A walled lane leads down from Bab F’touh to
a lower slope, where the Fazi potters have their baking-kilns.
Under a series of grassy terraces overgrown with olives
we saw the archaic ovens and dripping wheels which
produce the earthenware sold in the souks.
It is a primitive and homely ware, still fine in shape,
though dull in color and monotonous in pattern; and
stacked on the red earth under the olives, the rows
of jars and cups, in their unglazed and unpainted
state, showed their classical descent more plainly
than after they have been decorated.
This green quiet hollow, where turbaned figures were
moving attentively among the primitive ovens, so near
to the region of flies and offal we had just left,
woke an old phrase in our memories, and as our mules
stumbled back over the graves of Bab F’touh we
understood the grim meaning of the words: “They
carried him out and buried him in the Potters’
Field.”
MEDERSAS, BAZAARS AND AN OASIS
Fez, for two centuries and more, was in a double sense
the capital of Morocco: the centre of its trade
as well as of its culture.
Culture, in fact, came to northwest Africa chiefly
through the Merinid princes. The Almohads had
erected great monuments from Rabat to Marrakech, and
had fortified Fez, but their “mighty wasteful
empire” fell apart like those that had preceded
it. Stability had to come from the west; it was
not till the Arabs had learned it through the Moors
that Morocco produced a dynasty strong and enlightened
enough to carry out the dream of its founders.
Whichever way the discussion sways as to the priority
of eastern or western influences on Moroccan art—whether
it came to her from Syria, and was thence passed on
to Spain, or was first formed in Spain, and afterward
modified by the Moroccan imagination—there
can at least be no doubt that Fazi art and culture,
in their prime, are partly the reflection of European
civilization.
Fugitives from Spain came to the new city when Moulay
Idriss founded it. One part of the town was given
to them, and the river divided the Elbali of the Almohads
into the two quarters of Kairouiyin and Andalous, which
still retain their old names. But the full intellectual
and artistic flowering of Fez was delayed till the
thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. It seems
as though the seeds of the new springtime of art,
blown across the sea from reawakening Europe, had at
last given the weltering tribes of the desert the
force to create their own type of beauty.
Nine Medersas sprang up in Fez, six of them built
by the princes who were also creating the exquisite
collegiate buildings of Sale, Rabat and old Meknez,
and the enchanting mosque and minaret of Chella.
The power of these rulers also was in perpetual flux,
they were always at war with the Sultans of Tlemcen,
the Christians of Spain, the princes of northern Algeria
and Tunis. But during the fourteenth century they
established a rule wide and firm enough to permit of
the great outburst of art and learning which produced
the Medersas of Fez.
