Spiritual capital
Fès has a highly strategic location. The city is situated in the Oued Sebou basin, astride the traditional trade route from the Sahara to the Mediterranean, as well as on the path from Algeria and the Islamic heartland beyond into Morocco. For centuries the dominant axis within Morocco was between Fès and Marrakech, two cities linked by their immense power as well as by their rivalry. Even today, while the coastal belt centred on Rabat and Casablanca dominates the country in demographic, political and economic terms, Fès continues to fascinate, for it has another characteristic, perhaps its dominant feature: Fès is a religious place, and is felt to be the spiritual capital of Morocco.
The influence of a saintly person, the baraka or blessing of a protector, was felt to be essential for a Moroccan city in times gone by. Fès, founded by Idriss II, El Azhar, ‘the Splendid’, had its patron, too and the life of the city once gravitated around the cathedral-mosque where Moulay Idriss and his descendants are buried. In recent memory, the end of each summer saw great celebrations for the moussem of Moulay Idriss. The craftsmen’s corporations would take part in great processions to the shrine of the city’s founder, a sacrificial bull, horns and head decorated with henna, the heart of every procession.
The people of Fès were deeply religious. Some early European writers saw the city as a great Mont-St-Michel, a prayer-saturated place with its mosques, zaouïas and oratories. Dr Edmond Secret, writing in the 1930s, said that “the majority do their five daily prayers. Draped in modesty in the enveloping folds of their cloaks, the bourgeois, prayer carpets under their arms, recall monks in their dignity.” This air of religiosity still clings to the city, especially during Ramadan. And on every night of the year, in the hours which precede the dawn, a time hard for those who are sick and in pain, a company of muezzins maintains a vigil in the minaret of the Andalucían Mosque, praying for those asleep and those awake.
Intellectual heritage
The city’s religious life was closely tied to education. “If learning was born in Médina, maintained in Mecca and milled in Egypt, then it was sieved in Fès,” went the adage. In the early Middle Ages, it was a centre of cultural exchange. One Gerbert d’Aurillac, later to become Pope Sylvester II, from 999 to 1003, studied in Fès in his youth, and brought Arabic numerals back to Europe. Famous names to have studied or taught in Fès include Maimonides, the Jewish philosopher and doctor, Ibn’ Arabi (died 1240) the mystic, Ibn Khaldoun (died 1282), and the mathematician, Ibn el Banna (died 1321).
Thus Fès supplied the intellectual élite of the country, along with many of its leading merchants, and you will find Fassis (the people of Fès) in most towns and cities. They are rightly proud of their city; their self-confidence, verging at times on self-satisfaction, is a distinctive trait, making them rather different from most other Moroccans. Fès does not have the immediate friendliness of the villages, the mountains or the desert but it is a city well worth spending time in – like it or not, it will not leave you indifferent. Driss Chraïbi, for one, in his 1954 breakthrough novel Le Passé Simple, certainly did not mince his words: “I do not like this city. It is my past and I don’t like my past. I have grown up, I have pruned myself back. Fès has quite simply shrivelled up. However, I know that as I go deeper into the city it seizes me and makes me entity, quantum, brick among bricks, lizard, dust – without me needing to be aware of it. Is it not the city of the Lords?”
Settlers from Andalucía and Kairouan
The first settlement here was the village Medinat Fès founded in 789/90 by Moulay Idriss. However the town proper was founded by his son Idriss II as Al Aliya in 808/9. Muslim families, refugees from Cordoba and surrounding areas of Andalucía soon took up residence in the Adwa al Andalusiyin quarter. Later 300 families from Kairouan (in contemporary Tunisia), then one of the largest Muslim towns in North Africa, settled on the opposite bank, forming Adwa al Qaraouiyine. The Qaraouiyine Mosque, perhaps the foremost religious centre of Morocco, is the centre of a university founded in 859, one of the most prestigious in the Arab World. The influence of the university grew a few centuries later under the Merinids with the construction of colleges or medersas. On the right bank of the Oued Boukhrareb, the Jamaâ Madlous or Andalusian Mosque was also founded in the ninth century and remains the main mosque of Adoua el Andalus.
Almoravids and Almohads
The two parts of Fès el Bali were united by the Almoravids in the 11th century, and Fès became one of the major cities of Islam. In the 12th century the Qaraouiyine mosque was enlarged to its present form; one of the largest in North Africa, it can take up to 22,000 worshippers. The Almohads strengthened the fortifications of the great city. Under both dynasties Fès was in competition with the southern capital of Marrakech.
Growth of Fès under the Merinids
Fès reached its peak in the Merinid period, when the dynasty built the new capital of Fès el Jedid containing the green-roofed Dar al Makhzen still occupied by the monarch, the Grand Mosque with its distinctive polychrome minaret dating from 1279, and the mellah, to which the Jews of Fès el Bali were moved in 1438. The Merinid sultans Abu Said Uthman and Abu Inan left a particularly notable legacy of public buildings, including the Medersa Bou Inania, several mosques and the Merinid Tombs. The Zaouïa of Moulay Idriss, housing the tomb of Idriss II, was rebuilt in 1437. In the 15th century Fès consolidated its position as a major centre for craft industries and trade.
From Saâdian Fès to the present
Under the Saâdians (15th to 16th centuries) Fès declined, with a degree of antagonism between the authorities and the people. The Saâdians did however refortify the city, adding the Borj Sud and Borj Nord fortresses on the hills to the south and north of the city.
Under the Alaouites, Fès lost ground to the expanding coastal towns, which were far better located to benefit from trade with Europe. The occupation of Algeria also meant Fès was out of phase with the huge changes taking place to the east. In 1889 the French writer Pierre Loti described it as a dead city. However, the dynasty had added a number of new medersa and mosques, and reconstructed other important buildings.
The French entered Fès in 1911, but proved unable to gain full control of the city and its hinterland. Plans to make it the Protectorate’s capital were thus abandoned. In any case, Rabat on the coast was better located with respect to fertile farmlands and ports. Although the ville nouvelle, also often referred to as Dar Dbibagh, was founded in 1916, it dates principally from the late 1920s. French policy was to leave the historic quarters intact, preserved in their traditional form. Since the early 1990s, the city has exploded beyond its former limits, with huge new areas of low rise housing on the hills behind the Borj Sud at Sahrij Gnaoua and to the north at Dhar Khemis and Bab Siffer.
