Such is the twentieth-century curriculum of the University of Fez. Repetition 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 grassy 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 classical 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 passed 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 Chella. The power of these rulers also was in perpetual flux, they were always at war with the Sultans of Tlemcen, 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.
All are built on the same plan, the plan of Sale and Rabat, which (as M. Tranchant de Lunel[A] has pointed out) became, with slight modifications, that of the rich private houses of Morocco. But interesting as they are in plan and the application of ornament, their main beauty lies in their details, in the union of chiselled plaster with the delicate mosaic work of niches and revetements, the web-like arabesques of the upper walls and the bold, almost Gothic sculpture of the cedar architraves and corbels supporting them. And when all these details are enumerated, and also the fretted panels of cedar, the bronze doors with their great shield-like bosses, and the honeycombings and rufflings of the gilded ceilings, there still remains the general tinge of dry disintegration, as though all were perishing of a desert fever—that, and the final wonder of seeing before one, in such a setting, the continuance of the very life that went on there when the tiles were set and the gold was new on the ceilings.
[Footnote A: In France-Maroc, No. 1.]
For these tottering Medersas, already in the hands of the restorers, are still inhabited. As long as the stairway holds and the balcony has not rotted from its corbels, the students of the University see no reason for abandoning their lodgings above the cool fountain and the house of prayer. The strange men giving incomprehensible orders for unnecessary repairs need not disturb their meditations, and when the hammering grows too loud the oulamas have only to pass through the silk market or the souk of the embroiderers to the mosque of Kairouiyin, and go on weaving the pattern of their dreams by the fountain of perfect bliss.