Wharton’s Morocco and the Conundrums of Travel

                                        Delacroix The Sultan of Morocco

References are to the Century Publishing/Hippocrene edition of 1984.  Page references are in parentheses; numbers in brackets refer to endnotes.

 

     People are sometimes curiously self-conscious about being tourists.  In the days before cell  phones, I myself never liked to stroll through foreign squares with a camera around my neck.  Even looking around a new city in the United States, the visitor often strives to “fit in” and pass for a local.  The reason for this wish is not immediately obvious.  After all, the locals are merely going about their quotidian routines, while traveler, like an aristocrat, is not working and has expended money and time in pursuit of pleasure alone (and a little new knowledge can be as pleasurable as a new French sauce).  If anything, one might think the outsider could claim superior prestige.  An additional complication has arisen in recent times with those who criticize some aspects of interest in other societies as psychologically colonialist, “cultural appropriation” [1],  or simply serving the interests of the observer more than a true understanding of the other. 

     Yet since Herodotus’ time, it has been recognized that the traveler is likely to experience benefits more substantial than a view of Mont Blanc or the glow of Gothic stained glass.  The cliché declaring travel to be broadening might be rephrased by saying that the sight of foreign lands provides a kind of heightened awareness of alternatives, a sort of inversion of Dubois’ double consciousness in which the observer is privileged rather than oppressed.  Yet this gain is by no means regularly clear and straightforward.  Very often people project onto the “other” their own psychic contents: medieval monks stewing about how lusty women were or American minstrelsy making comic theater of the oppression of slavery.  Very often such judgements are intuitive and mingle justification of the writer’s own practices with genuine new insights adopted from other points of view. 

     A rhetorical vocabulary has developed in travel writing that embodies a view of the exotic scene not as another equally valid way of being human, but as simultaneously real and unreal, familiar and strange, understood and mysterious.  Edith Wharton’s In Morocco is in many ways an excellent book [2].  Wharton had toured the country in 1917 as the particular guest of the country’s Resident-General Hubert Lyautey, allowing her chauffeured rides and introduction to the traditional rulers.  She describes Morocco as having long been self-isolating after the manner of Japan with very few outsiders allowed to enter.  She obtained rare permission to visit harems and antiquities like the Saadian tombs, moving in a milieu that still included numerous absolute rulers surrounded by slaves and courtesans. 

     She provides ample information about the country’s history and circumstances including pages recording Gen. Lyautey’s achievements and an essay on Moroccan architecture [3].  Yet her skill is less in historical or political analysis than in description.  After one such detailed passage noting the sights before her eyes, the donkeys and camels, the mourners at a funeral, and an old “philosopher” smoking kif, she reflects on the character of her own vision.

 

One seems to be not in Africa itself, but in the Africa that northern crusaders may have dreamed of in snow-bound castles by colder shores of the same ocean.  This is what Moghreb must have looked like to the confused imagination of the Middle Ages, to Norman knights burning to ransom the Holy Places, of Hansa merchants devising, in steep-roofed towns, of Barbary, and the long caravans bringing apes and gold-powder from the south.  (32)

 

     Though she is in fact in Africa, she acknowledges that her view is subjective and may owe as much to her imagination as to the local scene.  Not only does she suggest the strangeness of life in Rabat by conceding that her view is that of an outsider, she feels motivated to make it stranger yet by referring it to centuries gone by.  After using the now-romantic term Barbary, she concludes the passage with a lovely evocation of something she has not actually seen at all.  (While she did witness camel transport, she was unlikely to have seen apes or gold in their cargoes.)  Thus her reportage is at once precise and specific and oneiric.

     This sort of conceit is woven throughout Wharton’s account.  What she sees before her eyes she regularly describes as unreal.  Morocco is “fantastic” (the word recurs five times in the course of her account), a “dream” (nine passages), where one may witness “wonders” (ten times).  The visitor feels she is living in a work of fiction, an “Oriental fable” (62).   The whole country for her was wrapped in “a blessed air of unreality” such that  “the scene became merely symbolical” (54).  Everything is visible only as though through a foggy “haze” (30) where the very light “gives a foretaste of mirage,” “magic becomes real,” and “the boundary between fact and dream perpetually fluctuates” (44) [4].  In an oddly tangled figure of speech, she says that “If one lose one’s way in Morocco, civilization vanishes as though it were a magic carpet rolled up by a djinn.” (28)  Here, in a strange reversal, the modernity to which the writer is accustomed becomes the fabulous carpet which, when removed, reveals a timeless land beneath.

     Its timelessness comes, however, at a cost.  Morocco to Wharton is moribund and static.  “The performance, like all things Oriental, like the life, the patterns, the stories, seemed to have no beginning and no end, it just went monotonously and indefatigably on till fate snipped its thread.” (121)  The Moroccans practice “supine indifference” that “lets everything crumble back to clay” (77).  They do nothing to maintain their own antiquities and holy places (33) resulting in  ”catastrophic desolation” (64), but, then, “nothing endures in Islam”  (72).  Thus “long animosity against the intruder has ended up by destroying her own life” (37) and  the palace of Moulay Ismael has devolved into “a carcass for his carcass” (70).  Modern Moroccan architecture is a tasteless imitation of Europe (35).

     Her belief in the timelessness and “stagnant domesticity” (152) of North African culture has political implications.  She admired Resident General Lyautey and described herself as a “rabid imperialist” [4].  To her “General Lyautey has twice saved Morocco from destruction” (161) and the general influence of French colonialism is wholly beneficent. 

    Not all tourists, of course, are conscious imperialists.  Yet today even those who explicitly praise another country’s way of life may be accused of “cultural appropriation,” a sin the boundaries of which are far from clear.  Someone from Omaha who relishes an hour enjoying an espresso and cognac at Café de Flore on the Boulevard Saint-Germain is more likely to be admired for cosmopolitanism than to be criticized for trying to be French.  Ralph T. H. Griffith served in  the British colonial service, yet most would feel that his translation of the Vedas constituted a service to the Indian people and not a theft.       

     Even the most outlandish examples of cultural appropriation seem to be in origin naïve tributes rather than acts of oppression.  Liberals at least can agree that it is unseemly for high school teams to be called Braves, Chiefs, or even Redskins, but what is one to make of the fact that nearly a hundred thousand Germans are members of Indianerclubs?  Members dress as Native Americans and hold pow-wows at which they dance and enact ceremonies, all the while professing great admiration for the people they mimic [5].  While such hobbyists may be accused of racial stereotyping, they are innocent of racist contempt.  In the same way some Americans purchase tattoos of Chinese characters which neither the customer nor the artist can read, sometimes with amusing results.  Yet the reason people wish to have their bodies ornamented with Asian-ness is surely that they associate that part of the world with wisdom and beauty.  Are we to make any distinction between Griffith’s despicable portrayal of Blacks in Birth of a Nation and Al Jolson’s blackface in The Jazz Singer?  The theme, after all, of the first, was the defense of slavery and the Confederacy while the second centered on Jakie Rabinowitz’ love of Black music, a love that estranges him from his own culture and family. 

     Inevitably less aware of the nuances of art and customs than a native, the tourist’s appreciation is always based on only partial knowledge.  An outsider’s enthusiasm (or criticism) may be less a reaction to the other than to the visitor’s own.  The Cubists imitated aspects of African art without any attempt to understand it in context and the Imagist poets wrote lyrics based on Chinese models they were, for the most part, unable to read.  Yet the European art that resulted is accepted as beautiful as well as innovative, even if the artist knew little of genuine Yoruba or Tang conventions.  What applies to the reception of art surely may be said as well of the tourist’s view of another society.

     Wharton seems to have taken great pleasure in her Moroccan tour.  If her rhetoric indicates that she is far from an objective camera simply recording facts, that does no more than concede her inescapable limitation.  The reader may turn to anthropologists and historians for information about the country.  If one reads a novelist’s account, it is surely for a different reason. 

     To the art critic what matters about an attitude is what comes of it.  I recently saw the 1939 film of the D’Oyly Carte Company doing The Mikado.  It was an altogether delightful performance; the wardrobes and makeup usually clever, the singing and dancing all first-rate, though it was assuredly not Japan at all, nor was it in fact pretending to be.  The action takes place in a completely fanciful and rather silly realm the ruler of which has a Japanese title, probably as fanciful to most Victorian Englishmen as names like Pooh-Bah and Yum-Yum.  If the costumer consulted authentic Far Eastern fashions at all, it was merely as a starting point from which his fancy might fly.  In the end we have a fine entertainment.  Likewise, if some Dusseldorfer plumber enjoys daubing his face with war paint on weekends, I would be more likely to envy his ability to have fun than to object.

     I recall when I first set foot on Moroccan soil over fifty years ago and was utterly bedazzled.  That first day I may have had less understanding of Moroccan ways than I had gained after a few months there, but my initial ignorance allowed me a measure of wonder as valuable, I think, as knowledge.  We have a fine book by Edith Wharton.  It is about Morocco, but unashamedly expressing Euro-centric notions.  Nonetheless the book is filled with fascinating descriptions, memorable phrases, and curious anecdotes with which one might while away an afternoon.  What more could one ask? 

  

 

1.  The term’s first use according to the OED was in 1945 in an essay on Orientalism by Arthur E. Christy.  The same phenomenon was discussed as "cultural colonialism" in the ‘sixties and ‘seventies (for instance, by Kenneth Coutts‐Smith).  Both phrases imply criticism, an improper and very likely misunderstood use of another’s culture.

2..  The book was completed in 1919 and published in 1920.  Wharton had been living in France and in 1914 had visited Algeria and Tunisia.

3.  She is said to have written the book under contract while in urgent need of income.  Perhaps some of this information was simply padding to meet a publisher’s desires. 

3.  Letter to Sara Norton, March 12, 1901. 

4.  Similar expressions include “cities of ancient mystery” (23), a “vision” (71) as though preserved by “some powerful enchanter” with “a wave of his wand” (73).  The observer has a  “dream-feeling” (77) as though walking into the Arabian Nights (36).  Morocco is to her “fantastic” (58), a “marvel” (61) full of “wonders” (62).  The entire country is for her a “dream” (127) in which “twilight adds to the mystery” (82-3).x

5.  The expression Indianertümelei has been coined on the model of Deutschtümelei (a chauvinistic exaggerated preference for things German).  Such groups have a considerable history.  The first “cowboy club” (which included “Indian” participants) was founded in Munich in 1913.  This phenomenon is neither confined to those outside America nor to the ignorant.  In his great study of the Iroquois Lewis Henry Morgan mythologizes them by likening them to Homeric Greeks and in recent years sweat lodges and the like have become the vogue among some New Agers.

A Victorian in Arabia Deserta

 

Numbers in brackets refer to endnotes.  Citations refer to the admirable Dover edition of Travels in Arabia Deserta.

 

     I was visiting a friend in the lovely, spacious house on Cape Cod he and his siblings had inherited.  A summer place, it had little changed over the decades.  On its shelves were a number of well-chosen books, many on literature, the arts, and history, reflecting the taste of an educated middle-brow generation before my own.  These included quite a few of the slip-cased Heritage Press editions, more modest versions of the Limited Editions Club volumes, yet aiming to enhance their classic contents with art and design.  I took down an unfamiliar title -- Charles M. Doughty’s 1888 Travels In Arabia Deserta.  Having fancied I had done a bit of wandering in Muslim lands myself, I opened it and saw at a glance that the author used a peculiar archaic English, described in T. E. Lwrence’s introduction as “a style which has apparently neither father nor son.”  His sentences followed patterns that seemed to be at times Elizabethan, and at times simply idiosyncratic.  I began to read and realized at once that I had embarked on something of a journey myself. 

     The book is a monument, amounting to nearly fourteen hundred pages including an excellent index and an essential glossary.   Very much a travel journal, of the heroic Victorian variety, the book meticulously records Doughty’s experiences during two years of trekking in what is today Saudi Arabia.  The illiterate Bedouins think he must be doing magic when he reads or writes, and they must have thought him a dedicated wonder-worker as he set down the occurrences of daily life in the desert, so commonplace to the nomads, so extraordinary to Doughty and his readers.

     He begins as part of a grand haj procession (though as an admitted Christian, he cannot enter Mecca), a vast and highly organized multi-ethnic pilgrimage which makes a dramatic opening to his story.  His second volume ends unceremoniously with his reporting to the British Consulate in Jedda.  Though several times detained in towns, he spends most of the time between simply living in the desert with nomadic people.  He becomes progressively weaker and sicker due to the rigors of his travels.  He makes a show of serving archaeological knowledge by copying old inscriptions in obscure language which he could not himself read such as Nabataean, but this pursuit seems an afterthought.  He brings some medical supplies and gets a reputation as a doctor among the locals, but this activity, too, seems more prudential than benevolent.  What he really wished to do was to experience the life of the “Aarab,” as he calls the wandering desert tribes. 

     These were no caravans carrying merchandise across the sands, but rather subsistence pastoralists who lived primarily on the milk of their camels (some has sheep and goats as well) and on oasis dates.  They had an extremely frugal regime in which Doughty fully participated.  Often neither they nor their beasts could eat through the course of a long day’s march, and sometimes the evening meal was scant when it did arrive. 

    Though the region was still largely unknown, a number of travelers’ accounts preceded Doughty’s [1].  Orientalism had enjoyed a vogue since the eighteenth century and European interest in both real and fictional Arabs was high.  Doughty’s book, with its grittiness and often pedestrian progress, has the highest verisimilitude.  Every reader will feel that he is sketching directly from life. 

     Life in the desert was bare subsistence for even those Doughty calls the “sheykly” class.  They drink sometimes water “thick and ill-smelling in the wet sand, and putrefying with rotten fibres of plants and urea of the nomads’ cattle.” [2] Often  at day’s end the people would say, “’To-day we have not loosed the spittle (their word for breaking the fast).”  [3]  They are in “almost incessant famine” [4].   “Languor of hunger, the desert disease, was in all the tents. ‘Mâana lôn, We have nothing left,’ said the people, one to another.” [5] 

     With scarcely enough to fill their bellies daily, the people upon whom he depends for hospitality never see a physician.  Doughty brought a medical kit and sometimes acts as a hakim, administering drugs and vaccinations, though his patients would sometimes prefer a magic amulet as treatment. [6]  Their scientific naivete is unsurprising, as they have only the foggiest view of the world outside, having no experience of any environment other than their own.  Even Amm Mohammed, a man of some experience with whom Doughty stayed in Kheybar, has the notion that England must be subject to the great Ottoman Sultan.  [7]  Doughty’s mere appearance as an inexplicable white man could excite “a sort of panic terror” among people who take him to be a sáhar or warlock “come to bewitch their village.” [8]

     Often Doughty’s surname seems a sprechende Name as, apart from the constant hazard of armed raids, he is repeatedly threatened with a violent death simply because he, unlike some earlier travelers, readily declares that he is a Christian.  Apart from the specific danger, reiterated often enough to become annoying, but doubtless fresh in its menace with every occurrence for the kafir. 

     Furthermore, outside of towns little law existed apart from tradition and violent robberies as well as organized raids or ghrazzus (of which the Arab nomads seem as fond as the Sioux had been in the American plains).  Such forays were so accepted in their society that Doughty relates one case in which the adjudicating sheiks ruled that the animals must be returned, with the exception of a share which the raiders could retain so that “the turbulent young men” who had stolen them might “be appeased, with somewhat for their pains, and that for an end of strife.” [9]

     The Bedouins are befuddled by Doughty’s presence.  The reader may share some of their wonder at his willful embrace of their arduous life with its hunger, illness, and danger.   His own explanation that his “life might add something of lasting worth to the European geography” [10] is insufficient to support the hardships he endured and afterward the labor of composition.  Though much of what Doughty describes concerns the quotidian details of the peoples’ lives, his prose is never pedestrian, but is rather lit from within by a sense of wonder, a strange beauty.

     His usage was eccentric, but not wholly idiosyncratic.  During his own time and shortly after William Barnes, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Ezra Pound, and Basil Bunting were among campaigners for a “purification” of the language, most importantly by using words with Germanic roots. [11]  His influence is evident in later admirers such as the avant-gardist Laura Riding and the novelist Henry Green for whom he is “a master of the language, the Genius Doughty,” though “he might be writing in Latin.” [12]  Long after he had left Saudi Arabia, Doughty maintained his interest in tinkering with English. 

     His six-volume national epic The Dawn in Britain (1906) strives to use a pre-Shakespearean vocabulary.  His chamber drama The Cliff (1909) which anticipates WWI by imagining a German attack on Britain features among its dramatis personae a “divine shining One from heaven,” a company of “light elves,” “a little deformed maiden,” and the ghosts of napoleon and Joan of Arc.  A sample of his verse might suggest why the play was never performed. 

 

I may not rest, as I wor wont of sleep;

So a wimble bores my brain, of busy thought:

Wherefore, what though ’t be chill for an old wight,

I’ve left them ruckling mother sheep; to pace

Awhile here to and forth, longs the sea-cliff.

 

     Doughty’s own relish for verbal display is evident not only in his own mannered sentences, but also in his appreciation for the artful speeches of his hosts.  He devotes several pages to conveying Abdullah’s loquacious reminiscences during coffee parties.  [13]  a lengthy dynastic history of the dynasty of Ibn Rashid which is surely drawn from oral accounts takes far longer.  [14]  He describes illiterate poets whose poetic rhetoric is nearly unintelligible to him yet who receive the “adulation” of listeners, though to him it is “stern and horrid” and notes that every shepherd boy could sing traditional songs.  [15]   Indeed, he says “the nomads, at leisure and lively minds, have little other than this study to be eloquent.  Their utterance is short and with emphasis.  There is a perspicuous propriety in their speech, with quick significance.”  He catalogues the Arabs’ verbal conventions, noting that “Every tribe has a use, loghra, and neighbors are ever childers of their neighbours’ tongue.”  [16] 

          Reactions to Doughty’s style, assuredly not to everyone’s taste, are likely to be extreme.  To some his language is merely affected, while others are captivated.  A few examples of Doughty’s locutions will suffice – more are available on every page.  The reader is likely to long recall, both for style and content, vignettes such as his description of a few camp hangers-on.  “Forlorn person’s will join themselves to some sheyk’s menzil, and there was with u an aged widow, in wretchedness, who played the mother to her dead daughter’s fatherless children, a son so deformed that like a beast he crept upon the sand [ya Latif, oh happy sight!’ said this most poor and desolate grandam, with religious irony, in her patient sighing] – and an elf-haired girl wonderfully foul-looking.  Boothless, they led their lives under the skies of God, the boy was naked as he came into the desert world.” [17]  A single line may sound proverbial.  “The Arabian sky, seldom clear, weeps as the weeping of hypocrites.”  [18]  At his best, Doughty achieves lyrical sublimity.  “The silent air burning about us, we endure breathless till the assr: lingering day draws down to the sun-setting; the herdsmen, weary of the sun, come again with the cattle, to taste in their menzils the first sweetness of mirth and repose.  – The day is done, and there rises the nightly freshness of this purest mountain air: and then to the cheerful song and the cup of the common fire.  The moon rises ruddy from that solemn obscurity of jebel like a mighty beacon: -- and the morrow will be as this day, days deadly drowned in the sun of the summer wilderness.”  [19]

     If the mighty tones of that rhetoric, so like a church organ, occur only occasionally, it is likely because such moments are likewise rare, and in that a part of their loveliness consists.  Doughty never finds reason to slow his flow of words.  As even the passages quoted above testify, he routinely uses a considerable lexicon of Arabic words, giving the reader an enhanced illusion of participating in the life of the encampments.  (Fortunately, he includes a useful combined glossary and index of over a hundred pages for reference.)  He includes lists of little possible interest: tribes, colloquial expressions [20], horses names [21] or brands [22], the ”thirty fendies [a kindred and natural division in a tribe] of ‘Ateyba” [23], or a collection of inscriptions translated into French [24].

     For me the rewards of trekking through Doughty’s ponderous volumes are of three sorts.  He provides new detail about the Arabian nomads, enlarging the reader’s notion of what it means to be human, and his exposition is all the more dramatic since desert life is always so close to the bone, in this case for the visitor no less than for the natives.  His style, for those receptive to it, is like a strange tide which may ebb and rise but which never loses its mysterious charm.  Surely writing in his journal sustained Doughty through many a difficult day and, for the reader as well, the play of symbols, the turns of syntax, and the author’s unpredictable lexicon prove an unfailing source of entertainment.

     Just as for less eccentric writers, though, the central motive for reading Doughty is to understand his vision.  He is repeatedly asked by his hosts why he is there, in a demanding and dangerous environment, and he has little to say in response.   He has a good many of the prejudices of his day, and he never hesitates to call the Bedouins ignorant and, if they are Wahaby, fanatic.  Indeed, he is willing to refer even to ordinary Muslims as captured  by “the dreadful harpy of their religion [25].  Though he never conceals the fact that he is a Christian, he remains prudent enough to confide only to his notebook that Mohammed is “the barbaric prophet of Mecca” and his religion a “solemn fools’ paradise.” [26]  He casually tosses off remarks  such as “these gracious Orientals are always graceless short-comers at the last” [27]  They have only “a barbarous, fox-like understanding” [28].  Yet he chose to live intimately among them for an extended period of time. 

     Somehow, in spite of his Victorian patriotism, I imagine Doughty would have been very nearly equally acerbic in his observation of his fellow Britons.  The people of the desert had for him one advantage, but that sufficed to motivate him (and his readers to follow).  The Arabs are living in an environment so harsh that they have always their eyes on the essentials.  Undistracted by media, consuming only the commodities they themselves wrest from a stingy land, their life has a purity and grandeur rarely discernable in a modern city. 

     For all the sameness of his days, some moments are epiphanies.  When a sudden storm bursts over the sand, “I said to Thaifullah,’God sends his blessing again upon the earth.’”  “How good! seemed to me, how peaceable!  this little plot of the nomad earth under the dripping curtains of a worsted booth, in comparison of Hâyil town.” [29]  “Bare of all things of which there is no need, they days of our mortality are so easy and become a long quiescence!  Such is the nomad life, a long holiday, wedded to a divine simplicity, but with this often long tolerance of hunger in the khála.” [30]

     Surely, this is why Doughty traveled Arabia and this is why those of us who are less willing to undergo the rigors he apparently embraced can appreciate reading his account of his experiences.  For all his suffering, he seems to have found a sort of Eden, not in a garden, but in the wilderness. 

 

 

1.  Captain George Forster Sadlier traversed the Arabian Peninsula in the early nineteenth century, though his Diary of a Journey Across Arabia from El Khatif in the Persian Gulf to Yanbu in the Red Sea, During the Year 1819 was not published until 1866.  Johann Ludwig Burckhardt’s Travels in Arabia came out in 1829.  Alexander William Kinglake’s Eothen (1844) relates the author’s experiences in Syria, Palestine, and Egypt, and in 1857 Richard Burton published his three-volume Narrative of a Pilgrimage to Al-Madinah & Meccah including his visit to the holy cities while disguised as a Muslim.  (Though his story made him something of a celebrity, Burton was not the first European to enter Mecca, having been preceded by a good many others, including Ludovico di Varthema whose Itinerario de Ludouico de Varthema Bolognese was published in 1510.)  In 1865 William Gifford Palgrave’s Personal Narrative of a Year's Journey through Central and Eastern Arabia (1862-1863) appeared.  Georg August Wallin wrote Notes Taken During a Journey Though Part of Northern Arabia in 1848 (1851) and Narrative of a Journeys From Cairo to Medina and Mecca by Suez, Arabia, Tawila, Al-Jauf, Jubbe, Hail and Nejd, in 1845 (1854). 

2.  I, 284.

3. “’To-day we have not loosed the spittle (their word for breaking the fast).”  (I, 489)  They are in “almost incessant famine”  “Languor of hunger, the desert disease, was in all the tents. ‘Mâana lôn, We have nothing left,’ said the people, one to another.”) 

4.  I, 500.

5.  I, 520.

6.  I, 197.

7.  II, 182.

8.  II,108

9.  I, 396.

10.  I, 469.

11.  In this they resembled the official policies of France, Iceland, and Israel. 

12.  “Apologia” in Surviving: the Uncollected Writings of Henry Green “master of the language, Focus on his style as an expression of personality   “his style is mannered, but he is too great a man to be hidden beneath it.”  In Rational Meaning: a New Foundation for the Definition of Words and Supplementary Essays Riding and Schuyler B. Jackson make much of Doughty’s style for reason, they say, “not literary, but linguistic.”

13.  II, 148.

14.  II, 30ff. 

15.  I, 306.

16.  I, 307.

17.  I,263.

18.  I, 351

19.  I, 368.

20.  I, 307.

21.  II, 253.

22.  I, 166.

23.  II, 456.

24.  I, 224-229.

25.  I, 95.

26.  I, 253.

27.  I,125.

28.  I, 142.

29.  II, 83.

30.  I, 490.

Strong Stuff [Marrakech]

     The sweat trickles down the visitor’s back as the afternoon sun approaches a hundred degrees in Marrakech’s celebrated Djema el Fna, but the unapologetic naked intensity of the heat can seem almost bracing. The elements here may feel extreme, but at least they lack hypocrisy.
     The vicious cruelty of the old rulers matched Caligula’s, and the slave market in the Souk Zrabia flourished until the French occupation in 1912. Today men’s aggression is for the most part displaced into commerce and socio-economic hierarchy. The assault of self-interested hustlers has abated since the government has got after them, but their importunities were little worse than the gauntlet of shopkeepers who will go so far as to seize the arm of a foreign passerby. Business here may seem recreational, but everyone knows it is always a matter of getting one’s hand into another’s pocket. The pitches to the visitor are transparent: “it is bad luck not to make the first sale of the day,” “just for looking, no buying,” and always the earnest “for you, a special price.”
     Though the beggars are also a result of a greed-based economy, and they sometimes distress the tender-hearted visitor and annoy the rest, but they testify also to the vitality of Muslim charity or zakat, one of the five pillars of Islam. The Arabic word means “that which purifies” [the giver] and such donations are enjoined by the Koran; to give what one ought is a prerequisite for one’s prayers to be heard. Almost always aged, crippled, or holding a baby, sometimes in orderly rows chanting outside a mosque, the appeals of beggars are regularly heard by the more affluent. Certain medicants make a regular circuit of souk merchants, receiving a coin from each. Have they somehow a franchise on the route? Compassionate giving may extend even to animals. Outside the modern carrefour where one may purchase forbidden goods such as cured pork from Savoy and wine, the feral cats find plates of milk and scraps of rotisseried chicken, perhaps left by a worker who recalled the story of Mohammed’s cutting off his sleeve to avoid disturbing his cat Muezza who had fallen asleep there.
     Travelers are one of the categories of people to whom zakat should be given, and hospitality to travelers remains strong in spite of the constant procession of foreigners, now decades-old. Though anti-American demonstrations are at this moment turning violent in Egypt, Tunisia, and Pakistan, we are consistently greeted with smiles and waves of the hand even from passing cars. The wanderer lost in the medina’s maze who asks directions will receive warmth as well as aid.
     Pleasure may be mingled with suffering, generosity with selfishness, civility with barbarism, but each element is undiluted and manifests without disguise. The head of household (the king even) slaughters his sheep for the Aid el Kebir. The stench of the tanning vats makes a miasma of a whole neighborhood. The diner knows the source of his meat and the stroller the origin of his shoes’ leather.
     One reads that Thami el Glaoui, Lord of the Atlas and Pasha of Marrakech, entertained not only the French officials with whom he collaborated, but Churchill as well, Colette and Charlie Chaplin, offering his guests hashish and opium as well as girls and boys snatched from the tribes of the Atlas. He was, not surprisingly, hated even before he turned on the king. The indulgences of his palace were beyond the means of most Moroccans, but a pipe of cannabis was not. If kief is no longer consumed openly, this is the result of government fiat under international pressures. Sebsis and shkaufs (pipe-stems and bowls) for its consumption are for sale in the markets yet today, and the use of alcohol, which I would agree with the imams is less desirable, is surely increasing every year.
     Islam itself seems a creed fiercely insistent and singularly simple and direct. When compared to the multifarious maze of Hindu mythology, the subtle metaphysics of Buddhism, the pomp of Roman Catholicism, or the denatured Puritanism with which I was raised, Islam’s requirements are few but absolute. The insurgent dynasties, the Almohads and then the Almoravids were puritan simplifiers out of the desert, and today the Sufis, the marabout cults, and the remnants of Berber animism continue to lose ground to the grand simplicity of orthodoxy. Experiential emotion is replaced by authority and variety by uniformity. The shahada, the basic statement of Islamic belief is a single sentence, stark and simple: “There is no god but God and Mohammed is his prophet.” It must impress even those of us it cannot convince.
     In Paul Bowles’ Moroccan stories one finds the same extreme forms of friendship, sensuality, betrayal, and agony. There is but one sun in the Sheltering Sky, and its heat overwhelms all else. The wanderer in the Djema el Fna can feel in his whole body that animating heat that chastens and mortifies even as it vivifies. Among the multifarious distractions of the square and of the wider world beyond, the joy and the pain of being alive, the love and aggression of the world, are here unmistakable.