Off to one side of the property, through small rooms where lunch is being prepared by smiling relatives, is another spacious courtyard with workshops set around it. Amongst them is Fettah’s studio, where he works on elaborate and complex plaster-work decorations.
I ask him why Islamic art has to be abstract. Is representation of nature and the human body really forbidden?
Fettah thinks there is no express ban in Islam but that creating the likeness of man and nature is, as he puts it, stepping into God’s field.
‘Islamic art,’ he says, ‘is the story of the line … the Muslim artist just exploits it to the maximum.’
His own work is painstakingly and meticulously carved by hand. He starts with a blank space and fills it up as the ideas come to him.
‘I’m interested in the accident,’ he says. ‘I find English people plan too much. The accidental is not there.’
He should know, for he married an English girl, Naomi. Slim, angular and a head taller than her husband, she’s articulate and down-to-earth, as befits a Suffolk farmer’s daughter. Besides Narjiss they have another daughter, called Emily, and a cat called Compost, who lies in the garden bed where he’s not meant to. I ask her why they decided, after seven years together in England, to come and live in Fez.
‘Fettah’s a Moroccan man,’ she says, as if explaining something she’s had to explain to herself often enough. ‘He didn’t take on some of the roles that Englishmen take. When he realised what child-rearing was, he’s going, “Where’s your mum? Where are your sisters? Where are your friends?” I was going, “No, no, you’ve got to do it, you’ve got to do it.”’
Figures flit by in doorways behind her.
‘Life here’s very much a community thing. You’re never on your own, you’re always surrounded by family and friends. And they all help and there’s a real teamwork going on. So, in that respect, life’s easier.’
Fettah is one of seventeen brothers and sisters. His father had three wives, and for a while, siblings were arriving at the rate of two a year.
Naomi smiles and loops a rogue strand of hair back over her ear.
‘The two younger wives are still alive. They live together in one house and they’re both called Fatima and they get on fine.’
This must account for all the smiling ladies in the kitchen, preparing food, playing with the children, helping here and there. It must account for why Fettah can find time for work, teaching, restoring the house and running music festivals, and why sometimes Naomi misses privacy and space of her own.
‘Fez is quite a traditional city and people are fairly conservative. If you go out in the street you have to have a reason for going out, for shopping and visiting … you don’t just sort of amble. Women are at home, cooking, cleaning, looking after children, that’s their role.’
This is said with a touch of regret but no malice. Anyway, Naomi thinks that attitudes have changed in the three years she’s lived in Morocco. People are less frightened of expressing themselves, of talking about politics.
‘Holding hands and kissing in doorways. That’s all changed since I’ve been here.’
This day of peace and quiet, walking around Fettah and Naomi’s garden, eating a vast couscous around the table on the terrace, hearing of their plans for the house and their affection for these unique surroundings, has lulled me into a dangerous sense of contentment. I haven’t thought of the Sahara all day.
It’s all about to change. This time tomorrow, inshallah, we’ll be in the city of Marrakesh, beyond which sand and mountains merge into the edge of the void.
Ring Jonathan Dawson in Tangier to thank him for his hospitality, only to hear that Birdie has broken his beak. Apparently he pecked at some phantom delicacy on the terrace and bit hard on a floor tile. His beak has gone black at one end and may have to be removed.
Day Eight
FEZ TO MARRAKESH
Fez and Marrakesh, the two most important cities of old Morocco, lie in the centre of the country, built to guard ancient trade routes through the Atlas Mountains. Modern Morocco has moved to the coast, around the capital Rabat, and Casablanca, the country’s biggest city, with a population twice that of the old towns - Tangier, Fez and Marrakesh - put together.
This is why we find ourselves accelerating south by heading west, using the fast motorway system around Meknes, Rabat and Casablanca as the quickest way to get to Marrakesh.
South of Casablanca the main road slims down to a poorly surfaced single carriageway, choked with trucks and buses. Quite suddenly, some 80 miles north of Marrakesh, the landscape undergoes a transformation. Maybe I was asleep and just woke up, but as we pull up out of a dip beneath a railway bridge I notice Morocco has changed colour. The greens and golds of the fertile northern plain have been reduced to a line of pale yellow wattle trees running beside the road. Beyond them, the land is brick-red and bare.
The walls of Marrakesh reflect this red land with a beguiling rosy glow which deepens as the afternoon light fades. Running unbroken for over 6 miles, their towers and battlements throw a spectacular cloak around the city. But if Fez was enclosed, almost hidden away behind its walls, Marrakesh is bursting out of them. The new town pushes right up close. It’s colourful and expansive, with broad avenues and a Las Vegas-like dazzle and swagger. Slab-like resort hotels, with names like Sahara Inn, jostle alongside a brand-new opera house. This is an old city desperate to accommodate the modern world.
I’m disappointed. I’d expected something exotic and unpredictable. After all Marrakesh has the most romantic connotations of any city in this romantic country. Perhaps it’s because the snowcapped range of mountains that frames the city in every tourist brochure is virtually invisible in the haze. Perhaps it’s because almost everyone I’ve seen so far is white and European like me, or perhaps it’s because I feel, on these tidy tree-lined streets, that I could be anywhere.
Then someone suggests the Djemaa el-Fna.
To get to it I have to leave the wide streets and bland resort hotels of the New Town and pass inside the peach-red city walls through the twin arched gates of Bab er Rob and Bab Agnaou.
Once inside the gates the atmosphere is transformed. Tourist buses prowl, but they have to move at the pace of a largely African throng. The tallest building is not an international hotel but the elegant and decorative minaret of the Koutoubia mosque, rising to a majestic height of 230 feet, from which it has witnessed goings on in the Djemaa el-Fna for over 800 years. There is an entirely unsubstantiated story that because the minaret directly overlooked a harem only blind muezzins were allowed up it.
The Djemaa el-Fna is not a beautiful space. It’s a distended rectangle, surrounded by an undistinguished clutter of buildings and lines of parked taxis. Its name translates as ‘Assembly of the Dead’, which is believed to refer to the practice of executing criminals here.
It’s bewildering. There’s so much noise that they could still be executing criminals, for all I know. There seems no focal point to the commotion - no psychic centre. At one end, where gates lead into the souk, tourists take tea on cafe balconies and overlook the action from a safe distance. The locals favour the food stalls, which are drawn up in a circle at the centre of the Djemaa, like Western wagons waiting for an Indian attack. They are well lit, and the people serving the food have clean white coats and matching hats. This concession to First-World hygiene is deceptive. The rest of the Djemaa el-Fna is a realm way beyond protective clothing.
A troupe of snake charmers with wild hair and staring eyes tries to provoke old and tired cobras into displays of aggression, playing pipes at them with ferocious intensity. A squad of lethargic transvestites dances lazily, clicking finger cymbals without much conviction. Not that they need to do much more than that. Judging by the size of the crowds around them, the very fact of a man dressed as a woman is deeply fascinating to Moroccans. There are fortune-tellers, fire-eaters and boxers prepared to take on all-comers. Performing monkeys, chained and skinny, will be thrust on you for photographs. Berber acrobats hurl each other around while their colleagues work the crowd with equal agility. There are self-taught dentists, astrologers and men who let scorpions loose across their faces.