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.
About the Author
TAHAR BEN JELLOUN was born in 1944 in Fez, Morocco, and emigrated to France in 1961. A novelist, essayist, critic, and poet, he is a regular contributor to Le Monde, La Repubblica, El País, and Panorama. His novels include The Sacred Night (winner of the 1987 Prix Goncourt), Corruption, The Last Friend, and Leaving Tangier. Ben Jelloun won the 1994 Prix Maghreb, and in 2004 he won the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award for This Blinding Absence of Light.
LINDA COVERDALE has translated more than sixty books, including Tahar Ben Jelloun’s award-winning novel This Blinding Absence of Light. A Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, she won the 2006 Scott Moncrieff Prize and the 1997 and 2008 French-American Foundation Translation Prize.