The Professor Visits

Wafin: Morocco in North America

"On visiting Moulay Idris, however, I realized I was in a unique expression of Islamic culture. I arrived in the afternoon, when sufi chants were being sung by a group of devotees; women, men and children sat in the sahn, and then sometimes entered to the hall of the tomb where they sought blessings, prayed, or simply meditated. The shrine conveyed an intense religious feeling, perhaps only equaled in my experience with the Dome of the Rock and the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem. Moulay Idriss is an expression of Islamic piety unique to the devotion of Morocco. Not only the dialect but the devotion was distinctly “Maghribi.” The more I learned about these “saints,” the more I could understand the tensions of early modern Moroccan history between the makhzan/government and the sufi lodges."