IN ANCIENT FEZ

Wairarapa Times-Age, 19 October 1943, Page 4

IN ANCIENT FEZ

MOROCCAN CITY OF OTHER DAYS RABBIT-WARREN ALLEYS. MOSLEM FATALISM APPARENT. An American newspaper proprietor walked through the bazaar quarter at Fez and filled his pockets with small leather purses of bright colours, and what he could not put into his pockets he carried in his arms. Each cost only a few sous. “I’m sure buying presents for my friends home,” he said to the astonished friends with him. “Don’t you realise these are all hand-made You can’t get hand-made things like this in America.” The rabbit-warren alleys of Fez are full of shops where things are being made by hand, and, as in ancient Europe of five centuries ago, trades strictly to quarters. Thus one alleyway is filled with the sound of hammering, where half naked smiths bang away with hammers whose exact counterpart adorns pictorial decorations of Egyptian tombs. Another alleyway is filled with sellers of all kinds of bright coloured cloths. A quieter alleyway is filled with the jewellers bent over bangles and necklaces and “hands -of Fatma” that keep away evil. In these narrow passages the natives crowd, strang figures from the Arabian Nights, the merchants with small daggers hung to their sides above their large purses. Fez is a religious centre, and here the women are not only veiled up to the eyes, but show only one eye. From 120 minarets the cry of the Muezzin floats over the white roofs of the town that slope over two low hills, and from rising ground on the edge of the city one looks across the plain to the horizon where the Atlas Mountains,, with their snow-capped peaks, divide the brown of the desert from the blue of the African sky. Dual administration is evident everywhere, French and native civil servants watching over the welfare of the city. The French, since their occupation of Morocco in the early years of this century, have done much to foster the ancient arts and crafts of the country, their missions bringing to the capital artists discovered in out of the way places, often Berber villages hung on the side of the Atlas Mountains, and they are helping them pass on their skill to others,, teaching the technique of Moslem design, the tooling and gilding of leather in lovely book bindings and other objects. In spite of the presence of Europeans, who are comparatively few, it is true, Fez remains in every way a city living in the past. Moslem fatalism and little inclination to change hold this wonderful city in the grip of the past. Admire the baby in arms, and its mother’s face is blanched often with fear, until you say the soothing words, “May Allah bless you through your child.” Then a smile spreads over her face, and her hand, every finger of which she his stretched out —the hand of Fatma to conjure the dangers of the “evil eye’’— is relaxed and she turns the little one towards you with a movement of pride and pleasure of universal motherhood.