NOTE ON MOROCCAN ARCHITECTURE
M. H. Saladin, whose “Manual of Moslem Architecture”
was published in 1907, ends his chapter on Morocco
with the words: “It is especially urgent
that we should know, and penetrate into, Morocco as
soon as possible, in order to study its monuments.
It is the only country but Persia where Moslem art
actually survives; and the tradition handed down to
the present day will doubtless clear up many things.”
M. Saladin’s wish has been partly realized.
Much has been done since 1912, when General Lyautey
was appointed Resident-General, to clear up and classify
the history of Moroccan art; but since 1914, though
the work has never been dropped, it has necessarily
been much delayed, especially as regards its published
record; and as yet only a few monographs and articles
have summed up some of the interesting investigations
of the last five years.
When I was in Marrakech word was sent to Captain de
S., who was with me, that a Caid of the Atlas, whose
prisoner he had been several years before, had himself
been taken by the Pasha’s troops, and was in
Marrakech. Captain de S. was asked to identify
several rifles which his old enemy had taken from
him, and on receiving them found that, in the interval,
they had been elaborately ornamented with the Arab
niello work of which the tradition goes back to Damascus.
This little incident is a good example of the degree
to which the mediaeval tradition alluded to by M.
Saladin has survived in Moroccan life. Nowhere
else in the world, except among the moribund fresco-painters
of the Greek monasteries, has a formula of art persisted
from the seventh or eighth century to the present day;
and in Morocco the formula is not the mechanical expression
of a petrified theology but the setting of the life
of a people who have gone on wearing the same clothes,
observing the same customs, believing in the same fetiches,
and using the same saddles, ploughs, looms, and dye-stuffs
as in the days when the foundations of the first mosque
of El Kairouiyin were laid.
[Illustration: From a photograph from the
Service des Beaux-Arts au Maroc
Marrakech—a street fountain]
The origin of this tradition is confused and obscure.
The Arabs have never been creative artists, nor are
the Berbers known to have been so. As investigations
proceed in Syria and Mesopotamia it seems more and
more probable that the sources of inspiration of pre-Moslem
art in North Africa are to be found in Egypt, Persia,
and India. Each new investigation pushes these
sources farther back and farther east; but it is not
of much use to retrace these ancient vestiges, since
Moroccan art has, so far, nothing to show of pre-Islamite
art, save what is purely Phenician or Roman.
