| The Journey to Qalbiyya | | Print | |
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Page 2 of 3 FIRE-EATER OF MARRAKESH When the fire-eater put the firebrand in his mouth the whole night sky I swear burst into flame And when he took it out of his mouth extinguished the night sky blackened and pulled itself tight around us again Except for this fantasy, I came very close to not visiting the square at all, but after the poetry reading given at the Language Center I pre-vailed on Hamza to just “pop over and have a look around.” We got into Zahara and she galumphed her way to the nearest sidestreet, around 10 p.m., and we wandered into Djemaa el-Fna. It was dark except for glowing points of light shimmering up from huddled groups of people dotted here and there, and the night sounds of drumming and singing from the various circles. We first passed a very obsequious man in djellaba and turban holding a kind of large banjo (a guinbri) sitting in the glow of a Coleman lantern, on a large cloth, surrounded by chickens pecking at grain on the ground. He was chatting to some onlookers. Next to him was a brightly painted naif portrait of himself playing the guinbri we saw him with. We wandered away to other groups, a very thin bare-chested man pacing back and forth and shouting in a guttural derajah to the great amusement of the men in the circles -- there were no women here at this hour -- and I suggested to Hamza who, in spite of his passable derajah, couldn’t really follow what he was saying, that he might be a kind of Marrakeshi standup (or pacing) comedian, his monologue probably full of subtle asides and lurid references. We then went to another group where some serious oud playing and drumming was taking place, and lingered for a little while, my hands on my wallet pocket, my camera held close to my body, until the allure wore off. The allure for the Djemaa el-Fna actually wore off rather quickly (I told Hamza that a little of the Djemaa el-Fna goes a long way), and after visually visiting some of the food stalls, where amazing pyramids of fruit and food, including goats’ heads sitting on their necks, were piled up, we tumbled back into Zahara and made our way home. THE FLOATING LOTUS MAGIC PUPPET THEATER CIRCUS VAN With the wooden collapsible stage wrapped in canvas and lashed to the roof, and the hired van and driver setting off early in the morning, with a vanful of fuqara who traveled north with us to attend the great Meknes Moussem -- who would be returning to Marrakesh by bus, as the driver, Sidi Hamza, my wife and I, and the suitcase of puppets, continued north -- we took to the open road. The countryside, even rainswept and cloudy, is everywhere majestic and rich, as we drove past sheepherders with small and huge herds, a little shack angling to the earth in the middle of a field, great cascades and gorges appearing around a bend, and glorious green fields with swathes of stunning bright red poppies seemingly strewn across them, or shockingly electric yellow mustard flowers in great wavy bands of color. MEKNES Meknes is the city of my soul, perhaps, in the way that Oakland, California is the city of my body. It’s a hilly city, the old city within a great wall around it built by the ruthless Moulay Ismail, who’s buried in a giant, fully tiled and chilly tomb at one of the gates. There’s a secret here too, though. If you go into the vast and echoey hall and ask the muqaddem for the tomb of Abdurrahman al-Madjdoub, perhaps he’ll take you to a far wall and open a low door with his set of keys. You’ll go into a dark and small chamber, low-ceilinged, somewhat dusty and cobwebby, and in the middle is the simple tomb of one of the great saintly shuyukh of Morocco, a wali poet, whose lines of poetry and aphorisms are often used to impart immediate folk wisdom, and I’m told, to diffuse disputes. On this journey to Meknes, though we weren’t able to visit his tomb, sadly, I was told that he has two collections, or diwans, of poetry, both written in the Moroccan dialect: one more “streetwise” and pungent, the other more seriously Gnostic and sublime. As there never seems to have been a translation of these works into English, I can only guess at their possible magnificence. I spent many months in Meknes in the 70s, at gatherings of dhikr during and after the lifetime of our sheikh, and passing through once on my way to the town of Rissani, in the Tafilalt. I can’t even remember clearly how long I stayed or exactly when, but the zawiyya, tucked away in an alleyway labyrinth just up from the long wild gardens that run along the old city’s lower wall and the new city, is a place of such deep nostalgia, I can’t explain. Coming into the city by bus from Tangier my heart would always leap with expectation of seeing our sheikh, or being in the company of his disciples. The city itself would be welcoming, it seemed, with its amazing bustle, its great gates, the smells of cedar wood from the marketplace, the stillness and coolness of its mosques, the Jama Zaytuna mosque, just around the corner from our zawiyya. Even this visit, where we stayed in a luxurious hotel in the modern city, and could look out across the bridge to the old city and see the minaret from the Jama Zaytuna rising out of the rooftops, we felt an exhilaration at just being in Meknes. But of course the Path continues very strongly here, with the old zawiyya and tomb with its barebones simplicity and huge and palpable blessing, and one of our sheikh’s strongest followers, Moulay Hashim, and the exalted nights of dhikr at his house which is also a zawiyya, inside a nondescript door not far from one of the main fortress gates of Meknes. The mornings of Fajr in the old zawiyya thirty years ago, when the men would come together in their woolen djallabas and turbans after the prayer and sit in a circle as the light slowly filtered in through the high small window as the sun rose, reciting the Qur’an and the Wird of our sheikh, then sometimes going back to sleep with their hoods pulled over their heads along the sides on the thin cushions until breakfast time. Then a low round wooden table would be brought in, and perhaps last night’s couscous would have been reheated and served, with milky coffee. The fuqara might eat in silence, except for some grunted jokes and kidding that might ensue between them, incomprehensible to me in their words but obvious in their intimate affection for each other. I often thought this must have been how the Companions of the Prophet, peace be upon him, behaved, courteously but familiarly as well, knowing each other’s inner states enough to respect their hearts but prodding their nafs with a little gentle taunting to get a reaction. A breakfast among human beings. The last grainy gulps of coffee, cahua hlib, as the mosque room flooded with morning light. This visit thirty years later began with a giant mawlid at our beloved Moulay Hashim’s house, with men coming from all over Morocco and perhaps farther, to celebrate the Prophet Muhammad, peace of Allah be upon him, and the shuyukh, the tariqas, the Path, and to thank God for every breath we take. The air itself was shaking with ecstasy, and the singing had a way of keeping the atmosphere aloft for hours on end, one coil of singing rounding into the beginning of another, spiraling up, really, to the stars. There’s something so vital, earthy, human and true about this form of worship, the recitation of Qur’an in unison, the songs of the teaching guides, and the many circles of standing dhikr that took place, the hadras, invoking the Presence of the Divine. What a pleasant relief from the stern fundamentalist view, the pure expression of joy of being Muslim, this vigorous, sweet gratitude to Allah! I often think that without this joy I would hardly have been attracted to Islam! Rather than the dour Puritanism alone, the strict observances of dos and don’ts alone, there’s this full flowering of the human heart’s wish to connect with the Creator in an energetic and blissful way. The fundamentalist radicals who label this form of dhikr haram have in many ways effectively removed the humanity and reality of our beloved Prophet Muhammad, peace be upon him, from Islam, forgetting his mercy, his lightness of being, as well as the depth of his love for Allah and all His creatures, human and otherwise, to say nothing of large swathes of Qur’an, hadith and hadith qudsi that praise dhikr of Allah in many forms, “standing, sitting and on our sides.” They have even pried away many of the attributes of Beauty and Forbearance of Allah ta’ala, as if God were only a Wrathful, Magnificent, All-Powerful and punishing God, rather than the Kind and Subtle, the Inwardly Hidden and Outwardly Manifest Merciful Lord. If more Muslims understood the spirituality of Islam in this way, perhaps we would not only have less damaging encroachment from so-called “outside” forces, cultural and materialist invasions from alien sources, but also a more balanced Umma that roots out murderous terrorism from within, and resists injustice from both inside and out. I saw in the faces and behavior of these men in these circles of celebration only ecstatic awe and hope in Allah’s Presence and Grace. The hadra is the natural rising to one’s feet in sudden inspiration and yearning, either leading up to or resulting from that state. My wife, who sat above us that night at one of the windows overlooking the courtyard, was afraid her copious tears of recognition would dampen the men’s djallaba collars below. The Mawlid continued far into the night, and its echoes continued in our hearts throughout our journey north and back again, even to Philadelphia, and alhamdulillah, even to this very moment. The morning after the Mawlid my wife and I visited the tomb of Sheikh ibn al-Habib, may Allah be pleased with him, in the corner of his zawiyya. It is a place of peace and light just up from the gardens running along the bottom of the old city, the Habibiyya zawiyya with its haunting echoes of voices down the alleyway leading to it, the call the prayer here in its mosque from the human throat, and the circle of dhikr after the adhan of the shahada sung three times at highest intensity followed by the greeting all the men offer to each other who sang it by kissing their hands in the circle. I was grateful to be able to revisit these earliest days of my Islam, those first years so poignant for those of us not born Muslim who are later blessed with its embrace. There was also a marvelously happy encounter there, on my Journey to Qalbiyya, that somehow completed the journey’s circle. I encountered a man in front of the tomb of Sayyidina Sheikh with a group of fuqara from Laghouat, Algeria. This is the very town six of us traveled to in the late 70s, where we met the extraordinary blind wali who had been a French professor and faqir of our sheikh, and who gave me the name Ameen. When I mentioned Hajj ‘Issa of Laghouat to him and asked if he knew him, he said, “Yes; that was my father!” And when I told him I have a photograph of all of us standing with him in his garden, he said, “Yes, I took that picture.” Then I recognized him as the wali’s grown-up son after thirty years, who was still a teenager when I saw him last. Amazed, we fell into each other’s arms. |