Until a year or two ago, the precincts around Moulay Idriss and El Kairouiyin were horm, that is, cut off from the unbeliever. Heavy beams of wood barred the end of each souk, shutting off the sanctuaries, and the Christian could only conjecture what lay beyond. Now he knows in part; for, though the beams have not been lowered, all comers may pass under them to the lanes about the mosques, and even pause a moment in their open doorways. Farther one may not go, for the shrines of Morocco are still closed to unbelievers; but whoever knows Cordova, or has stood under the arches of the Great Mosque of Kairouan, can reconstruct something of the hidden beauties of its namesake, the “Mosque Kairouan” of western Africa.
Once under the bars, the richness of the old Moorish Fez presses upon one with unexpected beauty. Here is the graceful tiled fountain of Nedjarine, glittering with the unapproachable blues and greens of ceramic mosaics, near it, the courtyard of the Fondak Nedjarine, oldest and stateliest of Moroccan inns, with triple galleries of sculptured cedar rising above arcades of stone. A little farther on lights and incense draw one to a threshold where it is well not to linger unduly. Under a deep archway, between booths where gay votive candles are sold, the glimmer of hanging lamps falls on patches of gilding and mosaic, and on veiled women prostrating themselves before an invisible shrine—for this is the vestibule of the mosque of Moulay Idriss, where, on certain days of the week, women are admitted to pray.
Moulay Idriss was not built over the grave of the Fatimite prophet, first of the name, whose bones lie in the Zerhoun above his sacred town. The mosque of Fez grew up around the tomb of his posthumous son, Moulay Idriss II, who, descending from the hills, fell upon a camp of Berbers on an affluent of the Sebou, and there laid the foundations of Fez, and of the Moroccan Empire.
[Illustration: From a photograph from the Service des Beaux-Arts au Maroc
Fez—the Nedjarine fountain]
Of the original monument it is said that little remains. The zaouia[A] which encloses it dates from the reign of Moulay-Ismael, the seventeenth-century Sultan of Meknez, and the mosque itself, and the green minaret shooting up from the very centre of old Fez, were not built until 1820. But a rich surface of age has already formed on all these disparate buildings, and the over-gorgeous details of the shrines and fountains set in their outer walls are blended into harmony by a film of incense-smoke, and the grease of countless venerating lips and hands.
[Footnote A: Moslem monastery.]
Featureless walls of mean houses close in again at the next turn; but a few steps farther another archway reveals another secret scene. This time it is a corner of the jealously guarded court of ablutions in the great mosque El Kairouiyin, with the twin green-roofed pavilions that are so like those of the Alhambra.
Those who have walked around the outer walls of the mosque of the other Kairouan, and recall the successive doors opening into the forecourt and into the mosque itself, will be able to guess at the plan of the church of Fez. The great Almohad sanctuary of Tunisia is singularly free from parasitic buildings, and may be approached as easily as that of Cordova, but the approaches of El Kairouiyin are so built up that one never knows at which turn of the labyrinth one may catch sight of its court of fountains, or peep down the endless colonnades of which the Arabs say: “The man who should try to count the columns of Kairouiyin would go mad.”
Marble floors, heavy whitewashed piers, prostrate figures in the penumbra, rows of yellow slippers outside in the sunlight—out of such glimpses one must reconstruct a vision of the long vistas of arches, the blues and golds of the mirhab,[A] the lustre of bronze chandeliers, and the ivory inlaying of the twelfth-century minbar[B] of ebony and sandalwood.
[Footnote A: Niche in the sanctuary of mosques.]
[Footnote B: Movable pulpit.]
No Christian footstep has yet profaned Kairouiyin, but fairly definite information as to its plan has been gleaned by students of Moroccan art. The number of its “countless” columns has been counted, and it is known that, to the right of the mirhab, carved cedar doors open into a mortuary chapel called “the mosque of the dead”—and also that in this chapel, on Fridays, old books and precious manuscripts are sold by auction.
This odd association 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 classes 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 Chemmain 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 space 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 coign of vantage we seemed to be looking down into the heart of forbidden things. Spacious 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 worshippers were flocking in, laying off their shoes and burnouses, washing 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 principles 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.”