WISE MEN OF FEZ.

Hawera Star, Volume XLVIII, 12 September 1924, Page 7

WISE MEN OF FEZ.

LIFE IN A MOORISH MOSQUE

. Sir Valentine Chirol has the following description of. Fez, the capital of Morocco, and its chief mosque, in The .Review of Reviews: Fez is a wonderful vision when you first look down from the heights above it into the deep valley in which an almost unbroken sea of flat white roofs shimmers, with all around it a green girdle of orchards and olive groves. But pass into Fez itself under one of the massive and recurving gateways in the long line of battlemented walls, now in various stages of decrepitude, which encompass the old city, and you will have a very different vision. I have seen most of the ancient Mohammedan cities .of the East, but none that wears such a look of extreme old age. none so tightly swathed in the cerements of a dead past. The great Kairouin Mosque with its attendant medersas has been for a thousand years the seat of strictly orthodox Mohammedan learning. Yet learning seems to have stood still there ever since the curious, metal discs on the walls of the Bu Ananya ceased to strike their chimes, when, centuries ago. a Jewish miscreant, it is said, destroyed the machinery which he had undertaken to repair. The famous university remains steeped in a scholasticism mor© barren than our own ever was in the darkest ages. It produces, no doubt, some grave and reverend seignors, who wear their doctrinal erudition and their meticulous piety with, perhaps, excessive ostentation. Its men may be profoundly versed in astrology; its Jaw students may master the intricacies of Mohammedan canon law, but few of them are sufficiently grounded in the rudiments of arithmetic to do the simple sums required m matters of succession and inheritance, though these matters provide the piost lucrative field of legal practice.