The Olive Tree
Hassan is late returning from the Mosque tonight, but when he finally walks through the open doorway to my room, he is carrying a large, ornate Qur’an. I put away my Neal Stephenson.
Cat Stevens converted to Islam.” Full stop. I wait patiently for clarification, but Hassan’s silence screams “Q.E.D.” into the hot, dry night. I pause while trying, in my head, to translate the idea that anecdotal evidence cannot be extrapolated into a universal normative claim. Hassan speaks no English, and I am ignorant of Arabic and Tamazight, so we are forced into the linguistic meeting ground of Francais. Unfortunately, all I can manage to come up with is “Je n’aime pas la musique de Cat Stevens.” Hassan’s confidence in the logical rigor of his argument remains untouched.
Ait Iktel feels much smaller than its eight-hundred inhabitants, mostly because the summer heat inclines one to stay indoors. A trek from Hassan’s house near the bottom of the village to the mosque at the top will only take about fifteen minutes, but the rocky elevation and hot, red dust that clings to your shoes, as if yearning to climb with you, make the journey seem much longer. When Hassan and I make our afternoon trip to have tea with Haj Mohamed, we pass a small, stripped field. It is nearing the end of the wheat season, and the harvest is being threshed by men with pitchforks. They heave the wheat into the village’s only thresher; it is a rumbling, smoke-belching shock of modernity juxtaposed against the ancient stone olive presses that now lie dormant until autumn. When the men finish in a few hours, the thresher will move to another field, continuously working. After the threshing is done, the wheat will be distributed among the village families, and what little remains of the harvest will be sold in the town about an hour away. We continue to climb, and through open doorways I catch glimpses of women in the houses lining the path. They are constantly sweeping away the same red dust that is hitching a ride with me.
We continue to climb, and through open doorways I catch glimpses of women in the houses lining the path. They are constantly sweeping away the same red dust that is hitching a ride with me.
Hassan and I sit on the floor, because it is more comfortable than the lumpy bed, the only piece of furniture in the room. Through the window, or more accurately the space in the wall in which Hassan’s father omitted bricks, I can see the night sky. It is a blanket of stars, broken only by the silhouette of the Atlas Mountains. Hassan brings my attention back to earth when he clears his throat and begins our discussion. He starts with a simple math puzzle, the solution to which requires nothing more than the concept of negative numbers. I answer correctly and he declares that I am scientifique—and that I should, therefore, easily comprehend the need to convert to Islam since the Qur’an says I am doomed to eternal damnation if I don’t. I counter that this conclusion only follows if one accepts the Qur’an as an authority. Hassan repeats his point. Full stop. I attempt a conversational detour and remark that it is amazing that the stars lighting up the mountains may not even exist. They could have died millions of years ago, and their light is only now presenting itself to us. “Pas du tout,” says Hassan: God would never let us see something that does not exist.
The neighbor’s eldest son came home from Marrakesh today. Hassan and I stop in to greet him, and we are promptly abducted for mint tea and beghrir with honey. With perfectly coiffed hair and a knock-off designer T-shirt stretched over bulging deltoids, Mustafa looks out of place in the dirt-floored living room in which he grew up. He loves Marrakesh, and is quite disappointed to discover that I am not from New York City. Hassan tells Mustafa about the installation of the new well, funded by the Japanese embassy, and how Ait Iktel no longer has to ration water out to each family. Mustafa, however, only wants to talk about girls. He asks whether or not I have a girlfriend back home, and when I answer oui, he shoots me a playfully suggestive look that is only meant to be decipherable by urban sophisticates, even those not from New York. I ask him about his job in the city, and he offers only that it is boring. He asks me how much my watch cost aux Etats-Unis, and I lie, scaling down by a factor of ten.
read our popular articles
