If as lovers of Allah you wish to rise
turn to Layla with sincerity in your eyes.

From all who scorn your love turn away
and travel to Allah’s lovers wherever you may.

But if your love is totally sincere
you’ll see Allah’s lovers by staying here.

And if your heart’s vision is pure and fair
You’ll see Her lights shining everywhere

So begins a qasida from the Diwan of Sheikh Muhammad ibn al-Habib of Fez, may God be pleased with him, in a verse version I made from an existing translation as the basis for a puppet play to take to Morocco. Hearing within it the echo of the Qur’anic ayats from God Most High enjoining us to travel the world and see what Allah has done with dif-ferent peoples, joined with the ayats reminding us that wherever we turn, there is the Face of Allah, it makes for a curiously circular adventure as travelers. We end where we begin, in our originally illumined state, if we are open to the heart’s purity of sight.

I was invited with my wife Malika to visit Morocco’s American Language Center in Marrakesh, to begin a tour of its centers beginning there and then north to Meknes, Tetouan, Tangier, and back again to Marrakesh in a three week junket. Initially invited to read my poetry to the students at these centers, the charismatic and imaginative director, Abdurrahman Fitzgerald, got wind of my work with puppets on my website, and wondered if I could also present a puppet play to their younger students of English, some not much more than 10 years old.

I acquiesced, and wrote a play, Ameen’s Journey to Qalbiyya, using puppets I made for a production a few years earlier of The Mystical Love Story of Layla and Majnun. I gave the famous couple cameo appearances in the new play as well, which is essentially the mini-saga of a young hero, Ameen, taking to the Path of Allah, intending to meet people of wisdom on the way to teach him to see Layla’s “lights shining everywhere.” The name Qalbiyya in the title is a made-up place, loosely translated as The Heartland, with the joke in it that if the difficult qaf is mispronounced it becomes Kalbiyya (Dog Town), though I wasn’t sure anyone but me would get the joke, and ultimately few did. I had trouble at first coming up with a story, and emailed the center in Marrakesh asking the students themselves to suggest a story, or at least some characters they would like to see in a play.

The only suggestion was to include the character of Aisha Kandisha, a seductive djinn who apparently is famous for beguiling unsuspecting travelers into falling madly in love with her. Many Moroccan men under her spell even today think of her as their wife, to their ultimate ruin. That was it. One character, no story. But the worldwide web is a true Ali Baba’s treasure cave, and from it I gleaned a Sufi folk tale actually from Marrakesh in which a sultan tricks a wali but the wali overcomes the deception due to his deeper wisdom, and the sultan becomes his disciple. A perfect ending to my puppet play showing Ameen’s successful illumination, and within a few weeks the story was complete. I sent specifications to the carpenter at the center in Marrakesh, and he constructed a stage in three hinged parts, so it could stand on its own, with an opening for the puppets to play in, identical in size to the one of strong cardboard I use from time to time at home.

With sheaves of poems and a large suitcase full of papier-mâché hand-puppets, masks and various props (and worried a bit that immi-gration might think we were smuggling something inside the puppets’ heads), my wife Malika and I took the plane for Marrakesh, a grueling fifteen-or-so hour journey via Heathrow in London, and landed at dusk at the small, quiet, balmy Marrakesh airport, greeted by our hosts, one already known to us, the others new to us but somehow familiar in that uncanny way that often happens, especially with people of dhikr.

The play was entitled Ameen’s Journey to Qalbiyya for a definite reason, as I had been given the name Ameen by a blind wali from Laghouat, Algeria, named Hajj ‘Issa, in the late 70s when I traveled there in the company of five other disciples of our sheikh in Meknes, who died in 1972. And for me this return visit to Morocco after thirty years was a real return to my “heart-land,” to reignite a connection to the tariqa tradition there in Meknes, a tradition that is still vibrant in Morocco in spite of recent fundamentalist encroachments. For Morocco was the first place in which the heart of my Islam was nourished, back in 1970, when I first became Muslim, when we traveled from Berkeley to London and from there to Meknes to attend a giant Mawlid for the Prophet (peace and blessings of Allah be upon him), and the Moussem for our sheikh a few days later, sheikh Muhammad ibn al-Habib, then over a hundred years old. And it was in Morocco that I tasted the elegance and refinement of the courtesies (adaab) of Islam, even among rougher Berbers and mountainmen from the high Atlas, the freshly minted behaviors in imitation of the Prophet Muhammad, peace and blessings of Allah be upon him, which were so sincerely and enthusiastically expressed that it seemed as if the Prophet was perhaps just down the street and that the love these people had for him was fresh from his living presence.

So it was with this high expectation that we traveled at the end of April of 2004, the time also coinciding with the annual Moussem in Meknes; a chance to meet the lovers of Allah and His Prophet in a country whose eagerness for courtesy and welcome has not diminished in the transpiring years away. As God Most High says on the tongue of His Prophet, peace be upon him: “I am as My servant thinks of Me …”

From all who scorn your love turn away
and travel to Allah’s lovers wherever you may.

MARRAKESH
Marrakesh is an almost mythic city to my post-Beat poet’s soul. So many of the 60s writers and cultural icons spent time on its rooftops and winding streets, and at the famous Djemma el-Fna, entranced by the smoky decadence of it all, absorbing its exotic delights. This many years later, though, and as a Muslim, I had come not for “beat” pleasures, but to visit students and awliyya, alive or in eternity, and hearken to their songs.

My wife and I moved into an apartment in the annex building of the American Language Center, in a suburb filled with newly constructed and underconstruction villas, three-or-more story buildings, imagined, it seems, as a kind of Moroccan Art Deco. All the buildings, old or new, are of the same pinkish terra cotta color of every building in Marrakesh, thusly hued by law for whatever reason: simple tradition, to blend in, or perhaps to maintain the native adobe desert look, which is actually quite attractive. Each house had a small daring detail of color, cobalt tiles above the main entrance for example, or a bit of tiled frou-frou somewhere on the facade. Looking over the city from our balcony, there is a lovely uniformity and Arab-town honeycombedness, so typical of Muslim cities, though on the street the bedraggled, rundown look is, up close, more acute. Here and there, dusty palm trees prong up into the sky, roadways often running around them, out of deference to the trees’ ancient role as mothers and living beings. Occasional ones spotted lying on their sides look truly forlorn, like dead animals, their lifetime of service having come to an end.

We slept after our journey, visited the country house of our host, being refurbished under the expert gaze of the director’s artist wife, Jamila, with great snowcapped mountains of the High Atlas in the distance, and generally sank into and acclimatized ourselves to the rhythms of Marrakesh. There’s always something amazing about living in a place where the adhan is called five times a day, although they begin a kind of courtesy adhan about an hour or more before the adhan for fajr prayer, which in a state of jetlag is a little unnerving.

In Marrakesh as well as everywhere in the Muslim world it seems, there manifests the same disease of modern Islam: the electrified minaret loudspeaker. What is lovely about the unaided human voice is its aching poignancy, and in cities like Marrakesh, Meknes or Fez muezzins go into almost every minaret to call the adhan, so there would be a natural overlap of their naked voices. Instead, every minaret is wired for sound, and the result is a harsh metallic adhan that almost hurts rather than reminds, like children in supermarkets screaming for attention. Where is the wafting adhan, the evocative adhan, the adhan based not on modern human technology but on the ancient human vocal chords and heart of the muezzin? Sheikh Hamza Yusuf also mentions in one of his talks somewhere that with an unamplified adhan you could guage how far away the mosque is and how quickly to walk to it in order to arrive at the prayer on time. With amplified adhans you might walk for miles thinking the mosque is just down the road, providing, of course, that you don’t already know the city like the back of your hand. Granted, a possible justification for amplification is that modern life has also gotten noisier. Still, I’m always grateful for the adhans, the muezzins in Morocco are the most sublime of singers, and I listened hopefully past the technology when at fajr and maghrib especially, you can hear the various adhans looping and blending their vocal banners across the city as the dawn comes up or the sun lowers itself down through the completed day’s radiant clouds.

In Marrakesh is the tomb of the author of the universally recited Dala’il al-Khayrat, Imam al-Jazuli (d.870 ah), sheikh of the Shadhiliya-Darqawi tariqa, who is one of the Seven Saints of Marrakesh, honored as the spiritual linchpins of the city’s reason for being. The other six are Sidi Qadi Ayaad, Sidi al-Abbas Sabti, Sidi Yussuf Ben Ali, Sidi Abdellaziz al-Tebbaa, Sidi Abd Allah al-Ghazwaani -- nicknamed Moul al-Ksour -- and Imam al-Suhayli (may Allah be pleased with all of them). During our visit there, though we had intended to visit all seven, both my wife and I were only able to visit the tomb and zawiyya of Sheikh Jazuli, Malika one night with other ladies, and myself with one of the language center’s teachers who would be our guide on the journey north, Sidi Hamza Weinman, who took me to the Jazuli zawiyya in his cuddly, banged-up rattletrap Renault I dubbed Zahara (to which he added: el-Miskeena, “the poor thing”), somewhere across town, not far from the Djemma el-Fna.

We walked down a winding alley and went into the very humble mosque, first going into the tomb to greet the sheikh. A lovely tomb, ornately decorated, which I obtained permission from one of the regulars, or the guardian, to photograph, only to have my digital camera jam as soon as I took the picture! I regretted the glitch, though, and wish I had been able to take a picture or two inside the zawiyya of the two lines of mostly old men in djallabas, reciting the Dala’il al-Khayrat, a collection of all the formulae of blessings upon the Prophet, God’s peace be upon him, starting with those mentioned in the sunnah, those composed by the Sahaba, by the Taabi’in, and by countless salihin, in that unmistakable Moroccan fashion, rhythmically fast and musically intense, page after page with very little variation in the phrases and invocatory formulae, page after page, most of the grizzled and very indigent looking men reciting it entirely by heart! The sweet joy of their faces! Their concentration and light! I was happy to see some young men among them as well, but most of them were well into their elder benignity, no less vigorous however, obviously mentally as sharp as sword-blades, and especially energized in reciting these glorious and lengthy invocations. But my camera was jammed, try as I might, and I had to give it up and let the recitation soak into me, following it where I could in the yellowed booklets of the text one of the men handed us. Afterwards, the leader and some of the others greeted us, and we left the zawiyya back into the darkened alleyway, back to Zahara, with the haunting sing song of the dhikr echoing in our hearts and brains.

The puppet play went well, in the Center’s courtyard, though most of the children really couldn’t follow the words. As it turns out, I had written it about five or six years above their heads. They sat in their chairs, row after row, with perfect attentiveness, many never having seen anything like a puppet play live. The two appearances I made, in masks and costumes exactly like two of the small puppets, created a kind of cathartic shiver up their young spines. The poetry reading two days later, however, was, for me at least, amazingly gratifying, with the audience commenting and questioning some of the poems and their meanings, which I welcome and always find fascinating, discovering how some people perceive them. The sea of excited and interested Moroccan faces as I read these poems (written usually at the side of my bed in the middle of an American night) was overwhelming to me. They caught the meanings, and their love of poetry was palpable.

The students and staff of the school had been studying one of the poems earlier, The Piece of Coal, but I was really surprised when, after just one recitation of the poem, many in the audience in unison were able to supply the final words of each stanza when I repeated them:

Piece of Coal

The piece of coal that wanted to be diamond
said to the earth: Press me.
The succulent grape that wanted to be wine
said to the feet: Crush me.
The cloud that wanted to be thunder and rain
said to a facing cloud: Collide with me.
The mountain that wanted to be level valley
said to the elements: Erode me.
The oyster that wanted to produce a pearl
said to a sand-grain: Irritate me.
The heart that wanted to be filled with light
said to the world: Break me.

DJEMAA EL-FNA
The famous square in the old city of Marrakesh, crossroads of camel-drivers and charlatans, snake-charmers and magicians, the wilder Gnaowa “Sufis” of the deeper south, dancers and singers and musicians deep into the night, Djemaa el-Fna, famous everywhere. Before visiting the place, I wrote a short poem imagining the mesmerizing atmosphere that might prevail there.