Al-Eid Mubarak!

For those who don’t follow the Muslim calendar of festivals, Eid al-Kabir (the big celebration) was on Monday November 7; but just like for Christmas, there was much to do before the big day.  The goal of this blog entry is to how much effort goes into this annual sacrifice that only lasts a few minutes, but takes days to prepare.  So without further adieu, here is the countdown to Eid Al-Kabir.

4 Days utill Eid (Thursday Nov. 3): Mama Nezha went out to a souk on the outskirts of Rabat and bought our sheep along with a sheep for her daughter Omnia’s family and for her sister Merriam’s family.  When I got home that night after teaching English, Amine, my host brother, took down into the basement of the apartment building to show me our sheep.  I think we were the first in the apartment building to have gotten our sheep, because that night there were only 3 sheep in the medium-sized storage closet, but on Eid at least 5 or 6 sheep came out of that room, one at a time to be sacrificed.

No, this isn't a sign of the Apocalypse; it's just
a few young Moroccans burning off the hair
of sheep heads in the middle of the street the day after Eid.

3 Days utill Eid (Friday Nov. 4): I drove up to Tangier with my program for the weekend to see the northern part of Morocco, which was under the Spanish protectorate, not the French.  The Eid preparations weren’t very visible in the modern part of the city, which the Europeans had built while the city still had its international status before Morocco gained independence in 1956, largely because it was raining.  As a side note on Tangier, my first impression of the city was underwhelming – it felt like the city was inhabited by “foreigners” (i.e. Moroccans) trying to find a new identity after the “native” builders of the city (i.e. Europeans) fled once Morocco gained control of the city.

2 Days utill Eid (Saturday Nov. 5): Once I actually walked around in the Medina (the old Moroccan part of the city) I finally saw all the sheep and hay bales I was expecting to find.  You could feel the excitement in the air as everyone was busy buying their sheep, sharpening their knifes, and acquiring their charcoal for the big feast.  The most memorable example was watching a group of young Moroccan kids going crazy over a sheep someone had just bought – some were helping to push it (since sheep can be very obstinate when they’re 1) by themselves and 2) about to be killed) while others were busy pointing out to us the sheep that was obviously there.  But the Eid madness didn’t end there.  Later that day we set off for Chefchaouen, a town tucked away in the Rif Mountains southeast of Tangier, and sat in a virtual parking lot for 2 hours in Tetouan because of the huge sheep market that was being held.  So as we sat in our bus inching forward, both on and sometimes off the road, a steady stream of people with newly purchased goats and sheep trickled past us; a few of the sheep willingly went along, but most of them had to be pushed, pulled, yanked, or even carried.  Finally, after a 6 hour bus ride that should only have taken 4 we made it to Chefchaouen, which means “Look! Two horns” for the horn-shaped mountain range the town’s built around.   

Eid dinner: sheep stomach tajine with several side salads, olives,
and of course, bread

1 Day until Eid (Sunday Nov. 6): Unsurprisingly, Eid preparations were also occurring in Chefchaouen – there; there were so many sheep and so much hay all over the medina that one couldn’t go five steps witout running into some reminder of the approaching Eid.  The strangest reminder of Eid in Chefchaouen was listening to an imam preach the story of Eid al-Kabir (in English) on the steps of a nearby mosque while I and afew friends ate lunch.  His enthusiasm of trying to include foreigners in the Eid without hesitation was a theme that was also present in my host family when I got home that night after another 6 hour bus ride delayed by village sheep markets.  The moment my host mom opened the door to our apartment that night, the excitement of the approaching Eid washed over me.  It was the same feeling of the night before Thanksgiving and Christmas of anxious anticipation for the holiday to start, and the feeling was so familiar that for a few hours I almost felt like I was back home celebrating Christmas with my family in Minnesota – the oven was busy baking bread, the stove was sizzling with beghrir (Moroccan pancakes) for breakfast the next day, and the kids (Hussam [6] and Yassine [1.5]) were running around telling me how we were going to kill the sheep tomorrow morning.  Then at around 11pm everyone went to bed so we could get up early to get a head start on the Eid festivities.

Al-Eid Mubarak! (Monday Nov. 7): The big day started bright and early at 7am with breakfast and my family’s morning prayers.  Breakfast was bigger than usual because family is so important in Morocco, especially during Eid, that my host sister, her husband, Yassine, and Hussam had spent the night (and would stay 3 more nights after that) even though they lived in the neighborhood next to us.  Then at about 9am the first sheep was dragged into the courtyard, its throat was cut, its skin was removed before I even realized it had started.  Thankfully for me our sheep was only the first of 8 to be sacrificed in the courtyard.  As the morning dragged on, the other families from the apartment slowly trickled out into the courtyard to kill their sheep and help out everyone else kill and clean the sheep and their innards.  The rest of the day continued at a leisurely Christmas Day pace, with liver and heart brochettes for lunch and 2 huge sheep stomach tajines for dinner at my host aunt’s house.  If you can get over the strange foods and the smell of dead sheep and blood, Eid truly is a wonderful holiday.

Slow Travel

There are two ways to travel.  The first is to try to see as much as possible in the least amount of time and the second is to see fewer things and spend more time enjoying them.  Before coming to Morocco, I tended to adopt the first approach and could hardly sit still when traveling; but I’m slowly beginning to adopt the “slow travel” approach, as I found out over Fall Break.  During the week-long break, I and 3 American friends from my program decided we’d try to tackle Jbal Toubkal, which, at just over 4100 m, is the tallest mountain in Morocco and second tallest in Africa behind Mt. Kilimanjaro.  The trip seemed very easy on paper – we were just going on a short hike that my guide book said anyone in reasonably good shape should easily be able to finish in 5 hours – but when we actually got to Imlil (a small Amazigh village tucked away 2 hours south of Marrakech in the High Atlas Mountains that’s 12 km from the base of Toubkal) and started our hike, we quickly realized how underprepared we had been.  

Taking 8 hours to do a 5 hour hike may have been a bit excessive, but if we had just rushed through the trail like everyone else, we would have missed so much that we wouldn’t have even realized we were missing.  Exhibit A is our chance encounter with a sweet Berber woman while we were taking a break under a tree, waiting for a raincloud to pass.  Had we been like the group of 4 British men that just plowed past us on the trail we would hardly have even noticed the women.  But since we were slow travelers, we ended up spending a good bit of time just talking with her in Darija and exchanging food (and by “exchanging” I really mean the Berber woman forcing apples upon us that we couldn’t refuse, so out of guilt for taking her apples, and because of the infectious mountain generosity that was permeating into us, we offered her the only food we had left: a small bag of almonds).  Then as we were leaving, she tried to invite us over for couscous at her house, but because it was getting dark and we still had a 2 hour hike in front of us to get back to Imlil, we had to decline.

Slow travel also allowed us time to reflect our experience and what we were seeing around us.  For instance, one overarching theme of this weeklong adventure was the strong Berber (or as my professors prefer to say “Amazigh”, which means “free man” in the Berber/Amazigh language) identity we encountered both in the High Atlas Mountains and the sand dunes of the Sahara Desert.  The 1^st taste of this identity appeared during our first night in Imlil when ‘Abdu, some sort of guide we think was working at the CAF Refuge we stayed at (but we’re still not positive), immediately brought us “Berber Whiskey” (i.e. mint tea) right after we had checked in.  This terminology caught me off guard because in the predominantly Arab cities the tea is sometimes called “Moroccan Whiskey,” but never “Berber Whiskey.”  Then the next night after our 8 hour trek to the base of Toubkal, which had just received about a meter of snow the night before, we talked with a few of the Moroccan guides who were leading non-impoverished college student European tourists and never once heard them refer to themselves as Moroccan; instead, they always proudly called themselves Berber but told us that their Islamic identity always came first. 

This hybrid identity was even more pronounced in the desert of eastern Morocco, where there are Arabs, Amazigh, and Bedouins (desert nomads from Arabia), all of which are still Muslims.  The best way to describe these identities in terms of the US is that the Amazigh are like the Native Americans if they had coexisted with the European colonizers (who in this example are like the Arabs) for centuries, had converted to Christianity, and had led several dynastic movements (on second thought this isn’t a great illustration, but that’s because Morocco is like no other country in the world).  So then up until the 1930’s, the Amazigh of the mountains and the desert remained largely autonomous from the central government until the French finished their campaign of “pacification.”  This history of autonomy has given the Amazigh a strong historical identity independent of their Moroccan identity but surprisingly not in conflict with it.

Now with the history/sociology lesson over let’s return to the desert.  The desert trip I and my friends took was the touristiest thing I’ve done in Morocco, but because I went in with this idea in mind, I was able to enjoy the 3 days I spend there.  For instance, the camel ride into the desert was essentially a glorified county fair pony ride during which I sat on a camel while our Bedouin guide, Muhammad, led the caravan of camels to our “Bedouin” campsite.  What’s more, every 5 minutes Muhammad would shout out “Africa!” and “Sahara!” even as we climbed onto the top of a huge jeep to leave on our last day.  But not even the cheesy attempts to give us the “Sahara” experience most tourists demand could ruin the beauty of the desert as we sat on the top of tallest sand dune for miles around, watching the sun set and the shadows of the dunes creep towards the edge of the Algerian border.  36 hours after that sunset my slow travel tour of Morocco came to an end as the train pulled into the Rabat Centrale Ville train station at 6:30 am and I walked home to take a nap after 12 hours of nighttime travel from the desert.

p.s. again, sorry for this back log of blog posts; my post on Eid al-Adha will be posted shortly.