You must never forget

"Allahu Akbar!"

The call of a muezzin from the loudspeaker at the top of the minaret remainds everybody that God is Great. You have to remember this all the time, you must never forget God, this is what His Prophet said. Some people stop their work, go to the mosque, wash their feet in the fountain in the middle of the mosque's yard, and hands and head as well. This is what the Prophet told his believers to do. Then they enter the mosque and fall to their faces before the invisible Allah. Only the Muslims can enter, we - the infidels - can only stand at the entry and peep inside. A few prostrations and the prayer is over, Muslims go back to their occupations so abruptly interrupted.

Mediaeval Fez - a city built more than a millennium ago and hardly changed since then. Grinning battlements surround the mediaeval medina. A dual carriage way divides the old city from a modern bus station but once a traveller leaves the station and walks into the city, he is transported, as if by a magic carpet, into a world of 1001 nights. Streets narrow and winding, no vehicles can drive there, all transport is on the back of pack animals. Shops along streets with vendors shouting loudly to attract attention. Heaps of vegetables, heaps of sheep's heads or cow's trotters still dripping with blood, heaps of colourful glazed pots and most of all heaps of things made of leather, bags, sandals, whatever, this is what this city is famous for. In one part of the old town there are traditional tanneries where leather is processed with pigeon droppings. This is where the characteristic smell of this town comes from.

In the very centre of the mediaeval metropolis, hidden in a labyrinth of winding streets, stands the mausoleum of Maulay Idries the Second, a descendant of the Prophet. Maulay Idries, who in the 9th century made Fez the capital of Morocco, did not recognise the caliphs of Baghdad. His dynasty ruled Morocco for several centuries. When five centuries after his death an uncorrupted body was found, it was decided that it must be the body of Idries, as only he could be so holy that his body would not decompose. A mausoleum was built over his tomb and now is a sign of God's Presence in the city. We, the unbelievers, cannot enter it but we can stand at the door and peep in, so we can see the believers hugging the tomb decorated with carpets.

Transport in Fez

The unbelievers can enter Madrasa Bou Inania, this is a sight for tourists. It is a masterpiece of 14th century Muslim architecture, its walls covered with sculpted calligraphy no worse than Alhambra. Much cheaper than Alhambra, though: the entry ticket costs just a few dirhams. There is no queue here either. The entry to the madrasa is opposite the shop with heaps of blood-dripping sheep's heads for sale. Self-appointed guides, several of whom gather in front of the madrasa, offer their services. A man in striped jelaba and a red fez talks to us politely in English but when told that we don't need a guide, curses us in much less polite words. Another man asked which way to an ancient synagogue leads us there (even though we only asked for directions) and then he demands money. He even says that 10 dirhams (about £1) is not enough, he wants 25 dirhams.

Is it possible that Allah is present among those sheep's heads, smells of tannery and people polite for money? Maybe His name is only an empty sound on people's lips

Little coffee shops where only men sit do not invite tourists. When I enter one of them with Ewa, the waiter makes an impression of not really wanting us there and doesn't try to stop us when we leave. Only around Bab Bou Jeloud (the famous Blue Gate) there are restaurants for tourists, where waiters invite passers-by of both sexes. Moroccan women do not go to coffee shops. Instead they go to hammams, or public baths. There are no secrets in a public bath, everybody is naked and ladies spend long hours there exchanging local gossip. Public baths are, of course, unisex; only the hammams for tourists are exceptions. These tourists are strange people, they have to go together everywhere, even to a hammam. So the hammams for tourists are coed, but nevertheless they are true hammams, Turkish baths where one sweats like hell, after which one is properly kneaded by a masseur.

Moulay Idries Mausoleum

Shops with heaps of colourful ceramic do invite tourists of either sex. We enter one where pitchers, vases and bowls painted in colourful arabesques fill shelves and cupboards. It is lunchtime, the attendants sit on the floor in the middle of the shop around a huge pot of soup, everyone tears a piece off a great flat bread and uses it as an edible spoon. They invite us to join them, tear off pieces of bread for us. We join them. This is pure hospitality, they do not expect us to pay or buy anything.

But buy we do. How can one not to in this world of 1001 nights? Hand made Berber earrings, camel wool fabrics, sandals in any colour, everything so cheap and everything hand made! After a walk along the Talaa Sghira street one has no cash left to buy a packet of Saharawi tea of 14 herbs from an old man sitting in a corner of a winding narrow passage. How much does one packet cost? Ten dirhams. But I don't have anything. A cash machine is just round the corner but it doesn't give cash. The next cash machine is near Bab Bou Jeloud, about half an hour walk through crowded Talaa Sghira. I ask the old man to put one packet aside for me.

The old man does not speak French, my Arabic is good enough to ask for the price but hardly more, so a young sandal vendor from the other side of the street comes to help. He tells the old man that we have to go to draw money and will be back in half an hour. The old man hearing that gives me a packet and waves his hand showing me to go. Having gone to Bab Bou Jeloud to draw money I was back almost an hour later. Seeing me the old man spoke to the sandal seller and the accompanying gesture suggested it was something like "I told you, didn't I?"

The world of 1001 nights ends at the bus station. A dual carriage way leads from there out of the town via Ville Nouvelle, the part of the town built when the French ruled here. Trees covered in blue blossom grow along the road. The road leads into the mountains, Middle Atlas covered in cedar forest with apes jumping between trees, then across a small plane that divides Middle Atlas from High Atlas. The town of Midelt is in the middle of that plane. This is where we get off. The bus driver remembers that we wanted to get off at Midelt, stops at a Shell station and gets our luggage out.

Tattouine

"Is this the bus station?"

"This is Midelt."

Where is the bus station? Charif is supposed to wait for us there. I phone him. He says he is at the new bus station 5 km out of the town but he will come.

Will I recognise him? I stayed with him for a couple of days six years ago. I then wrote down his telephone number just in case I wanted to come again. I phoned him before we left England and again from Fez. He told me he would meet us at the Midelt bus station. Perhaps I won't recognise him but he won't have problems recognising two tourists at the Shell petrol station.

Soon a Berber in a blue turban approaches: here he is. Together we walk to the place from which a pick-up will take us to Tattouine. This is a village deep in the mountains, the last one before the main ridge of High Atlas. One can see the snow covered peak of Jabal Ayachi, the highest in the region. the highest peaks are covered in snow, other mountains are pink, we can see the panorama from the back of the pick-up on which we travel. Pink rocks seldom covered in any vegetation, very different from the green mountains of Europe. Charif, who is a Berber from here but speaks French, asks:

"Are you Polish? Sister Barbara will be happy."

Tattouine is a village of adobe houses whose walls are of the same colour as the mountains. In one of those houses, at the very end of the village, live two Franciscan nuns: sister Marie and sister Barbara.

Jabal Ayachi

As it happens on the day of our arrival they have a feast in their house for all the inhabitants of the village. The feast is organised by Charif and his wife Hasna but it is in the house of the nuns because it is in memory of another nun who had lived here but recently died. Charif leads us to the nuns' house. They have prayers there, partly readings from the Koran (because all the villages are Muslims) and partly from the Gospels in French. After the prayers great bowls with tajine cooked in Hasna's house are brought in, one bowl for each table. The villagers sit in the bigger room, we are invited to a smaller room where all the conversation is in French because most of the guests there are French. There is a dentist who half a year works in France and earns good money and the other half he travels in Africa and repairs teeth of the Berber people for free. There are two monks from a Trappist monastery in Midelt, where also lives (not present at the feast) the last survivor of the Algerian monastery at Thibrine. I don't know the story of Thibrine but my interlocutors know it very well. It was a village very much like Tattouine, where the Christian monks lived in perfect harmony with Muslim villagers. Somebody clearly didn't like that harmony and one night all monks were killed. The Algerian government claims the murderers were Muslim extremists but the perpetrators have never been found. My interlocutors didn't believe in this explanation. They suspect that the government needed this murder to clamp down on other dissidents.

In Tattouine the harmony is still there. Big bowls of food prepared by Muslim Berbers are brought into the house of Franciscan nuns. Among the guests are Berbers from the mountains, Trappist monks from Midelt, French Medicins-sans-frontieres. One bowl for each table. People sitting around tear a morsel off a big flat bread and using is as cutlery try to tear off a morsel of a chicken cooked whole in vegetables. All the meals in the house of Hasna and Charif are served thus. The Bedouin whom we will visit the following day will also serve their meals this way.

For breakfest the following day we have freshly baked flat bread dipped in olive oil and very sweet green tea with fresh green mint. As we eat Hasna and Charif put all luggage we need for two days on the back of a mule, so we don't need to carry any rucksacks when we hike up the valley.

Bedouin hospitality

The valley seems to be a desert but here and there in the valley we see Bedouin tents. Here the two worlds meet. The Bedouin know the desert tracks but a city is alien to them, for them a point of contact with the so-called civilisation is the surgery of sister Barbara in Tattouine. If they have a health problem they travel on foot many days through the mountains to reach her. We are also travelling on foot through the mountains, not because we have health problems but for pleasure. We want to get away from the so-called civilisation for a few days. This means a walk through pink mountains. There is no grass here but sheep of the Bedouin find some herbs that thrive in this climate. We stay with the Bedouin for the night, share their meals from a single bowl, sleep on the floor on rugs, bedbugs (or shall I say rugbugs) bite us at night.

The nuns also regularly travel through the mountains, they visit the tents of the nomads and offer medical help. Recently they do this just one month every year but earlier they would spent half of every year travelling around, sleeping in their own Bedouin tent. They even have a portable tabernacle, a miniature Bedouin travel bag, which they hang in a separate part of their tent which serves as a chapel. When the sisters are in the village, the bag hangs on a wall of the chapel they arranged in their house. The bag is empty then because the hosts are kept in a permanent tabernacle in the wall. The hosts are kept there in a container made with several silver Bedouin bracelets. When the sisters travel, the container travel with them in the travel bag.

The chapel in the house is very simple: white walls, a Bedouin rug given by grateful patients, one sits on it during prayers. On one of the walls a waist rope belt worn by Bedouin women hanged so that it forms the Arabic word Allah. On another wall a copy of an icon of Andrei Rublev showing three visitors of a Bedouin named Abraham. There is also a beautiful portrait of pope John Paul embroidered by a boy who lost his right hand as a result of an accident with a scythe when he worked in the fields.

Sister Marie

They only travel one month in a year but they are very active nevertheless. Sister Marie is a teacher, she created a nursery and runs it. Children from the village come to the nursery for half a day. The sisters charge 10 dirhams per child for a term. They could do it for free but they charge because if the parents have to pay, they have respect for it and bring the children regularly. The nursery is in an adobe house like all houses in the village but inside it is equipped like a kindergarten somewhere in Stockholm. One day some well-to-do Swedes visited this place and asked how they could help. Sister Marie told them that they need some equipment for a nursery. Some time later a lorry came to Tattouine and brought all this. Berber children learn here what to do with paper and pencil, they learn the shape of Arabic letters. When they go to school they will have it much easier than if they went there straight from a Bedouin tent.

Sister Barbara runs the surgery and works with the Medicins-sans-frontieres. She is a nurse herself. When we go to see her in her nursery she shows us a little boy with walking impairment. She had several sessions of physiotherapy with him and he made huge progress. Sister Barbara likes to talk. She tells us about the most unusual medical cases she encountered among the Bedouin. Sometimes an inner voice tells her to get up and go. Like recently, when she learned that certain lady was in labour and a local Bedouin midwife was with her. Sister Barbara considers this midwife to be quite competent but nevertheless, even though this was in the middle of the night, she got up and went there. When she arrived the baby was already born and properly wrapped, but Barbara without any particular reason wanted to see the baby unwrapped. It turned out that the baby was all covered in blood, the unbilical cord was tied but got loose and started bleeding. It was very slow but a newborn doesn't have a lot of blood and till the morning could bleed to death.

Sister Barbara

Talking about births, there was an interesting story of a Bedouin who came to the sisters saying that he was worthless because he was born in a cave like a goat. So the sisters told him the story of Jesus, who was also born in a cave. For the Muslims Jesus is the prophet Isa, so the Bedouin went home happy telling everyone that he was born in a cave like the prophet Isa.

In our long talks with the sisters we never heard about a single case of conversion from one religion to another. Perhaps this is not the reason why they are there. But why are they there?

On the day of our departure the sisters invite us for their morning prayer. The prayer consists of a few readings followed by a long silence. Very long silence, certainly more than an hour. After the prayer we go for breakfest to Charif and Hasna. The breakfast consists of bread and olive oil and a pot of very sweet green tea with mint. This is the taste of this country: bread dipped in olive oil and very sweet green tea with mint.

What are the missionaries here for if they don't convert anybody?

Perhaps they are there to remind people about God? After all - you must never forget about God.

The nuns' chapel

You will find this story, and many others, in my book "ASK A GLOBETROTTER".