Elaine Byrne, Sunday Times, 28 August 2011
My photos of Morocco
My interview on RTE’s John Murray Show about Ramadan, the thirty days of fasting from water & food from sunrise to sunset – from Marrakesh. Also with two Irish women who are converts to Islam, Carol-Ann Duggan & Charlotte Morshed. (about 30-40mins in)
‘You weren’t at mass this morning, of all mornings,” my sister said to me on the phone. “He praised you from the altar for representing the local community in the national media.” “He” is one of my closest friends, a Monsignor nearing retirement who is hoping that Rome will overlook him when it comes to appoint Irish bishops.
“You haven’t told him yet,” my sister guessed. A little defensively, I replied that I was going up to have breakfast with him. “Father,” I told him, “I’ve decided to do Ramadan, one of the five pillars of Islam, to experience what it’s like to be a Muslim.”
We had been over this ground before – Passover in Jerusalem, the evangelicals in Ghana, the Dublin Protestant phase, and then those factory rituals of Havana graveyards. “I’ll be travelling for a month, mostly to the Moroccan villages near the Sahara,” I told him. He laughed. “Are you sure you know what you’re letting yourself in for?” he cautioned. As it turned out, I hadn’t a clue.
The holy town of Moulay Idriss is named after Morocco’s St Patrick. The great grandson of the prophet Mohammed now resides here in a tomb, and is a focus of national pilgrimage each year.
The town is an extraordinary feat of traditional structural engineering practised over thousands of years, with hundreds of small, white-washed houses piled impossibly high on a small hill.
Ramadan – the 30 days of fasting from sunrise to sunset – has a sound that releases itself once a day. In accordance with the cycle of the moon, fasting begins at 3.30am and ends at 7.20pm.
First, children run to collect freshly baked breads – batbout, beghrir and harcha – which complement the harira soup, the mainstay ingredients of “breakfast” or iftar. Hunger and thirst manifest themselves in loud angry exchanges on the streets. At 6pm, the noise of anticipation begins. As the sun goes down, the minutes are counted. People watch the sun from the balconies, and the noise subsides into a waiting silence.
Allahu Akbar. Ash hadu al-la ilaha illa llah.
The call to prayer descends. The sun disappears, the fast is broken; it is time to eat and drink. As if by turning off a switch, a town of thousands is rendered silent. There is a collective sense that everybody is in it together, eating the same foods at exactly the same time, sharing that same experience.
Travelling on your own, and being unable to speak Arabic or Berber, lends itself to random situations. A man on a bus took it upon himself to decide that a nondescript and dusty village of 250 people, which had absented itself from the Ziz valley map, was my stop.
I ended up the only guest in the only hotel in Oulad Chaker, about 50 miles from the Sahara, with temperatures approaching 50C. My hooded djellaba, similar to that worn by Yoda from Star Trek, was my sole protection against the intense sun.
A Westerner wearing traditional Moroccan garments made a big impression on Said, the hotel owner, and over pots of mint tea and his wife’s cooking, he decided we would hitchhike to the desert the next day to meet his friends. The external observer listening to Ramadan was now becoming part of it.
I was a bad Muslim from the start, drinking water during daylight. So what did 16 hours of voluntary thirst in extreme heat feel like? “It is my life. It is obligatory,” Said said. “When the sun sets it will be good again.” The complete acceptance of it meant self-discipline was no longer necessary; abstinence was normal.
On the edge of sunset and after hours of 50C-plus temperatures, we walked through the black volcano sand that marks the entry to the Sahara. “Are you sure you don’t want even a little water?” I asked, ready to collapse, despite the three litres downed in as many hours. The only concession he made was that permitted by the Koran, briefly gurgling a capful before spitting it out again.
An all-male gathering of camel-owners, hotel workers and the local Muslim cleric, known as an iman, asked me to demonstrate how I prayed. As far as they are concerned, the celibacy of priests, the sexual abuse of children, civil partnership and the absence of virginity upon entering marriage were all signs of Western moral decay.
The iman wanted to know all about the life of my friend, the priest. “Ramadan is not just about fasting from food and drink, it is about purifying the soul through cleansing the body,” he told me to tell the monsignor. “This is a time of self-awareness, when we re-evaluate our life.”
I became part of Said’s family. For almost a week we broke the fast together. It centred on a simple appreciation of food and water that cast a web of silence over the ritual, punctuated only by the prayers from Mecca on the television. After three days, the curiosity of the women of my household overcame their shyness. It was unimaginable to be without children and unmarried at 32, and their circling questions resembled the tactics I had used earlier about the water.
Said’s mother, Khadija, tattooed with lines and dots under her mouth, a Berber mark denoting fertility, watched the liberation of Libya on the Arabic news channel Al Jazeera. “This is our 1989,” Said reflected. “Gadaffi is like Hitler, Look what he has done to his own people.” The waiting for food was now replaced by the waiting for news of rebel advancements, with villagers huddled around their television screens.
Morocco’s newspapers were triumphant.
FRONT PAGE from ElaineByrne on Vimeo.
The Akhbar Press had a four-page special on the fall of Tripoli. The front page had photographs of the Libyan, Egyptian and Tunisian presidents with red crosses over them. There was no picture of Mohammad VI, the Moroccan king. On the day Tripoli was liberated, the king was at large, with large passionate rallies awaiting him in the poor Marrakech suburbs.
This spring Mohammad VI pre-empted serious discontent by introducing constitutional reforms. This included the supposedly radical concession that he must choose the prime minister from the political party that secured the most votes.
Moroccans love their monarchy. They blame poverty and unemployment on the elected politicians, even though their king enjoys a virtual monopoly. Meanwhile, Tuesday marks Eid ul-Fitr, the end of Ramadan, thank God.
