The Paris Club Scene

In the Heart of Paris, an African Beat - New York Times

The Washington Post's review of Moroccan restaurants in Paris has everything to do with wealthy Parisian chic and almost nothing to do with North Africa. No wonder people of North African descent are alienated in Paris.

The Post describes the scene at the restaurant 404 as follows:

"She" is a young woman in black who is celebrating a birthday in official 404 fashion: by gyrating on top of the bar with her shirt halfway raised in an attempt at belly dancing. Throughout the stylish restaurant-lounge - a perennial hot spot done up with casbah-cool d�cor - tables of media and fashion types abandon their bottles of Algerian Ch�teau Tellagh red wine, take out their digital cameras and mount the banquettes.

The "Arabian" scene in Paris sounds like nothing so much as post colonial French self indulgence.

Dry Hole

In Morocco, One Man's Oasis Is Another's Watering Hole - New York Times

The Sahara, the world's second largest desert (after Antarctica), covers 3.5 million square miles, nearly the size of the United States. Only one quarter of it is sand; the rest is rocky plains, steppes and volcanic mountains. I wanted to experience not just the desert's moonlike isolation - Saharan dunes can rise to a thousand feet and stretch hundreds of miles - but also its lush aberrations: oases.

A Times reporter takes a trip to a desert oasis but returns disillusioned by the local tourism business.

A Distant Mirror

I have just finished reading . Ibn Batuta's tale of his travels first to Mecca and then to the exotic East, with a brief coda on his voyage to Mali, provides a glimpse into a world far removed from most of our experience.

In the first place, Ibn Batuta's voyages, though often fraught with peril in the form of shipwrecks and attacks by pirates and bandits, are enveloped with an air of privilege. He travels from one sultan's court to another, where he is invariably showered with presents and frequently appointed to a state office. He leverages his experience in one court at the next by impressing each successive sultan by his intimacy with his previous host. His prestige reaches its apex when the Sultan of Dihli (Delhi) appoints him ambassador to China.

For protection on the road, Ibn Batuta typically travels with an armed escort or in a merchant caravan. In addition to being well provisioned, these caravans enable Ibn Batuta to bring his retinue, including a number of slaves male and female, with him on his journeys.

The society that Ibn Batuta describes centers around a series of royal courts, generally presided over by a sultan. In attendance on the sultan are one or more viziers and any number of princes. Ibn Batuta encounters a number of Sufis and other Islamic holy men along his route, and even withdraws from the world and embraces an ascetic life at one point until he is once again seduced by the pleasures of the court. Ibn Batuta was by birth a shaikh and by training a qadi, or Islamic judge, and various sultans appoint him to judgeships in the course of his travels. Merchants are mentioned, but mostly in paasing to explain how the court is provisioned, there is little description of them in terms of individuals. Finally, one gets the impression that the courts that Ibn Batuta visits are maintained by a veritable army of slaves.

Ibn Batuta's world is also clearly one of male privilege. As mentioned above, he usually travels with several slave girls, whose main purpose is evidently his sexual gratification. He even mentions at one point that one of his slave girls bore him a child. In addition, at any given court at which he stays for any length of time, he takes up to four wives (the maximum number that the Koran allows). When it is time to move on, he simply divorces them, a practice that in some cases was enjoined by a ban on women's traveling. In one instance he returns to India to look for a son that was born to him twenty years earlier, but the boy has died in the interim.

The Travels are punctuated with savage violence. In addition to the brigandage en route, the usual means by which one Sultan succeeds another seems to have been by murdering his predecessor, who is often a member of his own family. In addition, such offenses as picking up a piece of fruit lying on the public highway are in some kingdoms a capital crime, and the hapless offender is impaled and crucified as an example to others. Ibn Batuta appears to take such punishments as a matter of course.

Ultimately, the Travels portray a rich mosaic of sophisticated cultures throughout the Islamic world in the 14th century, when it was arguably at its zenith, and for that reason alone are well worth reading.

Ancient City Walls of Xian


Ancient City Walls of Xian


Ancient City Walls of Xian,
originally uploaded by el_danimal.


I am reading about Ibn Batuta's voyage to China, which he considered the most sophisticated civilization of the time (despite their not being Muslims). Ibn Batuta was writing in the 14th century, during the reign of the last Khan before the descendants of Genghis Khan were overthrown by the Ming dynasty. Although I have not come across a mention of Xian, he does talk about a number of walled cities. I happened across this picture quite by chance, but it spoke to me.

The Professor Visits

Wafin: Morocco in North America

"On visiting Moulay Idris, however, I realized I was in a unique expression of Islamic culture. I arrived in the afternoon, when sufi chants were being sung by a group of devotees; women, men and children sat in the sahn, and then sometimes entered to the hall of the tomb where they sought blessings, prayed, or simply meditated. The shrine conveyed an intense religious feeling, perhaps only equaled in my experience with the Dome of the Rock and the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem. Moulay Idriss is an expression of Islamic piety unique to the devotion of Morocco. Not only the dialect but the devotion was distinctly “Maghribi.” The more I learned about these “saints,” the more I could understand the tensions of early modern Moroccan history between the makhzan/government and the sufi lodges."