Chapter 8

NOTE ON MOROCCAN ARCHITECTURE

I

M. H. Saladin, whose "Manual of Moslem Architecture" was published in
1907, ends his chapter on Morocco with the words: "It is especially
urgent that we should know, and penetrate into, Morocco as soon as
possible, in order to study its monuments. It is the only country but
Persia where Moslem art actually survives; and the tradition handed down
to the present day will doubtless clear up many things."

M. Saladin's wish has been partly realized. Much has been done since
1912, when General Lyautey was appointed Resident-General, to clear up
and classify the history of Moroccan art; but since 1914, though the
work has never been dropped, it has necessarily been much delayed,
especially as regards its published record; and as yet only a few
monographs and articles have summed up some of the interesting
investigations of the last five years.

II

When I was in Marrakech word was sent to Captain de S., who was with me,
that a Caïd of the Atlas, whose prisoner he had been several years
before, had himself been taken by the Pasha's troops, and was in
Marrakech. Captain de S. was asked to identify several rifles which his
old enemy had taken from him, and on receiving them found that, in the
interval, they had been elaborately ornamented with the Arab niello work
of which the tradition goes back to Damascus.

This little incident is a good example of the degree to which the
mediaeval tradition alluded to by M. Saladin has survived in Moroccan
life. Nowhere else in the world, except among the moribund
fresco-painters of the Greek monasteries, has a formula of art persisted
from the seventh or eighth century to the present day; and in Morocco
the formula is not the mechanical expression of a petrified theology but
the setting of the life of a people who have gone on wearing the same
clothes, observing the same customs, believing in the same fetiches, and
using the same saddles, ploughs, looms, and dye-stuffs as in the days
when the foundations of the first mosque of El Kairouiyin were laid.

The origin of this tradition is confused and obscure. The Arabs have
never been creative artists, nor are the Berbers known to have been so.
As investigations proceed in Syria and Mesopotamia it seems more and
more probable that the sources of inspiration of pre-Moslem art in North
Africa are to be found in Egypt, Persia, and India. Each new
investigation pushes these sources farther back and farther east; but it
is not of much use to retrace these ancient vestiges, since Moroccan art
has, so far, nothing to show of pre-Islamite art, save what is purely
Phenician or Roman.

In any case, however, it is not in Morocco that the clue