page 86
A jabador is an embroidered vest once favoured by the Arab aristocrats of Andalusia; saroual are baggy, calf-length trousers fastened at the knees and worn under the djellaba.
page 96
The khamsa (from the Arabic word for ‘five’) is a symbol or design depicting an inverted hand. Called the Hand of Fatima by Muslims and the Hand of Miriam by Jews, this ancient talisman is often placed at the front door of a dwelling to ward off the evil eye.
page 98
Near the Grand Socco rises the brilliantly colored minaret of the Sidi Bou Abid Mosque, set off by the luxurious Mendoubia gardens with their eight-hundred-year-old trees and the former palace and offices of the Mendoub, the sultan’s representative during the international administration of Tangier, which lasted from the Treaty of Algeciras in 1906 to Moroccan independence in 1956.
page 100
The first sura of the Koran is the Fatiha, ‘the Opening’:
In the Name of God, the Merciful, the Compassionate.
Praise be to God, Lord of the Universe,
The Merciful, the Compassionate,
Sovereign of the Day of Judgement!
You alone we worship, and to You alone we turn for help.
Guide us to the straight path,
The path of those whom You have favoured,
Not of those who have incurred Your wrath,
Nor of those who have gone astray.
page 115
In Tahar Ben Jelloun’s 1978 novel, Moha the Mad, Moha the Wise, Moha is a holy fool, a voice from the crowd who speaks like a traditional North African Arab storyteller: he recounts the country, its mistakes, hopes, and dreams. Moha is the voice of exclusion. Here is a sampling of texts that illuminate Moha’s role in Leaving Tangier.
Moha took the path of the tree. To love the tree. […] It’s a dwelling for silence, a little palace where death bites its own tail. My special place for absence. […] The forest! But the forest is gone. There is neither forest nor desert, only a plain planted with zinc and broken mirrors. Ever since it grew rich, the city has spewed out poor men who wash up on the outskirts of life. They are my children. […] If you meet my children, don’t run away. Let them rob you just a little. It’s in a worthy cause. Then laugh along with them. […] You will thus deserve my blessing and perhaps a piece of the tree, a bit of paradise. […] I bear within me a rage of the utmost purity ever since the French wounded our land almost a century and a half ago. […] Me, I’m a hundred and forty years old. I’ve seen everything, known everything. I’m only passing through. […] Why does death sail away with us to the horizon? […] Even when they lock me up, I press on. […] Anyway, I’m not dead. How can one die when one has never existed? I have no name. I am hypothetical. I’m from nowhere. From a hill. A plain. The vague horizon and the mint of time. That’s what they’ve decided! Moha has never existed! What a lovely mirage for their pale desert. It’s true, I have no identity papers … and how could I have any? No, I’m not talking about corruption, but I don’t intend to fill in any blanks; I cannot write anything on the dotted lines… Neither date nor place of birth. I have three hundred and fifty-two names, one name for each moon. My date is written in the sky. Go read in the labyrinth…
page 124
General Mohammed Oufkir, Morocco’s much-feared chief of police, tried to seize power in 1972 by having King Hassan II’s plane shot down. After the coup failed, Oufkir was liquidated and his wife and six children — one of whom was only three years old — were imprisoned under appalling conditions. In 1987 several of the children escaped and managed to contact French journalists before being rearrested. The family was finally freed in 1991.
page 130
Nâzim Hikmet (1902–1963) remains Turkey’s most famous and revered poet at home and abroad, acclaimed for the modern stylistic innovations he brought to Turkish literature as well as for the lyrical power of the novels, plays, and poetry through which he mounted an impassioned crusade against injustice and oppression in Turkey and throughout the world. Persecuted for decades by the Republic of Turkey for his Marxist-Leninist convictions, he spent nearly two-thirds of his adult life in prison or in exile, finally dying of a heart attack in Moscow after long years of separation from his beloved country and family.
While imprisoned, Hikmet wrote a massive work intended to be his masterpiece: Human Landscapes, an extraordinary depiction of his homeland and the turmoil of the twentieth century, and although the Turkish government cruelly suppressed his poetry for nearly half his career, this collection of poems is today considered to be one of the greatest patriotic literary treasures of the Turkish people.
page 179
A marabout is a Muslim hermit, holy man, or the leader of a sect, especially among the Berbers and Moors in Northern Africa.
page 191
Mohammed ibn Abd al-Wahhab (1703–1792) was the founder of Wahhabism, a branch of Sunni Islam that seeks to restore the supposed theological purity of the Muslim faith during the first three generations of Islam, a purity grounded solely upon the Koran and the Hadith (a kind of appendix to the Koran containing traditions related to Mohammed). Ibn al-Wahhab reintroduced Sharia — Islamic law — to what is now Saudi Arabia, where Wahhabism has become the dominant theology. Heeding their teacher’s call for jihad against ‘polytheistic’ Islam, modern-day Wahhabis violently oppose what they call perversion, superstition, and heresy in the Muslim faith.
page 198
A Turkish singer of Kurdish and Arab descent, Ibrahim Tatlises (1952–) is one of Turkey’s most prolific recording artists. He has his own television show, has appeared in numerous movies, and has recently enjoyed increasing international success.
page 202
Farid al-Atrash (1915–1974) was one of the idols of twentieth-century Arab popular music. A Syrian composer, singer, and musician, he specialized in romantic love songs and composed the songs and instrumental music for more than thirty Egyptian musical films in which he starred.
More than thirty years after the death of Oum Kalsoum (1904–1975), the ‘Star of the East,’ there is still no one to rival the phenomenal impact and artistry of this Egyptian singer. She began singing at an early age, and through her artistic dedication and the canny management of her career, she turned her truly extraordinary voice into one of the wonders of the Arab world. She sang of the joys and sorrows of love and loss in bravura performances that might last for as long as six hours. During these performances two or three songs would become the means through which, improvising in response to her public’s ecstatic energy, she would create an intense bond with her audience, who repaid her tremendous outpouring of emotion with their undying love.
page 206
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. The Koran says that the Jinn were created by Allah, ‘from the fire of a scorching wind,’ from ‘fire free of smoke’; one connotation of the word jinn is invisibility, and jinns are invisible to humans unless they choose to be seen by them. The Jinn live in their own societies like humans (they eat, marry, and while they may live for hundreds of years, they do die), but, like angels, they have no substance: whole communities can live comfortably on the head of a pin or cozily in a vast desert waste. In the sura devoted to them, ‘El-Jinn,’ a company of jinns listens to the Koran and pledges allegiance to Allah, but some dark jinns, called Ifrit, will work black magic upon people when summoned by a magician or human evildoer.