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<\/a><\/p>\nA long, thin city, bordered by a canal on one side, surrounded by a walled oasis.<\/p>\n
Medieval historian Al-Bakri, drawing on the chronicles of Ibn Hawqal, records that in 814-5, an early ruler of Sijilmassa, Al-Yasa\u2019, built a wall surrounding the town: the wall had twelve gates, eight built out of iron.\u00a0 Under Al-Yasa\u2019, Sijilmassa also acquired a royal palace, an \u201cexcellent\u201d mosque, \u201clofty\u201d mansions, \u201csplendid\u201d buildings, and many gardens. \u00a0Field and photo reconnaissance confirms that both the city and the oasis were once walled. [Lightfoot and Miller]<\/p>\n
The famous traveller Ibn Battuta came to Sijilmassa in 1352-3 on his way to the Mali empire. Comparing Sijilmassa to cities in China, Ibn Battuta described Sijilmassa as including \u201corchards and fields and their houses in the middle,\u201d making the city as a whole very large.\u00a0 These houses were undoubtedly different from the fortress-villages of the qsour, but this description shows an established pattern that the later qsur may have built on. Ibn Battuta spent four months in Sijilmassa, preparing for a two-month Saharan caravan crossing.\u00a0 Camels were traditionally fattened for several months in the area around Sijilmassa to prepare them for the arduous journey. According to medieval geographer Leo L’Africain, the city fell in 1393, when the inhabitants rebelled against the Marinid governor (renowned in oral tradition as the \u201cBlack Sultan,\u201d as recorded by Lightfoot and Miller), broke down the walls of the city, quarreled among themselves, and distributed themselves amid the qsur (fortified villages) of the oasis.\u00a0 Writing of his two visits between 1510 and 1515, L’Africain praised the ruins of the city:<\/p>\n The city was built in a plain, on the Ziz, and was encircled by a high wall of which one can still see some parts\u2026. Sijilmassa had fine temples and colleges supplied with numerous fountains whose water came from the river.\u00a0 Great wheels took this water from the Ziz and projected it into conduits bringing it into the city.<\/p>\n Mostly, though, L\u2019Africain saw the fate of Sijilmassa as something like an object lesson in the importance of cooperation:<\/p>\n Back when the people were all agreed, they built\u2026walls to stop the incursion of Arab horsemen.\u00a0 While the people were united, with a common will, they remained free.\u00a0 But factions arose, and they demolished these walls and each [group] called upon the Arabs to protect them.\u00a0 So it is that these people have become the subjects and almost the slaves of the Arabs… always fighting each other, doing as much harm as they can, which is to say damaging the irrigation canals which come from the river, [or even cutting]\u00a0off palm trees at their trunk and steal[ing] from each other, which the Arabs abet.<\/p>\n You could almost say that when, in the early twentieth century, the French and their Moroccan collaborators destroyed irrigation canals and sabotaged water resources, “manufacturing a fifteen-year-long drought, followed by the 1944-5 famine” (Ilahiane), they were following something of a time-honored tradition.<\/p>\n Now, the al-bayud fungus is one of the greatest threats to the palmerie. \u00a0Kind of a relief–or maybe not, depending on how seriously your palm tree is infected.<\/p>\n For a Romanticist, of course, it’s also easy to think of Shelley’s “Ozymandias:”<\/p>\n “Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!”<\/p>\n *****Quotes drawn from from Dale Lightfoot and James Miller, “Sijilmassa: The Rise and Fall of a Walled Oasis in Southern Morocco.” \u00a0Photos from Tafilalt visit with John Shoup and Eric Ross.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Sijilmassa might have been founded by Kharijites and their supporters, but the rich city, repeatedly conquered by reforming dynasties such as the Almoravids (1055-1146 in Sijilmassa) and the Almohads (1146-1269), soon had the heterodoxy beaten out of it. \u00a0The Almoravids smashed musical instruments and closed down wine shops throughout the city; Almohads massacred many of … Continue reading Sijilmassa’s rise and fall<\/span>
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\nIbn Battuta also noted that the average trans-Saharan caravan included 1000 camels; large caravans might include as many as 12,000 camels.\u00a0 Miles and miles of camels.
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\n<\/a>Mindboggling. \u00a0You wouldn’t want to be at the back of the queue.<\/p>\nWhat remains of Sijilmassa today are actually the ruins of a mosque built in the 1600s and 1700s by the Alawite dynasty. \u00a0These are atmospheric if somewhat misleading: I spent ages imagining (incorrectly) thousands of camels parading through these walls.<\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n