at the fountains and their feet in the central tank, or stretching themselves out in the shadow of the enclosing arcade.
This, then, was the famous court ”so cool in the great heats that seated by thy beautiful jet of water I feel the perfection of bliss”--as the learned doctor Abou Abd Allah el Maghili sang of it; the court in which the students gather from the adjoining halls after having committed to memory the princ.i.p.als of grammar in prose and verse, the ”science of the reading of the Koran,” the invention, exposition and ornaments of style, law, medicine, theology, metaphysics and astronomy, as well as the talismanic numbers, and the art of ascertaining by calculation the influences of the angels, the spirits and the heavenly bodies, ”the names of the victor and the vanquished, and of the desired object and the person who desires it.”
Such is the twentieth-century curriculum of the University of Fez.
Repet.i.tion is the rule of Arab education as it is of Arab ornament. The teaching of the University is based entirely on the mediaeval principle of mnemonics; and as there are no examinations, no degrees, no limits to the duration of any given course, nor is any disgrace attached to slowness in learning, it is not surprising that many students, coming as youths, linger by the fountain of Kairouiyin till their hair is gray.
One well-known _oulama_ has lately finished his studies after twenty-seven years at the University, and is justly proud of the length of his stay. The life of the scholar is easy, the way of knowledge is long, the contrast exquisite between the foul lanes and noisy bazaars outside and this cool heaven of learning. No wonder the students of Kairouiyin say with the tortoise: ”Burn me rather than take me away.”
IV
EL ANDALOUS AND THE POTTERS' FIELD
Outside the sacred precincts of Moulay Idriss and Kairouiyin, on the other side of the Oued Fez, lies El Andalous, the mosque which the Andalusian Moors built when they settled in Fez in the ninth century.
It stands apart from the bazaars, on higher ground, and though it is not _horm_ we found it less easy to see than the more famous mosques, since the Christian loiterer in its doorways is more quickly noticed. The Fazi are not yet used to seeing unbelievers near their sacred places. It is only in the tumult and confusion of the _souks_ that one can linger on the edge of the inner mysteries without becoming aware of attracting sullen looks; and my only impression of El Andalous is of a magnificent Almohad door and the rich blur of an interior in which there was no time to single out the details.
Turning from its forbidden and forbidding threshold we rode on through a poor quarter which leads to the great gate of Bab F'touh. Beyond the gate rises a dusty rocky slope extending to the outer walls--one of those grim intramural deserts that girdle Fez with desolation. This one is strewn with gravestones, not enclosed, but, as in most Moroccan cemeteries, simply cropping up like nettles between the rocks and out of the flaming dust. Here and there among the slabs rises a well-curb or a crumbling _koubba_. A solitary palm shoots up beside one of the shrines.
And between the crowded graves the caravan trail crosses from the outer to the inner gate, and perpetual lines of camels and donkeys trample the dead a little deeper into the dusty earth.
This Bab F'touh cemetery is also a kind of fondak. Poor caravans camp there under the walls in a mire of offal and chicken-feathers and stripped date-branches prowled through by wolfish dogs and buzzed over by fat blue flies. Camel-drivers squat beside iron kettles over heaps of embers, sorcerers from the Sahara offer their amulets to negro women, peddlers with portable wooden booths sell greasy cakes that look as if they had been made out of the garbage of the caravans, and in and out among the unknown dead and sleeping saints circulates the squalid indifferent life of the living poor.
A walled lane leads down from Bab F'touh to a lower slope, where the Fazi potters have their baking-kilns. Under a series of gra.s.sy terraces overgrown with olives we saw the archaic ovens and dripping wheels which produce the earthenware sold in the _souks_. It is a primitive and homely ware, still fine in shape, though dull in color and monotonous in pattern; and stacked on the red earth under the olives, the rows of jars and cups, in their unglazed and unpainted state, showed their cla.s.sical descent more plainly than after they have been decorated.
This green quiet hollow, where turbaned figures were moving attentively among the primitive ovens, so near to the region of flies and offal we had just left, woke an old phrase in our memories, and as our mules stumbled back over the graves of Bab F'touh we understood the grim meaning of the words: ”They carried him out and buried him in the Potters' Field.”
V
MEDERSAS, BAZAARS AND AN OASIS
Fez, for two centuries and more, was in a double sense the capital of Morocco: the centre of its trade as well as of its culture.
Culture, in fact, came to northwest Africa chiefly through the Merinid princes. The Almohads had erected great monuments from Rabat to Marrakech, and had fortified Fez; but their ”mighty wasteful empire”
fell apart like those that had preceded it. Stability had to come from the west; it was not till the Arabs had learned it through the Moors that Morocco produced a dynasty strong and enlightened enough to carry out the dream of its founders.
Whichever way the discussion sways as to the priority of eastern or western influences on Moroccan art--whether it came to her from Syria, and was thence pa.s.sed on to Spain, or was first formed in Spain, and afterward modified by the Moroccan imagination--there can at least be no doubt that Fazi art and culture, in their prime, are partly the reflection of European civilization.
Fugitives from Spain came to the new city when Moulay Idriss founded it. One part of the town was given to them, and the river divided the Elbali of the Almohads into the two quarters of Kairouiyin and Andalous, which still retain their old names. But the full intellectual and artistic flowering of Fez was delayed till the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. It seems as though the seeds of the new springtime of art, blown across the sea from reawakening Europe, had at last given the weltering tribes of the desert the force to create their own type of beauty.
Nine Medersas sprang up in Fez, six of them built by the princes who were also creating the exquisite collegiate buildings of Sale, Rabat and old Meknez, and the enchanting mosque and minaret of Ch.e.l.la. The power of these rulers also was in perpetual flux; they were always at war with the Sultans of Tlemeen, the Christians of Spain, the princes of northern Algeria and Tunis. But during the fourteenth century they established a rule wide and firm enough to permit of the great outburst of art and learning which produced the Medersas of Fez.
Until a year or two ago these collegiate buildings were as inaccessible as the mosques; but now that the French government has undertaken their restoration strangers may visit them under the guidance of the Fine Arts Department.