Goodbye, Fez

I was prodded awake by an airport security boot.  I rolled over and glared blearily at the owner of the boot, punched my suitcase into a better pillow shape and straightened the bed of clothes I was sleeping on, trying to get some cushioning on the cold metal shelf.

            “Salaam alaikum,” I said.

            “Wa alaikum salaam,” he said.  One thing I love about ritual greetings is that they’re so engrained that you respond automatically, no matter the situation – even when the person you’re greeting is a vagrant who’s sleeping in a restricted area.

 

            “All is well?” I continued.

            “All is well.”

            “How is it with you, brother?”

            “It is fine, brother.”

            “Alhamdu lilah.”

            “Alhamdu lilah.”

            The security guard paused.  It’s hard to yell at someone for vagrancy when you’ve just finished praising Allah together. 

            “Why are you here?” he said.

            “I am sleeping.”

            “Why are you sleeping here?”

            It was a good question.  I was on the bottom of a rack of steel shelves set into the wall of the baggage handlers’ area in the Casablanca airport.  It had gotten colder during the night, and the cold of the metal had reached through my makeshift bedding and set me shivering.  Not comfy, but a lot cheaper than a taxi ride and a hotel.  The airline had cancelled my flight without telling me, and my flight was the next day, so it seemed easiest just to stay at the airport. 

            “It’s clean here, and no one will kill me in my sleep.”

            “You cannot sleep here.”

            “My friend, be kind.  I came from Fez last night to fly to Egypt, but my plane was not here.  I have another plane today, but I can’t afford a hotel.  I just want to sleep a little.” 

            He fingered the shirt cuffs of his spiffy new uniform nervously; I don’t think his training manual covered this.

            “You cannot sleep here.  But if you need to sleep, you can go to my family’s house.  My mother will cook breakfast.”

            I blinked.  No matter how long I’m in this country, intense and sudden displays of generosity always catch me by surprise.  He meant it, too.

            “That isn’t necessary.  But thank you very much.  It is time to get up anyway.”

            The security guard helped me gather my things and stuff them into my suitcase. 

            “I’ll see you, brother,” he said.

            “I’ll see you, inshallah.”

            “Ma salaama.”

            “Ma salaama.”

            I was in a good mood as I staggered over to the airport café, considering the fact I’d just spent the night in a luggage shelf.  It was partly because of the short but beautiful human connection I’d just shared, and partly because the entire conversation had been in Arabic. 

            That would have seemed impossible even a month and a half ago.  Arabic, in case I’ve failed to mention it before, is hard.  The conjugations, the pronunciation, the persnickety grammar – it’s a bitch, and what makes it harder is that that no one actually speaks the type of Arabic I know.  I’d pretty much given up on the idea of having any kind of real conversation in it and was just biding my time until I could take a break from Classical to learn a local dialect.  This was frustrating, since it meant that I wasn’t going to be able to have any close relationships with locals in Morocco.

            A mentor appeared in the unlikely form of Ozzie, a nineteen-year-old American student at my school who shared a house with me for a few months.  Ozzie would be the first to admit that he wasn’t the world’s greatest student – his attendance was spotty, homework was a vague suggestion, and he had a habit of taking long trips overseas in the middle of the school term.  But put this kid on the street, and he was like a goddamn local.  He reeled off slang words and local greetings, switching from Classical to dialect seamlessly.  Walking with Ozzie through the old medina was always an exercise in patience, because he’d have to stop every ten feet to talk to a friend – not just say hi, but do the full handshake, ritual greeting, pull in for the kiss on either cheek.  Most of the Arabic he used every day he’d never learned in class, just picked it up during the hours every day he spent at the local shops, sipping mint tea and bullshitting with his friends. 

            Once I realized Ozzie wasn’t putting on a show, that he actually did enjoy this stuff, my first thought wasn’t very charitable:  I’m supposed to be the fucking Peace Corps.  He was picking up an entire language (two languages, really) just from osmosis and practice, the way human beings are supposed to.  Peace Corps had taught me that was the best way to understand a culture and a tongue, but somehow a year and a half in the States had made me forget it.  I thought I could pick it up from lectures and textbooks, which is absurd.  Language isn’t about the classroom, it’s about the world, and if you don’t want to speak to locals, why are you learning it in the first place?

            Of course, it’s a lot easier to say that than to live it.  It’s tough for an ADD boy from the world of hash tags and streaming video to sit down in a shop for an hour and struggle to just talk.  For every idea successfully communicated there’s five minutes where you just smile and nod, not understanding what the hell they’re talking about and not feeling it’s worth it to find out.  You tend to have the same couple conversations over and over. 

            But once I started making the commitment, it really paid off.  My speaking and comprehension shot up, making more progress in a few weeks than in the three months before.  I made friends in the medina, real friends, not just guys that I saw sometimes and said hi to.  I ate at their houses, met their families.  Yesterday I made a final circuit of my neighborhood to make my goodbyes.  I thought it would take about half an hour, instead it took three.  I hadn’t realized just how many friends I’d made here or how attached I’d become. 

            There are two guys in particular I’ll miss.  Saiid runs a teleboutique, a small shop with public phones that also sells well as candies and sodas and whatnot.  Every time I walked in his face would light up and he’d clear a place for me to sit behind the counter.  Once I told him that I needed a pair of running pants, but I didn’t want to get ripped off.  Right in the middle of the day, he closed up his shop, walked me over to a friend of his on the other side of the medina, and got me a cheaper price than I’d seen anywhere else. 

At one point we were having a conversation about why Western women feel so uncomfortable in Morocco, with the constant harassment on the streets.  Saiid told me that most of the young men here are decent guys, but many were dogs, sniffing and barking after every skirt they see.  He acted it out, getting down on all fours and pretending to chase after an American girl, and I laughed so hard I think I peed a little.  After that, every time we were in his shop and we saw a young guy harassing women in the street we’d bark and howl at him.

            Another man, Aziz, owned a general store near our old house.  He’s the kind of guy you want to get to know, with connections throughout the city – it’s weird the number of times I’ve been in a completely different part of Fez, I’ll mention the neighborhood where I live, and they’ll say, “Do you know Aziz?”  His shop is just a hole in the wall – no seating, you can’t even go inside – but it’s one of the major community hubs, with people stopping by at all hours to pick up something for the house or just hang out for a while.  I’ve spent a ridiculous amount of time hanging out by that shop, one arm on the counter, chatting with the endless flow of neighborhood denizens that is always streaming by. 

One time I went out with Aziz to a bar, actually a fairly classy joint, which is unusual for Fez.  We met some Lithuanian tourists and went back to their riad for drinks.  I hadn’t seen Aziz drink that much, but apparently he’d been knocking them back without me noticing, because at about one in the morning the riad manager quietly told me that I needed to clean up my friend and get him home.  I found him bent over the Moroccan toilet (which is just a hole in the floor), looking like absolute hell.  Together we trekked through the medina, stopping every fifty yards or so for him to be sick.  It was an interesting evening, worth a little XP if nothing else.

All this means that I finally lived in Fez.  I loved the city as soon as I set foot in it, but I loved it as an outsider, exploring the winding alleys and watching the bustle of life.  Once I made some relationships, I was actually a part of that life.

            I would say I’m sorry to leave, but that wouldn’t be true.  Not that I’m eager to get away from Fez, far from it, but my next step is just so goddamn cool that I don’t have much regret.  For those of you unaware, I’m heading to Cairo.  I’m planning to study the Egyptian dialect, which is the most widely spoken of the dialects thanks Egypt’s prolific media industries.  Just about everyone in the Middle East can at least understand Egyptian, since they’ve been listening to it their entire lives. 

More than that, though, I get to watch history happen.  Egypt is in many ways a new country, with all the birthing pains and uncertainty that entails.  The signs aren’t all positive; it’s going to be a long and difficult road – and I’m lucky enough to see it take the first steps.

Taza, pt.2

It’s one of those funny quirks of life is that the day before a trip tends to be absolutely awful.  Unlikely obstacles gang up to throw themselves into your path with a conspiratorial glee, like packs of cowardly dogs.  Such was the case the day before my trip to Taza.  Read previous entry for details.

Sometimes, though, the pre-travel day is so miserable that the actual day of the trip feels bad for you and turns out extra cool just to compensate.  It’s nice when fate takes a little pity on you while it’s kicking you in the gut.

As I’d said in my last post, some friends and I had planned on a day trip to the nearby town of Taza, which apparently had mountains and canyons and spectacular vistas and whatnot. 

I was a little leery of taking our little rental car, battered and ancient as it was, up the twisting Moroccan mountain passes.  Actually, I was goddamn terrified.  Mountain roads in developing countries are death traps – tiny little dirt ledges cut into the sheer mountainsides, barely wide enough for two cars to pass abreast.  Add in the fact that stepping behind the wheel will turn the most sober and responsible Moroccan into a murderous psychopath and you’ve got a recipe for an exciting little drive.

All this was on my mind as I went my first faltering miles into the maze of the Rif Mountains near Taza, but soon I was just having too good a time to worry much.  Anyone who likes driving can’t resist a good twisty mountain road – the spectacular views, the tight turns, the all-too-reasonable fear of death.

We passed a canyon at one point with a little waterfall cutting down the center and couldn’t resist the urge to get out and explore a little.  It was a little eerie just how similar it was to the Jemez and southern Rockies where I grew up, so I was feeling nostalgic as I hopped and skipped like an eight-year-old down the dirt path on the side of the canyon. 

I was a ways ahead of my friends when I got to the bottom, where the waterfall emptied out into a pond that was the perfect shade of pure blue.  (Julian – it was pure water).  It was a magical place, and I wasn’t the only one who thought so: a group of young Moroccan guys were hanging out nearby, cooking fish and brewing tea.  When they saw me they hopped up and came forward, waving.

To be honest, I was a little leery at first, and I made sure to keep the pond between us, which must have seemed pretty rude.  But it was hard to shake the constant litany of warnings I’d gotten since arriving in Morocco about how dangerous it is and how careful you have to be whenever you’re go anywhere that’s slightly off the beaten tourist track.  Apparently around every corner robbers wait in malevolent silence, ready to murder you, steal your valuables and desecrate your corpse. 

It’s bullshit.  The only time I’ve had any concerns for my safety here was when I trespassed on someone’s property.  They were understandably pissed, and came after me to make sure I hadn’t stolen anything or done any damage.  Every other time I’ve met someone in a situation that might be dangerous, they’ve turned out to be incredibly friendly.  I’m not saying that there aren’t desperate and violent people out there, I’m just saying that the vast, vast majority are wonderful, welcoming people are delighted to see a Westerner get away from the normal tourist spots to see a little of the real Morocco. 

These guys were no different.  Once I’d gotten over my timidity and came to join them they shared their tea and fish and we relaxed in the sun for a while.  My friends all spoke Arabic much better than I did, so once they joined us we were able to have a decent conversation and enjoy the day together.  It felt like being back in Peace Corps, which was great.

After we said goodbye we loaded back up into the car and made our winding way to the Friouato Caves.  I’ve been to tourist cave systems in America, like Carlsbad Caverns – lit with electric bulbs, accessible via carefully groomed pathways, with helpful plaques every hundred feet to tell you what the big lump of rock you’re looking at is supposed to be. 

This was not like that.  The initial descent was down a tiny concrete stairway cut precariously into the side of a giant chasm that plunged over 700 feet straight down.  My friend counted 658 stairs before she lost track.  Once at the bottom we donned our hardhats and headlamps and squeezed through a crack in the wall, into a tight, long tunnel that cut deeper into the earth without the helpful assistance of stairs, lights or sanity.

At that point we were spelunking, and we found out, as millions of spelunkers have before us, why it’s called that.  Caves are wet.  Each stalactite might only loose a drop every couple hours, but add that up over millions of years without a decent maid service and the whole place gets pretty damp.  Every surface was slick with a kind of muddy, calciumated, gritty ichor that clung to your clothes and skin.  It certainly which made climbing interesting.  Each of us slipped and fell at least once, and by the end we were coated with mud and slime. 

At one point the only way forward was to cross deep pools of stagnant cave water, which we managed with the aid of some bridges the cave owners had helpfully set in place.  When I say bridges, of course, I mean planks of rotting wood less than a foot wide, slippery as a dog’s nose.  I can’t remember the last time I’ve had so much fun walking ten feet.

That’s another thing I love about being in developing countries.  A tourist attraction like this could never exist in America; the lawsuits would be through the roof.  Liability insurance would be more than all your operational costs combined.  You’d have to put in those electric lights and concrete paths and stupid little plaques, and no one would get to walk the planks.  You’d have to tame the place.

After climbing back out of the caves and changing out of our filthy clothes, we piled back into the car and got on the road.  I was enjoying the drive, and on a whim I took a random turn that led down into a small valley.  For some reason people I travel with don’t like it when I do stuff like that.  We were all in a pretty good mood, though, so there weren’t too many arguments when I said I just wanted to see the bottom of the valley then come back up and rejoin the main road. 

Maybe it’s my vanity talking, but I always get the vague feeling that fate likes it when I do shit like this.  It tends to reward me with random coincidences and strange adventures.  This time, we saved some German hikers. 

We saw the three of them about three-quarters of the way down, struggling up the road and about ready to drop.  Their massive backpacks swaying back and forth made them look like exhausted blonde hermit crabs.  It was two men, a woman and their dog, and they had gotten lost hours earlier and wound up at the bottom of the valley, a couple dozen miles from their truck, which was at the top of a nearby mountain.  We squeezed one of the men in and ferried him to his car.  I assume he went back to pick up his friends, although for all I know he could have just high-tailed it out of there.  Still, karma points are rare these days, and you pick them up when you can.

At that point it was getting on to dinnertime, and none of us had eaten since breakfast.  The German who’d come with us told us about a restaurant he’d heard was in a nearby village, so we set off to find it.  It wasn’t in the village he’d mentioned, or the one after it, or the one after that.  People we stopped on the road kept assuring us it was just a little ways ahead, always just one village away.  Every so often we saw a small cardboard sign pointing the way, taunting us. 

After over an hour and a half of questing through the mountains we finally stumbled on one of the most beautiful hotels I’d ever seen.  This place was like a fairy tale castle, with gardens, towers, and a sprawling villa.  Thrilled, starved, and in a state of shock we stopped the car outside the gate and rang the bell.  No answer.  We knocked, we banged loudly, we shouted – nothing.  A few passing locals assured us that there were people inside, though, and since it was either find them or drive starving back to Fez, I climbed the wall. 

I felt like kind of a jerk, sneaking onto this spectacular estate that someone had clearly put so much time and money into.  Chalk it up to hunger, desperation, and a completely unjustified feeling of justification – we’d come so far! 

Waiting for me on the other side was a massive German shepherd, a monster straight out of mythology whose ancestors must have mated with a bear at some point in his evolution.  The damn thing looked like a direwolf.  He stared at me with eyes that cut straight through the rational front of my mind and into the reptilian hindbrain, where fear lurks, the part that still remembers being a shivering primate, hiding from predators in the Mezosoic nights.  Then, without breaking eye contact, the hellbeast wagged his tail, lay down, and rolled over for a belly rub. 

He followed me cheerfully as I explored the sprawling grounds of the hotel, complete with swimming pools, a performance area, and a vegetable garden large enough to feed a village.  I thought the place was deserted until I accidentally scared the hell out of some cooks when I wandered into the dining room.  They said the owner was away for the evening and the kitchen was closed. 

My Arabic wasn’t really up to the task of begging for my dinner, so I called in my friend Caitlyn, who’s been studying in Fez for the last eight months and is as close to fluent as makes no difference.  She also speaks French, and is generally a useful person to have around, a kind of linguistic Swiss army knife.  Somehow she managed to convince them to open the kitchen and cook us dinner, because she has powers I do not understand.

I was hoping for just a sandwich or some soup or something.  Instead they rolled out a four-course dinner, with salads, fresh breads, a fruit and cheese plate, and a main course of grilled lamb and mushroom.  It was incredible, easily the best meal I’ve had in Morocco.  They topped it all off with a desert of diced fruit and cream in bowls of rosewater topped with cream.  I didn’t even know that rosewater was a thing you ate.  The whole thing was like a dream - I kept expecting us to get turned into swine or something. 

Stuffed and happy, we loaded back into the car and made our way back to Fez.  Every so often you get a good day, and when you do you gotta squeeze all the day out of it you can.  

Taza, pt. 1

Yes, yes, it’s Saturday. Saturday at 5 a.m., in my defense, so I’m not that far off the mark. Friday ended up being much, much longer than I’d thought it would be. You see, things don’t work as smoothly here as they do in America. Those of my readers who have been doing it for a while now will point out that living in America is not as easy as we make it look, and they’re right – but life in Morocco has an extra level of difficulty layered on top to make it especially hard to digest, like a fried egg on a hamburger.

But just like that delicious piece of heart-attack bait, the experience is usually worth it. I spent all of today (Yesterday? I haven’t slept, so it all blends together) in a fight with the landlords of the property I’m moving out of, a beautiful ancient riad in the heart of the old city of Fez. A riad is a sort of multi-level house/apartment, with a big central courtyard, sitting rooms, and a rooftop terrace. Ours was beautiful – one of the most incredible houses I’ve seen, with intricate tilework and calligraphy racing up the walls, a nearly 360 degree view from the terrace that took in the entire city and mountains beyond, and, fulfilling just about every dream I’ve had since childhood, a spiral staircase in my room leading up to my loft bed. The place has been a living dream, and it’s a shame to end it on such a rude awakening.

I won’t get into all the details of the fight – it’s essentially a point of view conflict, with my idea of what a landlord should do conflicting with his idea of what a tenant should pay for. We’ve all had arguments like that, except in this one I was reduced to stammering out mangled sentences in Arabic to try to beat back the torrent of abuse that flowed over me for hours. Dear god, no one can talk non-stop like an angry Arab. I felt battered by words, punch-drunk and dazed.

It’s all part of the Morocco tax. Life here, for the most part, is wonderful. Prices are cheap, the food is delicious, the experiences come thick, and the only acceptable form of coffee is espresso. Those who brave the expatriate life here find many rewards, but they always pay the Morocco tax – that extra bit of difficulty that lives in the gap between cultures.

Case in point – transportation. It’s fairly easy to get across the country, due to a stable bus industry, a nice set of railroads, and a fleet of long-distance taxis. Moving a short distance is usually much harder. A few weeks ago some friends and I decided to explore the mountains near Taza, a nearby town that’s supposed to have some of the best hiking in the country. In particular, we wanted to see the Friouato Caves, the deepest cave system in North Africa. The caves were just a few kilometers from the town, while the town was over a hundred kilometers away, but the trip from the town to the caves would cost over ten times as much as that to the city.

So we decided to rent a car, figuring we’d enjoy the extra freedom that we’d get having our own set of wheels. There are car rental places everywhere in the new part of Fez, I figured it wouldn’t be a problem to bop in and grab one for the day. Because I’m stupid.

My first and biggest mistake was trying to rent this car on a Friday, after lunch. Friday’s the prayer day in Islam, and it’s a lot like Christian Sunday in that most people use the time after worship to eat, relax with their families, and visit friends. You see a lot of Friday picnics. So no one’s in any particular mood to rent out cars, if the businesses are open at all. I spent a lovely five hours trucking from agency to agency, haggling with shop owners and making all sorts of ridiculous demands, like working breaks and a lack of smoke gushing from the hood.

I finally got a decent car for a decent price and took it to the parking lot near my house, where I noticed for the first time, again because I’m stupid, that there were no seatbelts in the back seat. Moroccans have a deep hatred for seatbelts. More than once I’ve gotten into the front seat of a taxi and reached for my seatbelt, only to be physically restrained by the driver. I don’t know what the deal is. Maybe I’m insulting their driving skills, or they think the things are dangerous, or – and I’m playing with a little fire here – there’s a fatalism that comes from some types of religious perspectives that makes you less likely to watch out for your safety. It’s up to God whether you get in a car crash, and putting on a seatbelt is interfering with his plan. (This isn’t conjecture, by the way – several people have told me exactly that.)

Whatever the reason, the rental company had decided to put the seatbelts behind the back seat, then bolt the seat into the frame of the car. This went far beyond what the manufacturers had done – they actually attached the seats to a thick frame of plywood and iron, then spot-weld the damn thing to the car, to make it just about impossible to pull the back seat up and get the seatbelts out. It took two hours, with the help of half a dozen guys who were hanging out in the parking lot after dark, to undo the bolts with my Leatherman and yank the damn seat out of the car. Not just the cushions, the entire back seat, top and bottom. Got the seatbelts out, then put the whole damn thing back in. At this point I was ready to just say screw the trip and set the whole fucking car on fire.

I’m glad I didn’t, though, because it turned out to be one of the best experiences I’ve had in this country. The full description, though, will have to wait until tonight or tomorrow, because I’ve just run out of time. Got a ferry to catch to Spain. Sorry to leave you hanging again, but this story shall be told! Tune in… soon. No promises this time. There will be caves! And mud! And great deeds of derring do!

Hungry

The funny thing about living in a fairy-tale city, one that delivers fresh exoticisms daily to your door, is that familiarity still ends up breeding contempt. Contempt is too strong – I’m still besotted with this city and drunk on its secrets. Maybe restless is a better word. There isn’t much difference between a weekday and a weekend in Fes, except that I don’t have to go to class, which makes it easy to just cozy up in a café with a book and let the day spend itself. To keep active and to avoid squandering this gift of five months in Morocco, I try to get out of town every other weekend or so.

You’ve heard already about the trip to the Sahara, where I discussed etymology with Achmed, my Berber camel guide and the first actual person I’d met with that name. I felt like I was back in New Mexico, soaking up the sun and the sand and the big big blue sky (and there’s really nothing like a sunset over a sand dune. It blazes a kind of screaming orange just before touching the horizon and for a second colors the sands between you to match, like a light on a wavy mirror.)

One thing I didn’t mention was the abandoned village we visited. It was on the other side of the big dunes from the town, about two hours’ camel ride, and I could tell walking through that it used to be a prosperous enough town, long ago. It had about two dozen houses, with wells and goat pens and cleared spaces for gardens. The houses were ruins, most of the mud walls were partially collapsed and the roofs had caved in. The largest of the houses was once a mansion – eight rooms, a stable, a banquet hall and an outer wall. Achmed coaxed me up onto the roof and we peered down into what must have been the Playboy Mansion of the Sahara.

“A very rich family lived here,” he told me. “They traded with merchants passing through from Algeria and owned a mine in the mountains.”

“What happened?” I asked.

“It all dried up. This area used to have grass most of the year. People grew dates and olives, kept cattle.”

“What did they mine?”

“Fossils, for the tourists.”

“Seriously?”

“Yes, the Germans especially, they loved the fossils.”

“Germans? Wait, when was this town abandoned?”

He counted in his head, searching for the English numbers. “I think in, two thousand and six, maybe.”

“You’re saying people lived here,” I waved, taking in the barren sands, the decaying ruins, the absolute lack of any goddamn thing, “less than six years ago?”

Achmed nodded. “My cousins lived here. They sold spices and olive oil. But then the grass dried, and everyone who could afford it moved away, to the big cities. If they had no money, they came to live in my town. Their relatives made space for them a place to live in their own houses, and food and water. But living that way, on charity, it’s not good for a man and a family."

There was actually one family still living there, and they made us lunch as we rested from the sun in one of the more intact ruins. God knows what they lived on, other than selling lunch to camel-jockey tourists.

I try not to get political in this blog, but this hit me hard, and I have to talk about it for a second. Climate change is screwing these people. They bear none of the responsibility but most of the burden.

This town was thriving less than a decade ago, now it has dried up and withered away, as have countless other tiny settlements along the Sahara. The desert is gobbling up more land every year, consuming lives and communities with a bland and patient hunger. You can dismiss doomsday prophecies about the seas rising, but you can’t dismiss the empty shells that used to be people’s homes. This is happening; this is now.

Another thing that hit me from this trip is how much I’d missed travelling on my own. I love travelling with my friends, of course, and some of the best times in my life have been two-man road trips or excursions with Peace Corps buddies. But there’s a lot to be said for striking out alone, just buying a bus ticket and seeing where it takes you. With no one to answer to but yourself there’s no deliberating or coaxing. You’re free to follow your every whim and explore whatever you want, earning great XP and picking up stories that no one will believe. Without someone to speak English and make Big Lebowski references with, there’s no buffer between you and the culture you’re wading through. It’s just you versus the world.

That said, I had another amazing trip with a group of good friends a few weeks ago, when we rented a car, crawled through miles of dank caverns, saved some German backpackers, broke into a hotel to forage for food and ended up getting a five-course meal. I’m reaching the end of your attention span, though, so I’m going to save it for next time.

And before you roll your eyes and assume that’ll be another three weeks – Lauren – I’m making a personal pledge that I will post the next entry this Friday, just two days away. Look at all the Yahya you get in just one week!

Rulez is rulez

Arabic is a wonderfully insane language. It reminds me of Calvinball from Calvin and Hobbes. The only rule of Calvinball is that you can make up the rules on the spot, and you never play with the same rules twice. If you score a goal, the other team might have secretly switched the goals, so they get a point – unless it’s backwards day, of course, when the goals switch back. Every rule has exceptions, and those exceptions have exceptions. Finishing a game is just about impossible.

Arabic is similar, except all the rules were invented centuries ago by overly-intellectual scholars who apparently had nothing better to do than come up with ever-more obscure rules to complicate their language.

First you have the letters, which are written differently depending on whether they’re at the beginning, middle, or end of a word. Then you have case endings, which change the endings of some (but not all) words depending on the role of the word in the sentence. There are twelve pronouns, each with its own set of conjugations. Then you’ve got plurals, which are much more than just adding an “s” to the end of a noun – you change the word completely, sometimes based on a regular pattern but usually not, so that every for every single noun you have to memorize two distinct words, the singular and the plural. There’s also a special form you use for a group of two.

Numbers in general have their own special neuroses. You use the singular form for one, the dual for two, the plural for between three and ten, then for anything larger you go back to the singular, adding a few letters at the end just to make sure it doesn’t get too easy. Nouns and adjectives agree on gender, just like French and Spanish, except for numbers, which reverse agree – but only between three and ten. Also, any group of non-human nouns, like “books” or “chameleons”, gets treated like a single feminine noun. If the sentence starts with a verb, though, there’s no number agreement at all. If the moon is waxing, all verbs are in the masculine form until sundown, unless there’s a menstruating cat within a hundred steps of your house.

And I’ve only scratched the surface. I’m studying Fus’ha, also known as Modern Standard Arabic, which is the language of business and the media. It’s based on Classical Arabic, the language of ancient poetry and scripture, which is so complicated that Muslim scholars spend their entire lives untangling its grammar.

I imagine a group of crotchety old men sitting around a mosque fifteen hundred years ago, striving to outdo each other to invent the craziest rule.

“All right, all right, I’ve got one. We’ll make them conjugate a verb differently if it’s used in a request instead of a command.”

“Yeah! And if it comes after a pronoun instead of a noun!”

“I like it. Hard to remember, easy to screw up – you’ve got style. How about we get rid of the vowels?”

“What, all of them?”

“Most of them.”

“Don’t we need vowels?”

“Not for reading. Don’t write them down, just let people guess”

“But so many of our words are almost identical! How will people know what they’re reading if they’re not already familiar with the language?”

“Exactly.”

“Ooh. I just got shivers.”

Here’s the thing, though – there’s a method to the madness. Arabic is a constructed language, logically and lovingly fashioned according to a specific plan. Each word is based on a root of just three letters, with a template to specify the meaning.

Example: the word “kitaab” means “book”, and “maktaba” means library. “Darassa” is lesson, and “madrassa” is school. To create a word meaning the place for something, you take the root letters and stick them into the “ma_a_a” template. You can use this to make any word. If I know “play” is “la’ib”, I can make “playing field” just by throwing the template on to make “mala’iba”.

Isn’t that cool? It’s an incredible tool for prose – you can invent a new word on the fly, and anyone coming across it will immediately know what it means even if they’ve never seen it before. It allows Arabic to be a truly living language, growing and evolving as old tools are used to create new ideas. The system makes so much sense you wonder why every language wasn’t built this way.

This same devotion to logic can be seen in Arabic artwork, too, particularly the tilework. Wander into an older, upscale building and you’ll see beautiful, convoluted tile patterns festooning every wall. They’re not just for show – each color has a meaning, and the layout of the tiles is strictly determined according to a geometrical progression. If the center holds a twelve-pointed star, then there will always be six sections radiating out from it, and within those sections will be six-pointed stars, six-sided shapes, and infinite variations on that theme. You’d think such a rigid structure would repress creativity, but it’s like a haiku or a sonnet - art is enhanced by discipline.

I’m told that Islam itself carries a similar zeal for logic. It certainly has a thing for numbers – five prayers a day, five pillars, the mathematics of the calendar, the 99 names of Allah. During Ramadan in the Gambia, when people fast all day and eat after sundown, the official fast-breaking time was precisely one minute later every day (which was funny, because it was the only time I ever saw a Gambian care about the exact time). My Muslim friends say that logical thought is one of the cornerstones of their faith, and one even claimed to be able to logically prove the truth of his religion.

I love the idea of a language, a culture and a faith built on logic, and I can’t help feeling some regret when I think about it. It’s hard to look around and make the honest case that the modern Arab world has kept its ancestor’s devotion to logic. None of the dialects that are actually spoken on the street have the root and template pattern of Fus’ha – no more inventing words. Artists either copy the works of their forebears or work in new styles that are more free and open, without any connection to mathematics or geometry. And while you could call modern Arabic society many things – evolving, passionate, complicated – logical isn’t the first word that springs to mind.

I say all this with a deep respect and affection for the culture (I’m living here, after all), and I say it knowing that many Arabic intellectuals agree with me. My professor, a brilliant and intimidating bullet of a man named Abdelhafid, spends a good fifteen minutes out of every lecture bemoaning the loss of Fus’ha in everyday speech and the loss of logic in everyday thought. The civilization that invented algebra, chess, and inoculation is struggling to catch up to a world that leapfrogged it long ago.

In the 9^th century, Mulim scholars not only knew the world was round, but calculated its circumference to within less than 200km. Now that the world is flat, competitive, and looking more every day like one big game of Calvinball, it’s time to remember how to make new words.