Fez, City of Islam is undoubtedly one of Titus Burckhardt’s masterpieces. It conveys a profound understanding of the sacred roots that nourish Islamic culture and civilisation. As a young man in the 1930s, Burckhardt spent some years in Morocco where he became acquainted with several remarkable representatives of the spiritual heritage of the Maghrib. Although he committed much of this experience to writing, it was not until the 1950s that these writings were developed into a book. In Fez, City of Islam, Burckhardt writes of the history of a people and their religion - a history that was often violent, often heroic and sometimes holy. The book relates the teachings, parables and miracles of the saints of many centuries and demonstrates not only the arts and crafts of Islamic civilisation, but also its sciences and administrative skills. Burckhardt’s unique black and white photographs from the 1930s are included. In addition 41 new colour illustrations have been specially selected to enhance Burckhardt’s originals. Here, text and illustrations come together to provide an insight into the way the life of a people can be transformed at every level by a religious tradition.

‘Titus Burckhardt is an authority whose works are a constant source of inspiration...the publication of this book in English is like the unearthing of a great treasure.’ Martin Lings

Other Fons Vitae titles by Titus Burckhardt:

Mystical Astrology According to Ibn 'Arabi	Moorish Culture in Spain	Sacred Art in East and West	Letters of a Sufi Master - The Shaykh ad-Darqawi	Alchemy - Science of the Cosmos, Science of the Soul

[Return to Catalog] - [Fons Vitae titles] - [Sufism] - [Order books] - [The Titus Burckhardt series]

Excerpt from 'Fez':

A geode of amethyst, brimful of thousands of tightly packed crystals and surrounded by a silver-green rim: this was Fez, the Old City of Fez, in the twilight. As we came downhill towards it, the hollow in which it lies grew visibly larger; the countless crystals, uniform in themselves, but irregularly grown into one another, now came more clearly into view; one side of them was light, while the other side, the one facing the prevailing wind, had become darkened and weather-beaten. Between them and the silver-green girdle of olive trees, the wall of the Old City with its towers could be seen. Towards the city gate now facing us—Bab al-Gissa—the small donkey caravans made their way as of old, and from out of the gate into the evening wind and towards the expanse of green, came men and children in Moroccan dress; for it was spring, and the hills round about were covered with yellow and blue flowers.

In the heart of the city, in the lowest point of the hollow, one could make out the tent-shaped roof of green glazed tiles that covers the dome of the tomb of the holy Idris, the founder of Fez; nearby was a minaret. Not far away were the equally green roofs of the old Koranic college of al-Qarawiyyin. The nearer we came to the city, the more minarets rose to Heaven, clear-cut, square, flat-topped towers, similar to the Romanesque city towers of Italy. There must have been hundreds of them. These reveal the position of the larger mosques; even more smaller mosques are hidden from sight in the confusion of the high, grey-white and, at this moment, reddish cubes of houses. A city full of sanctuaries: the European travellers who first visited it at the beginning of the century spoke either of a ‘citadel of fanaticism’, or marvelled at it as a place of perpetual prayer.

I asked myself whether the Old City might have inwardly changed during the twenty-five years that I had been away from it. It still looked the same as before: ancient, weather-beaten, withdrawn inside its walls. Only a few groups of white houses outside in the open ground where no one had previously dared to settle, and a few miserable huts which had crept into deserted lime-pits, showed that the army of the poor had now burst outside the protection of the old walls.

On our left, towards the East, the hollow in which Fez lies opened up towards the plain of the river Sabu: a wide, flat valley on whose horizon a still snow-covered branch of the Middle Atlas, the Bu Iblan, soared. To the West, on a somewhat higher level, began the plain on which lie the medieval Sultan’s city, Fas Jadid ‘New Fez’, and further away, the modem town built by the French.

The city was getting nearer, and at the same time it loomed up within my own mind, rising out of the darkness of memory, with all of its thousand faces pressing upon me questioningly; for Fez had once been familiar to me, well known and yet full of inexhaustible secrets. In it I had experienced another world and another age, a world of the Middle Ages such as perhaps now no longer existed, an austere and yet enticing world, outwardly poor but inwardly rich. It was a city that had had to yield to foreign rule and that had accepted in silence the arrival of a new order dominated by the power of machines, yet inwardly it remained true to itself; for at the time I first knew it, men who had spent their youth in an unaltered traditional world were still the heads of families. For many of them, the spirit which had once created the Mosque at Cordoba and the Alhambra at Granada was nearer and more real than all the innovations that European rule had brought with it.

In front of the city gate there was still the neglected cemetery with its irregular crop of graves between mule tracks and flowering thistles, where children were playing on white slabs and, here and there, men sat silently waiting for sunset and the call to prayer.

Just then the last pink glow on the towers disappeared. The sun had completely set and now only the green-gold of the sky shed a mild, non-shadow-forming light, in which everything seemed to float as if weightless and somehow glowing in itself. At that moment the long-drawn-out call to the sunset prayer rang out from the minarets. Lights appeared in the towers. But the city was silent; only a few cries, like suddenly broken-off laments, reached our ears. The wind which had suddenly arisen and which, high above us in the town, blew from mountain to valley, interrupted the sound. But the people who were waiting had heard the call. One could see both individuals and groups spread out their prayer mats and turn towards the south-east, the direction of Mecca. Others hurried through the city gate to reach a mosque, and it was with the latter that we ourselves entered the city.

We were immediately enveloped in the half-light of the narrow streets which descended steeply from the various gates into the hollow where the great sanctuaries lie surrounded by the bazaars or commercial streets (aswaq; sing. suq). In the streets all that can be seen of the houses are the high walls, darkened with age, and almost entirely without windows. The only open doors are those of the fanadiq (sing. funduq) or caravanserais, where peasants and Bedouins visiting the town leave their steeds and beasts of burden, in open spaces surrounding a courtyard, and where, on the upper storey, they can hire a room to pass the night or store their wares. Otherwise the street is like a deep, half-dark ravine which turns unexpectedly, sometimes here, sometimes there, often covered in by bridges from one building to another and only wide enough to allow two mules to squeeze past each other. Everywhere the cry Balek! Balek! (‘Take care! Take care!’) rings out. Thus do the mule drivers and the porters with heavy loads on their heads make their way through the crowd. Only further down do the shops begin, where the traveller on arrival may find his necessities; there too are the saddlers, the basket-makers and the cookshop-owners, the latter preparing hearty meals on little charcoal fires. We proceeded past them into the street of the spice-dealers (Suq al-Attarin), which runs through the entire town centre, and in which one shop lies hard against the next, a row of simple plain boxes, with shuttered doors in front, just as in Europe in the Middle Ages, and with no more space than will allow the merchant to sit down amongst his piled-up wares.

Nothing stirs the memory more than smells; nothing so effectively brings back the past. Here indeed was Fez: the scent of cedar wood and fresh olives, the dry, dusty smell of heaped-up corn, the pungent smell of freshly tanned leather, and finally, in the Saq al-Attirin, the medley of all the perfumes of the Orient-for here are on sale all the spices that once were brought by merchants from India to Europe as the most precious of merchandise. And every now and again one would suddenly become aware of the sweet smell of sandalwood incense, wafted from the inside of one of the mosques.

Around the Sepulchral Mosque of the holy Idris there is a narrow alley, made inaccessible to horses and mules by means of beams. This constitutes the limits of the hurm, the sacratum, within which formerly no one might be pursued. Only a short time before the French withdrawal was this rule broken for the first time-in the revolt against the French-imposed Sultan Ben Arafa.

We walked along the arabesque-decorated outer walls of the sanctuary, past the little window, covered with an iron grille, which opens on to the tomb, and reached another brightly lit street which brought us into the vicinity of the great mosque and college of al-Qarawiyyin. In the streets surrounding it the advocates and notaries have their little offices and the booksellers and bookbinders have their shops—just like their Christian colleagues of old in the shade of the great cathedrals. As we passed by, we stole a glance through several of the many doors of the mosque and gazed into the illuminated forest of pillars, from which the rhythmical chanting of Koranic suras could be heard.

Then through the district of the coppersmiths, where the hammers were already at rest and only here and there a busy craftsman still polished and examined a vessel in the light of his hanging lamp; soon we reached the bridges in the hollow of the town and ascended from there to the gate on the other side, the Bab al-Futuh. As we looked back we saw the Old City lying beneath us like a shimmering seam of quartz. I now knew that the face of Fez, the old once-familiar and yet foreign Fez, was unaltered. But did its soul live on as formerly?

On one of the following evenings we were invited home by a Moroccan friend, to a house which, like all Moorish houses, opened only onto an inner courtyard, entirely white, where roses grew in profusion and an orange tree sparkled festively with blossoms and fruits. The room on the ground floor, where the guests sat in threes and fours on low divans, opened onto this courtyard. Amongst all the men present, there was also a small dark-skinned Arab boy, whose thin face was as if transfigured by an inward fire as well as by a child-like smile. The master of the house told us he was the best singer of spiritual songs in the whole country. After the meal he invited him to sing to us. The boy shut his eyes and began, softly at first, and then gradually more loudly, to render a qasida, a symbolical love-song. And some of the guests who had gathered near him and had drawn back the hoods of their jellabas sang the refrain, which contained the shahada (the attestation of Divine Unity) in a harsh, ancient Andalusian style. The Arabic verses of the poem grew faster and faster, in a quick, intense tempo, while the answering refrain surged forth in widely extending waves. All of a sudden the volume of the chorus, which until then had only ‘answered’ the singer, flowed on without interruption and branched into several parallel rhythms, above which the voice of the leading singer continued at a higher pitch, like a heavenly exultation above a song of war.

It was miraculous how the many strands of the melody never came together in those accords which allow the flow of feeling to rest as if on a broad couch and which promise to human longing an all too easy, all too human consolation; the melody never turned into a worldly ‘space’, its different strands never came together as if reconciled; they continued endlessly, circling undiminishingly around a silent centre, which became ever more clearly audible, as a timeless presence, an other-worldly ‘space’, without yesterday or tomorrow, a crystalline ‘now’, in which all impatience is extinguished.

This was Fez, unalterable, indestructible Fez.

Table of Contents

Fez: City of Islam

[Return to Catalog] - [Fons Vitae titles] - [Sufism] - [Order books] - [The Titus Burckhardt series]