The road to Sijilmassa

October 12, 2013Geography and environment, History, TourismBetsy

The road south from Ifrane to the Tafilalt oasis is marked by a beautiful stream that always lifts my heart,

more commonly by dry river washes,

(where water remains, somewhat surprisingly, just a foot or so below the surface), and perhaps most consistently by the evidence of remarkable geological forces at work:
.
If you’re six, however, the road is punctuated primarily by sandwiches and animated videos:

Thank heavens for well-equipped friends! It’s a long road.

We’re tagging along on a trip with Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI), the culmination of their 7-week sojourn in Morocco, doing an integrated field study project. John Shoup, anthropologist, and Eric Ross, geographer, both of Al Akhawayn University (AUI) are leading the trip. (Both photos lifted from the internet: apologies.)

We’re headed to the Tafilalt oasis and to the site of a powerful medieval city, Sijilmassa.

Lightfoot and Miller, 2006.

Sijilmassa was once one of the most powerful urban centers of the Maghreb; one medieval chronicler [Mas`udi] claimed it took half a day to walk Sijilmassa’s long main street. The eleventh-century writer Edrissi described it this way:

As for Sijilmassa, it is a big and populated city, visited by travelers, surrounded by beautiful gardens and fields inside and outside [the ramparts]; it does not have a citadel, but it consists of a series of palaces [ksur], houses and fields, cultivated along the banks of a river coming from the Western side of the Sahara; the floods of this river, during summer, resemble those of the Nile, and its waters are used for agriculture in the same manner as those of the Nile are exploited by the Egyptians. [qtd in Iliahane (2004), 40]

I’m a little obsessed with Sijilmassa. It seems to me that the vicissitudes of this vanished city are somehow central to the aspects of Morocco I find most baffling: the nearly miraculous creation of a nation on the edge of a desert; the (disputed) segmentation of Maghrebi society, with Arabs, Berbers, Jews, “blacks” and other foreigners remaining quite distinct despite general insistence on social pluralism; the perhaps-related silence around race; the reverence accorded the king; the role of Islam in public understanding of the nation.

Bear with me, if you will, as I look into the history of the region and the city in a series of related posts, focusing (albeit not in any particular order) on (1) irrigation technologies (for building or maintaining oases in the desert), (2) Sijilmassa’s founding and social history, (3) agriculture or permaculture: the growing patterns of the palmeries, (4) the religious institution of the zawiya, (5) the architecture of a royal qsar in relation to local resistance to French colonialism.

References:
Dale R Lightfoot & James Miller, “Sijilmassa: The Rise and Fall of a Walled Oasis in Medieval Morocco” in Annals of the Association of American Geographers 86:1 (Mar 1996), 78-101.

Hsain Ilahiane, “Ethnicities, Community-making, and Agrarian Change: the Political Ecology of A Moroccan Oasis” (University of America Press, 2004).

Teachers in Telouet

October 10, 2013Education, Geography and environmentBetsy

The day of visiting teachers in Telouet is a study in contrasts: the movie studios we pass on the road out of Ouarzazate both opposing and imitating the villages themselves; the teacher’s thumbdrive serving as an unexpected counterpoint to his improvised, plastic-covered blackboard, and so on.

Here are some highlights of the trip:

School 0: On the road into the first small village, we pass a gaggle of children on the road. The tallest boy in the group runs to shake hands with Hassan out the driver’s side window. “Hassan used to teach in this village,” Ahmed explains. “That boy was one of his students.” Clearly, Hassan was a beloved teacher. Still, I wonder why the children are not in school this morning. At this first stop, we don’t even get out of the car. There’s a small school on the left and a small residence up the hill on the right. Hassan calls to the children in the school, but there doesn’t seem to be a teacher present. One of the children runs up the steps to bang on the door. After five extended poundings, Hassan calls him back, laughing. Enough is enough: either the teacher is not present or he or she is not in a state to meet with us. Hassan restarts the car and we drive on.

School 1: As Ahmed asks the teacher, Lahcen, about the needs he would like to see addressed in the next training session, Hassan talks to some of the children, trying to help the little girl nearest me to see where she went wrong with the math problem in her notebook. What Lahcen most wants is a way to use the materials Hassan and Ahmed are bringing (a set of picture books and children’s magazines) to really develop a love of reading in his students. It’s a central issue: how to make these materials come to life for the children?

School 2: We stop at a preschool where the teacher who’s been participating in training has now moved onto a new placement in Rabat; her replacement asks eagerly whether she could participate in the training instead.

School 3: A husband-and-wife team divide the upper classes: Abdulrachman teaches French, and Hayat teaches Arabic. Only during this visit do I realize that the school day starts around 8:00 and ends at about 12:30, with a break at 10-10:15; after the break, the children who have been studying with Hayat go to work with Abdelrachman and vice versa. In most of the schools in this area, education continues to be split evenly between Arabic and French, with the students speaking Tamazight at home. In this context, my limited Arabic and non-existent Tamazight make me feel like a slouch.

The walls of Hayat’s classroom have posters about H1N1 and others proclaiming Allahu akhbar: God is great. I’m struck by the mix of state religion and hygiene. Hayat is wearing a bathrobe, as are some of her students, for warmth; she’s just had a tooth pulled, and still suffers pain in that jaw. But she’s sharply focused on the books and the discussion of pedagogical needs. She is looking for activities that children can do independently for a sustained period of time, to enable her to intervene more directly and extensively with those children who are struggling.

As we are leaving, Hayat addresses me in a mixture of French and English, and we end up talking about family. It turns out that the teachers have a four-year-old son and eighteen-month-old daughter. The children sleep until 10, when Hayat runs home to make breakfast for them before coming back to teach the second half of the morning. I hope there’s an adult home with the children as well, and I assume there is, but I don’t want to ask. Still, I’m struck by the lack of margin in Hayat’s life, the pressure to be teacher and mother, even though I’m sure she also celebrates the opportunity to fill both roles as fully as she can. I’m missing my children as well, as we climb back in the car for the next extended drive down the rough piste.

School 4: We wait for the teacher to come back from lunch. The director of the school invites us to sit in his office, and eventually tea is produced. Hassan and Ahmed take the opportunity to ask whether the teacher we’re waiting for has been sharing her new resources with other teachers at the school. “Not really,” the director replies; pressed for detail, he specifies: she hasn’t shared software or library books or teaching techniques. Ahmed recaps the conversation for me while the director goes off in response to a different teacher’s request.
“That’s not good,” I respond, somewhat indignantly. “It’s a good thing you found out. People shouldn’t hoard resources.”
“Yes, but perhaps she didn’t understand what we were asking of her,” Ahmed replies gently, and I stand reproved. When will generosity come as my first response to other people’s actions?

When Sukhaina arrives, in fact, she is full of energy and ideas. In the past training, she appreciated Lotto as a way of teaching students categories of French vocabulary. What she most wants from this next training is a demonstration of different learning games: she wants her students to learn by doing. Asked about what she’s done to share what she’s gained from the workshops, Sukhaina is quick to say that her fellow teachers haven’t been interested in learning what she’s been taught, and Ahmed quietly but firmly clarifies: even if the other teachers are not interested, you need to take books to them, you need to demonstrate the software or describe a new teaching strategy in staff meetings. Work with your director: he’s keen to extend the read of the training.

School 5: We spend quite a while at the next school: Ahmed goes off to talk with the director of the school and Hassan and I hang out in the preschool class. Some seventeen 3-4-year-olds sit at two long rows of tables; another 4 children sit on a rug at the side of the room. The teacher is working on Arabic: she’s drawn a stick figure on the board, and the children repeat the fusHa (or modern standard Arabic) after her: femoon, nefoon, eienoon, oudnoon. It’s odd to hear this formal-sounding language coming out of these tiny mouths.

Hassan focuses his attention on Leila, a three-year-old deaf girl. She’s tiny, engaging, just on the almost-manageable side of hyperactive. When it’s Leila’s turn to go to the board, the teacher has her point to the stick figure, then stroke the relevant part of her own body: modified signing. Hassan calls a boarding school for the deaf in Ouarzazate: a school where he used to work. The director there agrees to talk more with Hassan about Leila’s case, and the two try to set up an assessment for Leila. Her best hope, Hassan thinks, is to go to the boarding school, even at age 3. There’s no instruction for her, and almost no potential for communication, in her home village. In the not too distant past, deaf people have been physically abused (Hassan’s word is “tortured”) in Morocco.

School 6: Ahmed tries to call ahead, but when we arrive, the teacher is nowhere to be seen. “Moroccan mobile phones!” Ahmed jokes. “Even when you talk to the person, the phones don’t work.”

We sit in the director’s office and Hanan arrives, along with tea and little tea cookies. I’m particularly impressed with the teaching books and materials Hanan has produced. Talking about digital stories leads into a conversation about how much the children enjoy doing plays with home-made puppets. She also shows us the story books her older children have produced–and the flip books she has made to help her students understand components of French words (syllables, prefixes, suffixes, etc.)

Bonus school: As we near the road back to Ouarzazate, we pass a new “community school” that has only just opened. The idea here is that numerous small villages will send their children to this one larger community school. The school is designed to hold some 80 boarding students and about 200 day students. The whole place is spanking clean and new. The students are practicing for an inaugural ceremony: they are singing the national anthem. Hassan and Ahmed know everyone here, from the gardener to the director. Everyone gives them a hero’s welcome.

I’m struck by the fact that Hassan and Ahmed vanish briefly (sequentially, leaving someone to keep an eye on me) to pray. We started the day at 7:30 in the morning; we were given some bread, butter, olives and honey at about 10 a.m.; it’s now 5 p.m. One of the phrases from the dawn call to prayer (or just before) is this: “It is better to pray than to sleep.” I think of this now: for Ahmed and Hassan, it seems, it is better to pray than to eat. I am terrifically impressed with their dedication, their good humor, their attentiveness, their focus. When I try to tell them this, they laugh. “We work harder than Americans!” they exclaim, wonderingly. It becomes clear that they are trying, quietly, to transform their country, to compensate for their countrymen and women who are not working as hard as they might. Education is the key to the transformation they desire: a world of possibility and hope for all.

Aazerf: the law underneath the law

October 9, 2013HistoryBetsy

At the start of our tour of Telouet schools, we stop for a breakfast break. We three visitors (and later, the teacher Lahcen) traipse across the road to have some tea with a man I take to be the director of the school; Ahmed describes him as the chief of the village.

Tea turns out to be more elaborate than I had anticipated. The house is traditional pisé architecture (“Take a photo of the roof,” Ahmed and Hassan urge me: the traditional beams are palm trunks).

Our host, El Basheer, vanishes briefly; a woman greets us shyly then vanishes as well. When El Basheer returns, he brings with him traditional hand-washing equipment: Ahmed picks up the soap and washes his hands over the basin while El Basheer pours the warm water. We all take turns. Once you’ve washed and dried your hands, you pour for the person next to you in line; soap waits on the edge of the container catching the water.

Then comes the sweet tea, along with four loaves of fresh, hot bread, with honey and butter and olive oil and olives. The bread is particularly good—warm, thick, light, and crusty—but it’s all delicious, and we give it our full attention. I worry briefly that if each school visit is going to include this kind of food, I may not be able to keep up.

The Tamazight-and-Darija conversation washes over me, with periodic breaks for translation into French, mostly by Ahmed. We canvass my appearance as an American, and the three men discuss previous American NGOs active in the area, along with the much greater French activity at present. The obligatory family inquiries turn up an interesting detail: El Basheer’s nephew is going to university for Islamic studies, something of a scandal because El Basheer himself is an old lefty, a member of the Istiqlal (the nationalist party). El Basheer smiles at me: “I just can’t understand it!” That younger generation…” By process of association, conversation shifts to the city of Kelaa-M’Gouna, where Hassan is now inspector of schools. Kelaa-M’Gouna is known for its political polarization: it sends half of its graduates to university in Islamic studies, the other half to university for Amazigh or Berber studies. How do these opposites co-exist in one city?

Then the conversation turns to a recent announcement from the local minister of education: all female teachers will be assigned to schools in Ouarzazate itself; all male teachers will be sent out to the small villages. It’s a potentially gallant gesture, saving young women from harsh living conditions: no electricity or running water in some places. But no one thinks the announcement is a good idea. What happened to equality? “Il est fou!” El Basheer sums up for my benefit. The minister of education is crazy! “It would have been simple to achieve the same effect without making such a stupid announcement. Now he’s got everyone’s back up.”

As we walk back out to the car, I thank El Basheer for his hospitality and mention in passing Ahmed’s remark that El Basheer is the chief of the village. I mean only to extend the compliment. But El Basheer takes issue—serious issue—with this statement: “I am not the chief! I am an elected official—un élué. A chief is something from the past. I am elected, elected! I am no different from any other member of the village.”

OK, I get it: I’ve made a post-colonial blunder. I seem politically naïve. “You want me to know you’re not like the Glaoui.”

“No! I’m an elected official. Elected. A chief is for life.”

I try to shift the focus a little by asking about the size and composition of the village. There are five families in the village—founding families, some of whom live further out now—and each of these five families sends a representative to a kind of village council. Total population: roughly 475 people. (Those are big families, I think to myself: multiple generations.)

There are disputes about land and sometimes about other resources, but most of these are easily resolved. As we drill down into the details, El Basheer tries to clarify for me: this is l’aazerf, the ancient, oral tradition of governance. It underlies the rule of law, and it rests a little uneasily under the government and the structure of modern law. The government accepts it, because it serves the interests of the government in resolving local conflicts and issues, but l’aazerf is neither the modern government nor the law.

Hassan and Ahmed are waiting for me by the car; we all say our goodbyes and then the three of us drive off.

“He didn’t like it when I called him the chief,” I say, partly to explain the length of the conversation I’d been having.

Ahmed smiles. “Nonetheless, El Basheer is the chief.” I look back at him in surprise. “Absolutely. Every person in that village would move the entire village a mile up or downriver at a gesture from his little finger.”

“He wanted me to know he was an elected official, not a chief.”

Ahmed’s smile deepens. “Oh, yes, he’s elected. He didn’t want to run for office, so each of the families in the village sent a representative to ask—or really to insist—that he accept the role. The elected chief.”

We turn a sharp corner to find a large truck barreling at us and conversation halts as Hassan slams on the breaks. The car stalls. We take a communal breath.

“I was protecting the car,” Hassan explains with a grin, starting up again.

“Thank you!”

“He was scared,” teases Ahmed from the backseat.

“I was scared too!”

“But not me,” says Ahmed, “because I’m further back.”

Ouarzazate and first impressions

October 8, 2013Geography and environment, ReadingBetsy

I feel as if I’m on a blind date—I don’t know what or whom I’m looking for. Will Hassan, my contact, be arriving by car, bike, motorcycle, petit taxi? What will he be wearing? How will he recognize me? I am standing at early dusk in the shadow cast by Kasbah Taourirt, the tourist attraction par excellence, waiting to see how and whether I will be seen.

Kasbah_Taourirt_in_Ouarzazate_2011

No joy. In the end, I have to go back to the car to find the phone I’ve left. Hassan has left two messages. Evidently, we are neither of us what the other expected. Even once Hassan has told me that he is standing in front of the Marmara bus, I seem to drift right past him. I’m about to phone again when he calls to me, coming from the direction I’ve just been.

We go to meet Ahmed at the Centre de Documentation Pedagogique (CDP—center for teaching documentation) and there’s another odd echo of a feeling—this time of a bargain waiting to be struck. A weird benevolent-Godfather kind of vibe. Would I work with students as well? at the end of November? “Ah, yes, that is what we wanted to know. Very good. We invited you to work at this time with the French group, but we don’t need to be limited to that time. There is a long history of Moroccan-American collaborations. Very good.”

Ahmed tells me tomorrow we will go to Telouet, an area associated with the de facto ruler of this part of Morocco in the early twentieth century. Glaoui? I venture. “Yes. All this area is known as Glaoua. So you will learn a little history, a little geography.”

Thami_El_Glaoui
Thami el Glaoui: I’ve read a little about his immense power and wealth, and his lack of squeamishness when it came to extending either.

After this short meeting, I follow Hassan’s car over a narrow causeway to the newer section of Ouarzazate, to his family’s home. I will be staying with them both nights I am in Ouarzazate. Bleary from the eight-hour drive, I try to summon the mental energy to recall my small portion of Darija.

Hassan’s family doesn’t seem to eat much meat, and I don’t think that has anything to do with my visit. The first night I stay with them, they eat semolina soup; the second night, rice pilaf. Dinner is late, maybe 8:30, about the time I’m ready to crash; Hassan’s nephew stays up late, and as we drive through Ouarzazate, the streets are full of children out with their families. Don’t they fall asleep in school, I wonder?

Just as my brain feels ready to explode, a friend and neighbor of Hassan’s stops by to meet me. His name is also Hassane, though for reasons unclear to me the spelling conveniently includes a distinguishing E. I revive a little on discovering that Hassane speaks fluent English and is working on a PhD in cultural studies at the university in Fez.

“What did you think of the landscape on your way down?” Hassane asks me.

“Amazing! It was like driving through the Grand Canyon,” I say.

“Yes, this is what everyone says!” Hassane replies, underscoring my own sense of the predictability of my response.

We go on to talk about the books we have both read, enthusing together about the work of Brian Edwards in Morocco Bound: Disorienting America’s Maghrib.

Even on the drive down, I had been thinking about Edwards, and his chapter on how American soldiers in Morocco during the second World War responded to Morocco as a mixture of the Wild West and a kind of Biblical pastiche.

“Here I go,” I thought, looking out the window at that Grand Canyon landscape, “making that same old American translation of the unknown into the known.” But is there really an alternative to this habitual recoding of the unfamiliar in terms of the familiar?

Can we just confront the unknown head on—or will we always duck aside at the last minute, giving up on the cultural game of chicken?

The problem with projection and transposition are the misrecognitions that come with them. So…. focus on geology: seeing the angle of the stone, imagining the the pressures that must have thrust it up out of the ground.

Focus on specifics—the details of this particular teaching task, this context—to help separate reality from imaginary projections.

I have so much to learn.

Women’s weaving collective at Tarmilat

October 4, 2013Arts, Daily life, HistoryBetsy

On the southern back road out of Ifrane, heading toward Azrou, there’s a kind of squatter’s community on the open ground to the right of the road. This town is known as Tarmilat; it’s home to a group of shepherds. The original families came to this area some 50-60 years ago, right around independence. Probably they looked after sheep for the French, or perhaps for wealthy Moroccans collaborating with the French.

Now there are some 50 families living here, in houses built from stone, roofed with large tin cans that have been cut open and flattened.

The contrast with the royal palace, whose entrance is across the road, a little ways back, is striking.

Karen Smith, Christian pastor at Al Akhawayn University (AUI), has brought a group of AUI affiliated folks–mostly students, a few faculty–out to Tarmilat to purchase rugs and bags and share a meal with the women weavers.

Half a dozen years ago, a group of high school students, working with an AUI-affiliated organization called Hand in Hand wanted to raise money to help the people of Tarmilat. Karen, a member of Hand in Hand, insisted that they begin by meeting the women and finding out what the women themselves needed and wanted. What they wanted most was to form themselves into a weaving cooperative, even though only a few had weaving skills.

Karen remembers driving one of the women and her baby up to Tangier to learn from a successful cooperative there about how to form such an organization. Imazighen women don’t diaper their babies–something Karen hadn’t yet learned–so she had no sheets or towels to protect or clean the car or the mother. “It was an experience!”

The Tarmilat weaving cooperative has been very successful, leading to other changes in the community. To begin with, none of the women could read or keep track of numbers, so there was one man serving as treasurer for the collective. “One man and twenty eight women: that was never going to last!” says Karen. (Someone else told me later that the treasurer was accused of stealing the women’s money.) Perhaps as a result of this experience, the women were very concerned that their children go to school. But the nearest school was in Ifrane itself, some five kilometres away down a road not safe for pedestrians.

The community started trying to build more permanent structures, claiming Karen had told them this was necessary for their cooperative (not true). These structures were impermissible and had to be taken down. But when it came to a school, the women pulled every string they had access to: the biggest string was Hand in Hand, with the governor’s wife on board. Wala! (Voilà!) The community now has a cement school and even a mosque–but the homes remain stone-and-recycled-can structures.

Inside most of the buildings, it’s dark and a little smokey–but the home-made bread, butter, and tea is delicious. In the right-hand photo above, the blue-and-white thing in the upper right corner is a “churn” for making butter: it’s a kind of swing in which the cream is pushed back and forth to make it slosh around until it solidifies. This cooking hut is warm with the fire, so many of us crowd in briefly to get out of the chilly wind. To our right is one of the community’s looms, with a rug in process:

Our family buys two “lap rugs” (thick and small) against the coming winter, plus one small rug for the kitchen. Each piece has a tag describing the weaver, in English geared toward the AUI community:
Ito, pictured here, was one of the founders of the cooperative, and a major force in pushing for the school. One day, a Moroccan friend came to tell Karen that Ito had died, since everyone knows that Karen has been closely involved in the Tarmilat community. Karen and Fatima drove out to Tarmilat to attend something like a funeral. They sat around with a group of women mourning Ito and they all told stories about her, describing how they had known her. The next day, someone from Tarmilat came to town to tell Karen that in fact Ito was alive and well–it was a different Ito, from the same family, who had died. Now there are jokes about Karen having attended Ito’s funeral prematurely.

Aisha is one of the wealthier members of the Tarmilat community, as this tag notes: her husband has a hired hand; her grown son works for the city and owns a truck.

Fatima, by contrast, is the second wife of a elderly deaf man whose first wife is disabled. I can’t help but wonder about the internal dynamics of this family structure–or what Fatima’s earlier circumstances were, that made it sufficiently appealing to accept a marriage that seems mostly a formalization of caregiving responsibilities. I love the simplicity of her rug.

As it gets dark, we gather inside Ito’s house, with a dim bulb powered by a solar panel bought with proceeds from the cooperative, and the community serves us a f’tur-style dinner: bread and msemmen and hard-boiled eggs and harira soup. There’s a new baby in the community: a baby born to two 15-year-olds who were married last year. Julie Reimer tells of attending the wedding and becoming the official photographer because she was the only one with a camera. When she came back to the community to share the photographs later, the mother of the bride was (mildly) offended because Julie had not taken any pictures of her. “She was wearing a bathrobe,” Julie explains, “so I thought maybe I shouldn’t take a picture. Turns out, it was her very best bathrobe.”

I asked Karen if we could arrange for Zoe and me to have weaving lessons. “Probably. There was a student from Haverford who came and stayed at Tarmilat for three months a few years back (part of an anthropology thesis) and she learned to weave. The gendarmes were not at all happy about it, though.” Maybe once our Darija improves…

The mothers are not the only entrepreneurs here: the boys of the community build sleds out of old wooden pallets and (sometimes broken) skis. When it snows, the boys stick their sleds in the drifts by the side of the road and hire them out to tourists who have come to see the snow.

James makes friends with some of the boys by video-taping their play and then showing them the results:

These hills are full of small communities like Tarmilat, though Tarmilat with its school and its mosque and its solar panels now ranks among the most prosperous. What would extend the (relative) success of Tarmilat to other communities in the Middle Atlas?
(photo by AUI student)

Zellij

September 26, 2013Arts, HistoryBetsy

It’s a little hard to believe that something like this:
starts out something like this:

Or, to be more accurate, it starts as a bit of mud, which is shaped into a tile and glazed; those glazed tiles then have patterns sketched upon them and a maalem or master craftsman cuts the tiles precisely into tiny khatams, safts, and related shapes.

The last day of the Art of Islamic Pattern study tour, we visit a zellij workshop. The maalem or zellij master sits cross-legged on the floor all day, chipping the tiles into shape.

He set up a chair for us neophytes, though, insisting that it was too difficult for us even to attempt to chip a tile from a cross-legged position.

The chisel is heavier than you might think, and some coaching is in order: SONY DSC

It turns out that the crucial factor is the angle between the chisel, the tile, and the thin metal surface on which the tile rests.

Adam, a sculptor, says that this is a little like splitting stone: get the angle right, and a single blow on a huge block of stone will split it down to the floor.

Pages from a long-ago magazine article are posted on the walls of the workshop, showing various steps of the process:

Once everyone who’s interested has had a chance to try cutting the zellij, we go downstairs to the room where the zellij are actually assembled.

Sometimes, a frame is used…

But clearly, some of the designs are created freehand:

Notice that the patterns are constructed face down, with the colors obscured. Imagine getting a color wrong in a split-second of distraction and discovering the mistake only at a much later moment of truth.

James arrives with Zoe and Jeremy just as we are about to make our own little tiles, so I let the children take over my piece:

Once the pieces are arranged in the appropriate order, a temporary wooden frame is placed around them to hold them close together. Then some grouting powder is sprinkled over them…

and water is flicked onto that grouting powder with a paintbrush. What fun!

Then comes the plaster, rapidly applied by one of the apprentices of the workshop:

While the plaster is drying, Jeremy tries out other patterns as the maalem (master) rapidly creates a few additional shapes for other people’s patterns.
K5F-pqO1z8fiP1UgX3UXWM23BU61r77Dvhs-sKbrS3o,GepcE4rqp82pJzyVgNNZkGhv8wJrkKQWXfWB5h-i5Bs

Finally, voila: the finished tile.

Now we just have to extend that pattern a hundred-fold or so to arrive at a small fountain design…

Replicating and generating patterns of Islamic art…

September 25, 2013Arts, History, ReligionBetsy

is a whole lot harder than you might think–but also kind of obsessively compelling.
Here, Adam is trying to teach me how to see the patterns, the grids, underlying biomorphic designs in the Al-Attarine, but really, it’s a bit of a hopeless task. Take this panel, for instance:

I thought this little creature with eyes should be the repeating motif. So adorable!
SONY DSC
Oops. Probably that’s not meant to be a creature at all. The double loop at the center of the image below (and placed in the four corners of the design as well) is a better unit to focus on for tracking the extension and tessellation of the image. See the grid that comes into focus around that repeated double loop? You’re looking for a rhomb, a dynamic (or diagonal) square shape that repeats both vertically and horizontally.

And now can you see why some of us might find this process challenging?

The plaster carvers would have created a cardboard (in medieval times, stiff paper or vellum) template to draw the design grid on the fresh, damp plaster. Then they would have “pumiced” the shape through the template, leaving black pigment on the plaster–and then they would have used fine, sharp tools to carve out the plaster into these shapes.

Adam has carefully parsed pattern after pattern for us. Here’s just one example: the stunning door and knocker at the Al-Attarine. The knocker itself is a khatam (static square plus diagonal square extended out from it), extended further into an eight-pointed star…
What about the door behind the knocker? It’s almost like a variation on my beloved “breath of the compassionate” pattern: khatams, some surrounded by four dynamic squares, diagonal crosses, plus safts (or petals) to fill out the pattern.

Adam takes the analysis one step further, drawing out the incredibly fine (and faint) biomorphic design traced within each of those large safts:
Isn’t this amazing? First, the painstaking detail of the design–and then the painstaking, even meditative recreation of that design.

Not to mention the painstaking correction of student errors in attempts to further replicate those designs…

Geometry and generation:

On the geometrical side, meanwhile, Richard (having walked us through the many stages of creating a 12-fold rosette among other patterns), asks us to think about the shapes that can be generated from a khatam. Some of us understand the question well enough to sketch some possible shapes. (Tip: think about cutting pieces out of a khatam or possibly extending corners out to make a new shape.)

Richard chooses the most useful propositions and has us cut out templates for creating watercolor zellij–paper versions of the cut tiles used in Maghrebi mosaics.
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We paint and cut out the shapes, and then we play with different arrangements, from small to large:

Some principles for productive play: 1) think about the white space; 2) join shapes point to point, not side to side; 3) follow straight lines to extend patterns; 4) be intentional about color patterns; 5) share your pieces; 6) have fun!

Breath of compassion

September 24, 2013Arts, ReligionBetsy

If you’re like me, all that beauty is still too much. So let’s concentrate on geometry alone for the moment–geometry in the form of zellij:

I’m still overwhelmed. Five-pointed stars, ten-pointed stars, safts (petals) of many different varieties. How do I make sense of unity and variation here?

According to Critchlow,“Islam’s concentration on geometric patterns draws attention away from the representational world to one of pure forms, poised tensions, and dynamic equilibrium, giving structural insight into the workings of the inner self and their reflection in the universe.”

I need a little help translating that structural insight.

Critchlow and his students, including Richard and Adam, work to articulate those structural insights by reconstructing the geometrical forms one step at a time. Implicit in this workshop is the sense of a spiritual discipline in following, re-enacting the construction of a pattern, as if those of us laboriously following the model before us could also abstract ourselves from three dimensions to two or even one, from embodiment to spirit. Certainly the room is full of concentration, and amusement at our struggles.
BbAileQRyw5Cmsh_c0y7NvBparVQvXWVH83ZKr4JR50,yczdbh7v_akZCgyFX1PA5EGU7W8U18QUyvUsL9yNo7M Sama straightening out one of my many confusions…

Geometric patterns in the Maghreb are most consistently based on four-fold symmetry, Richard tells us.

Richard begins with first principles: the point as abstract concept and its material embodiment; the line coming from the point, defining the horizon; the circle, drawn from a point on that horizon, representing unity: the heavenly circle.

He draws two departing circles, with the same radius, centered where the circumference of the original circle meets the horizon:

Centering the compass on the top and then the bottom of each vesica (intersecting shapes–see handwritten note above), we draw intersecting arcs to define a vertical line.

Next, we place the point of the compass at the intersection of the vertical line with the original circle and draw semi-circles touching the line of the horizon: this produces four petals.

If we draw diagonal lines out from the center, passing through the outer intersection point of each petal, we will have marked eight points on the original circle: these eight points define the shape of the khatam or seal of Solomon, a static square with a dynamic or diagonal square intersecting.

Richard speeds through this introduction and goes on to develop the basic relationships sketched here into a pattern with four- and twelve-fold symmetry. But I’m lost, still stuck back on a phrase lightly tossed off: a pattern of khatams touching at the points of the dynamic squares creates a pattern known as the breath of compassion (or breath of the compassionate), after the work of medieval Islamic philosopher Ibn Arabi, who spent time in Fez.

After class, I ask Richard to explain the pattern and the reason for its name more fully, then I go back to my hotel room with its functioning internet and look up Ibn Arabi. Here’s what I find:

“Ibn al-‘Arabî looks at God’s creativity as an analogue of human speech. Just as we create words and sentences in the substratum of breath, so God creates the universe by articulating words in the Breath of the All-Merciful (nafas al-rahmân), which is the deployment of existence (inbisât al-wujûd); indeed, existence itself is synonymous with mercy (rahma).” [“Ibn Arabi,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, online, first published 2008]

I’m reminded of the Tibetan Buddhist practice of tonglen, where one works to breathe in suffering, and breathe out compassion. To think of existence as synonymous with compassion offers a wonderful (if sometimes distant) ideal. This month (September 2013) a Pakistani Christian church will be bombed and a Kenyan mall violently occupied by terrorists. Breathe in suffering, breathe out compassion.

The breath of compassion pattern expands into khatams, then compresses back into a cross or x form as each point of the khatam folds in. This visual, from greatdreams.com, makes it easy to see the relationship between the two forms:

breath

The pattern can be elegantly simple, or marvelously complex:
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images from artofislamicpattern.com and ibnarabi360.wordpress.com

Daud Sutton says that the naming of this pattern after Ibn Arabi is a relatively recent phenomenon, but the pattern itself is clearly of long standing. I like connecting this pattern to a sense of divine creativity, and to the central prayer of Islam: Bismillah ir-rahman ir-rahim. In the name of God, the most compassionate, the most merciful.

Monumental art and contemplation

September 23, 2013Arts, ReligionBetsy

The problem with entering a space like the courtyard of the Bou Inania or Al-Attarine is that the design is overwhelming: it feels impossible to process all the wealth of visual detail and beauty. (Rather than focusing on a single place in this post, I’ll be using images from both medersas [Islamic schools] as I wrestle with the kinds and inter-relationships of Islamic patterns.)

Perhaps if one were a student here, living and studying and praying in this space every day, the pattern would work on you at a subliminal level—or perhaps each day you might pick out a different element, a different image or detail, as a kind of meditative practice, focusing your mind.
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But for those of us merely passing through, how can we receive the gift of this place more deeply than a superficial, dizzying glance?

Does analysis help? Isolating specific elements to try to understand their meaning, before reconsidering them in context?
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Maybe if you’re Adam or Richard, it helps significantly. But even for me, slowing the eye, forcing it to rest and register, is a useful exercise.

How do we learn to look in this kind of a space? Let’s start with the architectural layering:

geometric patterns on the floor

speaking to the zellij on the lowest level of the walls,

with calligraphy at eye level,

then biomorphic plaster carving
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leading up to intricately carved cedar wood,

which leads the eye still higher, to the heavens. The cedar may be the only original component here: the plaster has certainly been renewed, and some of the zellij shows its age.

According to Daud Sutton, “The visual structure of Islamic design has two key aspects: calligraphy using Arabic script—one of the world’s great scribal traditions—and abstract ornamentation using a varied but remarkably integrated visual language.” (Islamic design: a genius for geometry, 2007, 1)

Calligraphy
Calligraphy tends to be placed at eye level or slightly above—never below the head—and it turns the oral tradition of the Qu’ran (which, as you may know, is the recitation of the visions granted to Mohammed, and only belatedly a written text) into luxuriant visual beauty. For anyone struggling to read Arabic script, the beauty quickly overwhelms the meaning, but for students writing and memorizing different verses of the Qu’ran on a daily basis, the beauty presumably extends the meaning of the verse.

Geometry and biomorphic design
The ornamentation surrounding this calligraphy “revolves around two poles: geometric pattern, the harmonic and symmetrical subdivision of the plane giving rise to intricately interwoven designs that speak of infinity and the omnipresent center; and idealized plant form or arabesque, spiraling tendrils, leaves, buds and flowers embodying organic life and rhythm” (Sutton, 1). Infinity and the omnipresent center: Allah is the center of all things, of the infinitely varied development of the universe. For Keith Critchlow, geometry “reflects the facets of a jewel, the purity of the snowflake and the frozen flowers of radial symmetry” while biomorphic design registers “the glistening flank of a perspiring horse, the silent motion of a fish winding its way through the water, the unfolding and unfurling of the leaves of the vine and rose.” (Islamic Patterns: An Analytical and Cosmological Approach, 1976, 8) All three aspects of Islamic pattern inter-relate: biomorphic pattern relies on geometrical relationships for its tessellation and expansion;

and different modes of Islamic calligraphy may lean toward biomorphic flowing lines on the one hand

or more fixed geometric shapes on the other.

Biomorphic design
Adam stresses the logic inherent in the biomorphic elements of Islamic design: spirals are curves that look back to their points of origin. Biomorphic designs flow out, then back, bowing in humility to the creator. Balance is central to biomorphic design: nothing should stand out. All is humility and peace.

And well-nigh impossible beauty:

Fès: domestic architecture and its logic

September 22, 2013Daily life, Geography and environment, History, TourismBetsy

In this post, I’m trying to reconstruct a presentation given by Alla of Dar Seffarine, an architect originally from Iraq, but now a long-time resident of Fès. Alla and his wife Kate own the guesthouse Dar Seffarine; Alla also specializes in reconstructing traditional houses in the Fès medina, so he has thought deeply about the architectural features of the typical Fassi house.

Imagine these words as spoken by Alla, as he gestures towards the features recorded in the photos. (All errors, of course, are mine–and the first photo is actually of David Amster showing our group an entry to a derb, where the door and the guardian would have been located.)

Alla: Every derb, or residential street, should have a door at its beginning, and that door should be watched by a guardian. The guardian will ask of each visitor: where are you going? who are you coming to see? how long will you stay? Only in the past 60-70 years has the tradition of the doors been lost, the doors themselves sold, the guardians unemployed. This entry (to Dar Seffarine) is actually the door to the street. Since there are only two houses on the street, the government lets us maintain the street door between us.

The riad is the garden (visible just through the window above the right-hand door); the house or dar exists just beside the garden. A duera is a small house connected to another house: servants’ quarters, housing the servants and slaves who served the family of the dar.

When you come to the house proper, you will notice that the door that opens for daily use is on the right side. You use your right hand to open the door. All this emphasis on the right hand comes from the Quran, which teaches that the right hand is the good hand.

The door opens to the inside of the house, and you find yourself in the corridor. Every house has a corridor: it is an essential part of the house. Sometimes, the corridor is only a meter long; sometimes it is much longer and has a door at each end; but all traditional Fassi houses have a corridor. To be polite, you stand in the corridor as your host goes into main part of the house and tells the women to leave, that a guest will be entering.

Notice the square holes down at foot level: these are ventilation for the basement. Fassi houses have basements, with columns and arches, where one can escape the heat of the summer. Some houses, you enter, and then go four or five steps down: again, the principle is to use the cooling available below grade.

Also in the corridor, you may see windows to the street: this will help with ventilation.

The street itself may be roofed (as seen in the second photo of this post) to create a tunnel to help move the breeze through the space.

Above your head, you may see a boxed in area. This is a storage space for taxes, or zakat, the charitable giving obligatory in Islam. At the end of Ramadan, each household had to give 1.5 kilos of flour to the poor [multiplied by some factor, it seems to me—bb]. That boxed area made it possible for householders to buy the flour when it was cheap, store it, and then distribute it at the appropriate moment.

Immediately inside the door to the house, you see another door, leading to an internal staircase: this allows the man of the family to visit one of his wives without the others having to know. Separate doors for separate wives: this minimizes conflict within the family.
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On the wall in our corridor, we have hung the contract of sale for our house. As you can see, this is a large document, recording the most recent three sales. The three pages—one for each separate sale—are bound together. Every time the house is sold, the oldest contract is removed, and the newest contract connected to the document.

At the end of the corridor, we have another door—a door within the door. The larger door allows for large items to enter or leave the home; the small door, for everyday use, forces the person entering to duck. You must enter the house with respect. When you have stepped through the doorway and you straighten up, you raise your eyes to the calligraphy opposite, which reads: “All this belongs to God” or “There is no power but God.” This saying counterbalances pride in the owner of the house and envy in the visitor.

Finally, you find the courtyard on your right. You will never enter a traditional house directly: always, you turn to discover the house, the central courtyard.

That courtyard is open to allow for gradual cooling overnight. Houses in Fès were single-storey buildings originally. Seffarine’s small minaret tells the story: the minaret must always rise above surrounding buildings, but today that minaret is dwarfed by the houses and buildings around it. Originally, the houses would have been a single story, but as the city grew and wealth increased, homeowners expanded their houses upwards, building additional living quarters around the existing courtyard.

On either side of the courtyard, two salons face each other: one salon is for family use; one is for entertaining guests. This salon is a man’s space.

Above, there is a mezzanine for the women’s use, where the women could sit and listen to the men’s conversation without being seen.

[BB: From the inside, the mezzanine is fabulously decorated with ornate zouaq–painted wood–but it’s a small space, too low to stand in. Definitely only a space for sitting on the floor and listening.]
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The norm in domestic architecture as in more monumental or sacred spaces, is to decorate the floor and lower areas with zellij, tiles in complex geometric patterns; above the zellij comes plaster (often plain, then carved), calligraphy (in plaster or tile), and then carved or painted wood. Dates in houses are recorded in terms of the Hijra or Islamic calendar–a lunar calendar starting with 622, the year Mohammed moved to Medina–and they normally just register the date the most recent plaster was finished.

To complement Alla’s presentation, here’s a map of a traditional Fassi house before the Protectorate from Roger Le Tourneau’s book:

Here you can see the stairs, the bathroom, the kitchen, and the entryway. But what stays with you after a visit to Dar Seffarine is the glory of that courtyard, lifting the eye to wonders overhead.