The whole of civilian Moslem architecture from Persia
to Morocco is based on four unchanging conditions:
a hot climate, slavery, polygamy and the segregation
of women. The private house in Mahometan countries
is in fact a fortress, a convent and a temple:
a temple of which the god (as in all ancient religions)
frequently descends to visit his cloistered votaresses.
For where slavery and polygamy exist every house-master
is necessarily a god, and the house he inhabits a shrine
built about his divinity.
The first thought of the Moroccan chieftain was always
defensive. As soon as he pitched a camp or founded
a city it had to be guarded against the hungry hordes
who encompassed him on every side. Each little
centre of culture and luxury in Moghreb was an islet
in a sea of perpetual storms. The wonder is that,
thus incessantly threatened from without and conspired
against from within—with the desert at their
doors, and their slaves on the threshold—these
violent men managed to create about them an atmosphere
of luxury and stability that astonished not only the
obsequious native chronicler but travellers and captives
from western Europe.
[Illustration: From a photograph from the
Service des Beaux-Arts au Maroc
Rabat—gate of the Kasbah of the Oudayas]
The truth is, as has been often pointed out, that,
even until the end of the seventeenth century, the
refinements of civilization were in many respects
no greater in France and England than in North Africa.
North Africa had long been in more direct communication
with the old Empires of immemorial luxury, and was
therefore farther advanced in the arts of living than
the Spain and France of the Dark Ages; and this is
why, in a country that to the average modern European
seems as savage as Ashantee, one finds traces of a
refinement of life and taste hardly to be matched
by Carlovingian and early Capetian Europe.
III
The brief Almoravid dynasty left no monuments behind
it.
Fez had already been founded by the Idrissites, and
its first mosques (Kairouiyin and Les Andalous) existed.
Of the Almoravid Fez and Marrakech the chroniclers
relate great things; but the wild Hilalian invasion
and the subsequent descent of the Almohads from the
High Atlas swept away whatever the first dynasties
had created.
The Almohads were mighty builders, and their great
monuments are all of stone. The earliest known
example of their architecture which has survived is
the ruined mosque of Tinmel, in the High Atlas, discovered
and photographed by M. Doutte. This mosque was
built by the inspired mystic, Ibn-Toumert, who founded
the line. Following him came the great palace-making
Sultans whose walled cities of splendid mosques and
towers have Romanesque qualities of mass and proportion,
and, as M. Raymond Koechlin has pointed out, inevitably
recall the “robust simplicity of the master
builders who at the very same moment were beginning
in France the construction of the first Gothic cathedrals
and the noblest feudal castles.”
