A Palace in the Old Village

Notes

1 Islam’s most sacred site is a shrine in Mecca, al-Kaaba; Muslims everywhere face it during prayers. One of the Five Pillars of Islam is the hajj, the largest annual pilgrimage in the world, which all Muslims should perform at least once, after which he or she uses the honorific title Hajji or Hajja. One ritual of both the hajj and the umrah (a lesser pilgrimage) is the circumambulation of the Kaaba, performed by as many as two million pilgrims at a time. The hajj ends with the celebration of Eid al-Kebir, during which animals are slaughtered to commemorate Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice his son at God’s command.

2 The Koran contains 114 suras, traditionally arranged in order of decreasing length. Each sura is named for a word or name mentioned in one of its sections.

3 During the European heat wave of 2003, an estimated 11,435 people died in France in August, when much of the population went on vacation. The authorities had no disaster plans for heat waves, and some officials even denied there was a health crisis until the heat had claimed hundreds of victims, many of them elderly people living alone or left behind at home. Some bodies remained unclaimed for weeks because family members were still on holiday.

4 On October 17, 1961, a year before the end of the Algerian War (1954–62), thirty thousand Algerians demonstrated peacefully in Paris in support of the pro-independence Algerian FLN. Maurice Papon, the Paris police chief (and infamous war criminal), promised his twenty thousand officers protection from prosecution — and demonstrators were shot, clubbed, thrown into the Seine to drown, murdered in the very courtyard of the Préfecture de Police, or simply “disappeared.” Only after thirty-seven years of denial did the French government admit responsibility, in 1998, for this atrocity, which claimed an estimated two hundred victims.

5 Jean-Marie Le Pen, founder of the National Front party, is a reactionary who supports sweeping restrictions on immigration. In the first round of voting in the French presidential election of 2002, he unexpectedly beat Lionel Jospin, the main left candidate, which meant that the deeply unpopular Jacques Chirac then ran against the even more unpopular Le Pen as the lesser of two evils, and won. (Sample election slogan: “Vote for the crook, not the fascist.”)

6 The Makhzen is the governing elite in Morocco, a feudal institution something like the Russian nomenklatúra. This untouchable network of important men in finance, the military, the police, and government, as well as tribal leaders and the royal family, revolves around the king, who is still all-powerful in Morocco. The present king’s father, Hassan II (reigned 1961–99), adopted a market-based economy (with underwhelming success) and allowed the institution of some mechanisms of parliamentary democracy (which the conservative king essentially ignored). Opposition to Hassan’s despotic rule was ruthlessly repressed: many dissidents were exiled, jailed, or killed. In his novel This Blinding Absence of Light, Tahar Ben Jelloun describes the secret underground prison, a series of six-by-three-foot cells, in which men unwittingly involved in an attempted coup spent twenty years in utter darkness; the few survivors were freed when the outside world discovered and voiced outrage at such cruelty. King Mohammed VI presents himself as an enlightened ruler battling poverty and corruption, a (modest) champion of women’s rights and democracy. His economic reforms have seen some progress, and Morocco’s dismal human rights record has improved, but the old problems of repression and abject poverty remain. The king remains a dictator in almost complete command of a country without any real separation of powers or government accountability.

7 “Al-Baqara” (“The Heifer”) is the second sura; it sums up the teaching of the Koran and takes its name from a brief reference to Moses, who tells his reluctant people that God commands them to sacrifice a cow. The parable of the heifer illustrates the inadequacy of blind or reluctant obedience, for when true faith is lost, empty compliance means nothing, and the soul begins to die.

8 “Marriage for pleasure” is a Muslim tradition that permits temporary religiously sanctioned sex: a marriage contract is drawn up for a period ranging from an hour to a year, without any commitments or religious ceremony. When the time limit is up, the “marriage” automatically dissolves.

9 Jamaa al-Fna is the vast square at the heart of the old city in Marrakech, an open-air market and arena for festivals, street performers, storytellers, diviners, dancers, musicians, peddlers, and hustlers of all kinds. After dark, dozens of food stalls spring up and the square becomes even more crowded.

10 A ryad (Arabic for “garden”) is a traditional Moroccan home built around an interior garden and modelled on the Roman villa. Many of these newly fashionable ryads have been renovated or converted into restaurants or hotels.

11 The Berbers are the indigenous peoples of Northwestern Africa. Today the largest number of Berbers is in Morocco; the northeastern highlands of Algeria and Tunisia are home to a Berber people called the Kabyles. Some Berbers speak Arabic as well as French in the post-colonial Maghreb, but many speak only Tamazight and often face discrimination. Berbers tend to live in less-developed rural areas and can be considered “backward” by Arabs.

12 Islamic invaders began settling southern Spain in 711, and travellers in Andalusia still marvel at the surviving wonders of their civilisation, but by 1238 wars of reconquest waged by Christian rulers had reclaimed almost all of Muslim Spain from los moros. In 1492, the Reyes Católicos (Catholic Monarchs) drove the last sultan of Granada into exile, ending Moorish rule in Spain.

13 The shahada is the profession of faith: “Ach hadou anna la ilaha illa Llah, Mohammed rassoulu Llah” (I affirm that there is no God but Allah and that Mohammed is his prophet). A person may become a Muslim simply by reciting the shahada, with sincerity, in front of witnesses.

14 On October 27, 2005, two French boys of North African descent were electrocuted while hiding in an electrical substation from the police. Parisian suburbs heavily populated by Arab and African immigrant families erupted in rioting that spread throughout France, and there were similar incidents in 2006 and 2007. The government initially adopted a law-and-order response to the violence, which it linked to illegal immigration and the separatist practices of Islam, but the rioters were overwhelmingly native-born youths, and their motives were more complex. In the 1950s and ’60s, after France’s African empire collapsed, many guest workers flooded into the country from her former colonies, settling mainly just outside Paris to work at industrial jobs that have now grown scarce. Crowded into ugly housing projects and urban slums, and attending often second-rate schools, the children and grandchildren of these large African and Arab communities must cope with high unemployment and discrimination. Although the original immigrants indeed found a better life in their adopted country (and could usually return home if necessary), their French-born descendants have few ties to the old country, and while many second- and third-generation immigrants have fit successfully into French society, others in this growing minority do not yet feel truly accepted by their own nation.

15 In the West, a jinn is usually thought of as a “genie in a bottle,” but in pre-Islamic Arabian mythology and in Islamic culture the Jinn are a race of supernatural creatures lower than angels, capable of assuming human or animal form and influencing mankind for good or evil. Jinns are invisible to humans unless they choose to be seen by them. Although the Jinn live in their own societies like humans (they eat, marry, and while they may live for hundreds of years, they do die), like angels the Jinn have no substance: whole communities can live comfortably on the head of a pin or cosily in a vast desert waste. They like water and tend to live by creeks and in wells and washrooms, cemeteries and old ruins. They are touchy creatures, however, and it is dangerous to intrude on their territory, even by accident.

16 The popular approach to mental and much physical illness in Morocco derives both from the Berber traditions of animism, which attribute magical powers to nature, and from the tenets of Islam. In Moroccan sorcery, spiritual power both benign and malignant can reside anywhere — a tree, a bird, a glass of tea — as the natural property of the object, or it can be placed there by human agency. It can be unleashed at random (a traveller tripping on a stone) or can target a specific person. It can also attack without physical contact, via jinns or the evil eye, harming a victim through the envy of other people even without their conscious will.

The Sufis brought Islamic mysticism to Morocco in the twelfth century, and their holy men, the marabouts, acted as intercessors between mankind and the spiritual realm. One of them, Bouya (Father) Omar, gained fame in the sixteenth century by interceding with the Jinn for their human victims and arranging compensation for the spirits’ grievances (through animal sacrifices, Koranic readings, prayers, offerings at a marabout’s grave). Today a holy man’s tomb is likewise called a marabout, and there are many of these simple, white-domed structures throughout Morocco. The marabout of Bouya Omar, not far from Marrakech, is particularly popular with people afflicted by mental illness.