Juj

The shape of Morocco is the cipher juj – the Arabic for “two”. Write a horizontal stroke, right to left, near the top of the page. This is the Rif Range. Then beginning at the end of the first, write a second, longer stroke going down and sloping to the left: this is the Atlas. The space below and to the right is the useless Sahara; the space to the left and above is the narrow coastal strip, useful only in parts.

The coastal strip can be further divided into Belb el Makhzen and Belb es Siba. The former is “governed” -- they are three large, fertile areas, watered by mountain streams or underwater aquifers. Over near the bottom, to the left, is Marrakech, the southern capital; in the upper left corner, Tangier; and at the kink – the place where the two strokes meet – the fertile central valley with the northern capitals, Meknes and Fes. Settled, fertile, rich and densely populated, these areas were amenable to centralized rule. They produced an easy life of plenty, and with it a morally ambivalent and permissive approach to life. Forgetting about God, people grew wine and enjoyed the arts.

But these areas are but islands in the sea of Siba – the marginal land, populated in times of plenty, but deserted in times of drought; consisting of thousands little oases, often no more than scraps of meadow in which to herd one’s sheep in wet years, sometimes no more than a cave from which to run a smuggling racket. Life here has always been chancy; the dwellers repeatedly forced to fall on robbery to support themselves through the hard times. The residents of the Siba are thus not merely country bumpkins of the sort you and I might know because they are shaped by a different, more rigorous, more fundamental environment. Their bodies are sinewy, their laws simple, and their religion undisturbed by doubt.

Their roughness revolts the Makhzen while the decadence of the Makhzen both tempts and disgusts them.

The history of Morocco is the history of the climatic pendulum and the oscillating relationship between Siba and Makhzen which the pendulum drives: sometimes, after a long drought, when Siba has been emptied by a long drought, the climatic pendulum turns back, rains come back, things begin to turn well, the Makhzen springs back to life first and then soon generates sufficient profits to control and repopulate the Siba; then the Siba grows; and as it grows, it becomes too large for the Makhzen to control; then the drought returns, Siba, at best times marginal, becomes unlivable, and, now overpopulated and hungry, it turns against the Makhzen.

Throughout the history of Morocco, time and again, the hungry Siba has conquered the Makhzen, usually in the name of religion, and it is these roughneck desert men who preside over each reflowering of Morocco when the climate (as it always does) turns friendly again. Muslim historians have seen the "moral renewal" (i.e. the imposition of the rude standards of Siba) as the source of the revival; but morality, like the bloom on a tree, is no more than the product of the cycles of the weather which come and go in their own rhythm.

One more element makes part of the picture: Al Andalus: Spain. The Moroccans conquered and reconquered Southern Spain several times; holding onto it, or recovering it, has always been the central dream of any Moroccan government as soon as it managed to strike some balance between the Siba and the Makhzen. This was for the simple reason that Spain has a better climate, more reliable rainfall, and more plentiful crops. Every new dynasty of Morocco (and it is always a Siba dynasty) have always felt that if only they could seize and hold Spain, they could then use her resources to alleviate, perhaps even prevent, the political turmoil of the perpetual climatic ebb and flow of Siba and Makhzen. And so they wasted uncounted precious resources on the dream of holding onto Spain; and even now, when it is lost forever, Al Andalus inspires a dreamy reverie in any Moroccan. You see, by comparison to the rigors of Moroccan climate, the easy Al Andalus is, simply put, heaven.