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| Entrance to the Mausoleum of Moulay Idriss |
Beyond that barrier lies the mausoleum of Idriss I, who, as the founder of Morocco's first Muslim ruling dynasty, is held in the highest esteem throughout the country. In 789, he arrived in the hills of north-central Morocco, fleeing a vengeful relative after a failed uprising in the Arabian Peninsula. At the city of Walili, a former Roman municipality better known by its Latin name, Volubilis, he married a woman from a powerful local tribe and began construction of the future Idrissid of Fes. He died a few short years later, however; the scuttlebutt is that he was poisoned by his Abbasid enemies, although I don't know whether that has been verified.
Today, his body rests in the small town of Moulay Idriss Zerhoun, a few kilometers east of Walili. It was moved there in the seventeenth century by Morocco's most famous sultan, Moulay Ismaïl, who built the mausoleum in the hopes of creating a major pilgrimage site just twenty-some kilometers north of his imperial capital at Meknes.
The plan worked. The main difference between the photograph above and the one I would have taken is the crowd. It was the time of the Asr prayer when I stood in the entryway and people were streaming in to pray. I felt uncomfortable training a camera on these people preparing themselves for an important ritual.
The absent photograph that I decided not to take, however, is not actually all that different from the one that I later found on the internet. The choice not to take a picture, which I made out of a mingled sense of respect and discomfort, hides the same thing as the photo that someone else did take: my own presence, or that of the photographer.
In this sense, perhaps Moulay Ismaïl's pilgrimage site project worked too well. Its powers of attraction, based on its architecture, historical associations, and religious significance, draw pilgrims of many kinds. Tourists, those omnivorous pilgrims of the Sights to be Seen, add their number to that of the Muslim faithful. Travelers latch on the aura of a place, guaranteed by its inclusion in their handy guidebooks, and channel their experience through vision: being there means seeing what there is to see there, wherever that may be.
But when tourists come to a place, they change it. Their presence modifies, becomes a part of, whatever it was that drew them there in the first place. The presence of tourists becomes a part of the fabric of the place itself. And so tourism engenders itself: people travel to places that people travel to. How can places preserve themselves from this self-fulfilling spatial reconfiguration?
Sometimes, the sights that draw tourists in simultaneously withdraw themselves from view. For this reason, what is most interesting to me in the photograph of Moulay Idriss' mausoleum is the small sign posted in the shadows to the left of the doorway. It announces in Arabic and French that "L'accès n'est pas permis aux non-Musulmans": entry is not permitted to non-Muslims. And so I stood behind the barrier, chatting with a European woman who was waiting for her Syrian husband. We wondered together about what the interior might be like and she speculated that it probably resembled the Bou Inania or Ben Youssef Qur'anic schools in Fes and Marrekesh, respectively, which are open to the non-Muslim public. The thought that this inaccessible interior might seem familiar, were I actually to see it, made me wonder about the nature of the traveler's desire to see a place, to be in it.
Forbidding access to a site with such a powerful capacity to draw in visitors has created a new kind of attraction for foreigners in Morocco throughout history. At the same time, however, those that managed to see sights they believed to be off-limits were often disappointed.
When Edith Wharton visited the country in 1917 at the invitation of the Resident-General of the newly-formed French Protectorate, she was surprised by the suggestion that she visit Moulay Idriss Zerhoun. She writes in the travel narrative[1] published a few years later that "Such a possibility had not even occurred to us. Moulay Idriss was still said to be resentful of Christian intrusion: it was only a year before that the first French officers had entered it" (47). This sense of interdiction lingers today; the travel website where I found the picture of Idriss' mausoleum still reports (erroneously) that non-Muslims are not allowed to spend the night in the town.
However, Wharton was not entirely pleased by what she found when she crossed the threshold. On the day she visited, a local sectarian religious festival featuring dancing with ritual self-mutilation was underway: "I wondered how long I should be able to stand the sight of what was going on below our terrace", Wharton reflected (52). She seizes on something particular about the space to compose herself: "the beauty of the setting redeemed the bestial horror. In that unreal golden light the scene became merely symbolical" (53). When she imagines that the violence on display is purely symbolic, she does so in an aesthetic rather than a ritual sense. In this aesthetic capacity, she can recover her pleasure in entering a once-forbidden space: "we counted ourselves lucky to have entered the sacred town, and luckier still to have been there on the day of the dance, which, till a year ago, no foreigner had been allowed to see" (57).
The traveler's impulse to see is here fulfilled, perhaps all the more for having nearly back-fired. But the scene offered an aesthetic component in excess of its religious function. Other travelers' desires are not always so sated. René de Segonzac, a French Marquis of something or other, visited Moulay Idriss in Muslim garb at the end of the nineteenth century. It's not clear in his book Voyages au Maroc[2] whether he visited the mausoleum, but he did gain entrance to a cave where Idriss is supposed to have taught his disciples. Despite his pleasure at sneaking into a space that would otherwise be closed to him as a Christian, Segonzac is ultimately disappointed by what he finds: "Du côté du Nord s'ouvre une étroite fissure; à gauche une sorte de niche obscure, sans débouché, est creusée dans le paroi. Et c'est tout. La caverne sacrée n'a qu'un intérêt historique" [On the northern side opens a narrow crack; to the left a kind of dark niche, with no outlet, is dug into the wall. And that is all. The sacred cave has only a historical interest]" (91). That historical interest, in absence of a strong aesthetic component, is not enough to satisfy Segonzac's drive to see.
What these cases both illustrate is the problematic logic of dismantling reserved space by opening it to the traveler's gaze. Wharton's and Segonzac's interests are essentially narcissistic. They want to appropriate the aura of place and claim ownership of it through their occupation and observation of space. They see denial of entry only as an obstacle to be overcome.
The sign and wooden beam outside the mausoleum do not simply define who is welcome and who is not, however. Instead, I think they seek to preserve the place's power to attract visitors at all, Muslim and otherwise. Most religious sites in Morocco are closed to non-Muslims and the signs I've seen elsewhere capture this goal better. Most of them read, "Réservée au culte musulman": reserved for Muslim worship. It is not simply that non-Muslims are forbidden entry to particular places, it is that those places are reserved for specific practices, without which they would no longer be the same. These spaces are not forbidden, but reserved.
Reserved space is run through with tension. It gathers people in, but distributes them in ways that are uncomfortable for some visitors. I haven't yet processed my own experiences of such spaces that have fascinated me but also held me at bay. They force me to approach them in ways I wouldn't normally have thought of.
A good example is the Qarawiyyin mosque and university in Fes. It is held to be the oldest continuously operating university in the world,[3] which is quite a draw for me as an universitaire in training, albeit along very different disciplinary lines. But not only can I, as a non-Muslim, not enter the massive complex, its architectural form is nearly impossible to grasp as well. It is ensconced in the winding streets of Fes el-Bali, old Fes, hemmed in at every turn by narrow, shop-lined alleys. Only from the hills above Fes could I catch its outline and, even then, its edges remain amorphous. The eye slips from one building to another in the medina; architectural boundaries become fluid.
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| al-Qarawiyyin in the Fes medina |
Neither posted injunctions or religious functions are absolutely necessary to create reserved space, however. About a week earlier, I spent an afternoon in the small city of Sefrou in the Middle Atlas mountains. A small river runs through Sefrou and, in its course down the mountains, forms a series of cascades. I had imagined I would be mostly alone on the short hike out of town to the waterfall, but instead it seemed as if everyone in the region had gathered along the river. I shouldn't have been surprised; it was a sunny, pleasantly warm day, school vacations were coming to an end. The thing to do was to sit down and join in. There were families with children, mothers in headscarves, shirtless boys, barefoot fathers. A young man and woman, perhaps a couple, sat on a rock midstream, as close to each other as they could be without touching. Below me, two men shared a joint; one of them retrieved a Heineken from a black plastic bag where it sat cooling in the current. He opened it below his knees, glancing around and palming the label as he took a sip.
I had passed some kind of government building downstream -- a transformer station or a small dam, maybe. A sign was posted on its indicating that photography was not allowed. This is common at government buildings in Morocco, but it felt to me as though the sign was referring to the whole space along the river. I couldn't take a picture without disturbing people from their end-of-summer rest and drawing attention to myself. And any photograph I might take wouldn't be able to capture the calm of that place, or how completely these people had made the river their own place.
I admit, however, that the visual traveler in me one out. I couldn't resist shooting a few pictures. I was like the man with the beer, only taking my camera out in the shadows and working quickly, my eyes roaming about to see if anybody was watching me. As I was heading back to town, I realized that people around me had their cameras out, too, from fancy Nikons to basic camera phones. They were taking pictures of each other, of the mountains, of the cascades. The key in this reserved space was not to worry about making myself invisible, but to open my eyes to what was going on around me and how my presence could fit in.
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| River outside Sefrou (heavily back-lit) |
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| Peaks above the river |
[1] Edith Wharton, In Morocco. New York: Charles Scribner and Sons, 1920.
[2] René de Segonzac, Voyages au Maroc. Paris: A. Colin, 1903.
[3] According to UNESCO, which has included the Fez Medina on its World Heritage list since 1981. The Guinness Book of World Records also gives the award to al-Qarawiyyin.
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