Sidi Kaouki

Thirty kilometers south of Essaouira sits a bizarre but increasingly typical surfing village called Sidi Kaouki. Camping cars (motor homes to Americans) fill a parking lot surrounded by open-air cafés and fish restaurants. Down the road sits a surf shop decorated in a psychedelic melange of Beach Boys throw-back and Moroccan kitsch. A few hundred meters further: 2 hectare stone-fenced estates with million dollar homes, waiting for their owners to arrive for a few weeks each year. Each empty lot bears the testimony of land moving equipment; many more mansions are being built. In late January the Europeans outnumber the Moroccans at least 2 to 1.

All along the Atlantic coast of Morocco communities like this are being built. Inhabited mostly by French retirees during the winter months and European surfers year round, with stone and concrete fences topped with broken glass bottles, these little Europes allow all the economies and beautiful weather Morocco offers without the hassle of engaging the locals too much. For the most part the locals seem pleased to have them and the money they bring, much the way scarabs are pleased with sheep and their manure, though this sentiment is not shared by all. The road along the coast until Agadir is filled with vieux campeurs in their wheeled, white houses. Some of them wave as they pass, a few wave both arms in front of their faces, in the universal sign language of No. None stop to pick up a hitchhiker.

I was dropped off at Sidi Kaouki by four young French people. They slept on the beach. Not knowing whether it was high or low tide and not wishing to find out, I climbed a couple of fences, built a small fire and slept in an empty lot under the stars. It was the first time in Morocco I slept neither in nor immediately outside a city and the stars reminded me of Montana. Recognizing all the constellations I thought forgotten, feeling each wave breathe onto the shore two hundred meters away, it occurred to me that atheists cannot exist outside the city.

Disbelief requires smog and traffic and money and advertising and buildings. Absent these things atheism dies a quick and painless death. I know many who profess atheism. Some are scientists, biologists, physicists and geologists who spend long hours in the wilderness and still maintain that there is no God. These are atheists the same way those who preach war claim to be Christians or Muslims: without exception each scientist I know regards the universe with awe. They marvel at the apparent genius of organisms' adaptations, the wonderful elegance of the physical forces that maintain the engine of creation, the shear force of the slow eternal movement of the earth's crust. They devote their lives to the study and comprehension of a universe they know they will never fully comprehend. These “atheists” worship as well as scholars who parse holy books or mystics who know the secret names of God.

Muhammed Abduh, an Egyptian educator and Islamic reformer and revivalist who died in 1905, critically compared the fundamental differences of Christianity and Islam. According to the first item of his framework, Christianity is fundamentally based on miracles. Islam maintains that God is evident in nature before and apart from the prophets or Quran. According to Abduh, the single miracle Muslims are required to believe in is the transmission of The Quran through the Angel Gabriel to Muhammed. And the Quran reaffirms reality rather than contradicts it as does the Bible.

He acknowledged that his principles of Islam were far from universally followed and I think many of his criticisms of Christianity are unfair. Later revivalists, including the Muslim Brotherhood which formed in Egypt a few decades after his death, criticized many of his ideas as unislamic. Still the comparative framework he developed is a predominate one in Muslims' conception Christianity vs. Islam.

Separated even from his larger criticism of Christianity, the point that God is evident before and outside any organized worship, that reason and observation alone are sufficient for belief seems important in understanding the differences between the post-Christian secular Occident and the Islamic Orient. Muslims often make the point that while they believe in Jesus and Moses and either 23 or more than 124,000 other prophets, each was sent by God for specific times, places and people; Muhammed is the last Prophet and passed Islam on for all people for all eternity. I never disagree with this assessment of Islam, only “J'ai le meme dieu”.

Unignorable is that Islam was born in the dessert of Arabia and spread quickly in the dry Middle East and Africa. Here still is where it is strongest and mostly deeply rooted. Even in the cities of Morocco it is impossible to ignore the presence of the desert and its frontier surrounding every oasis real and constructed. Here it is impossible not to consider the vastness of the universe and to conceive a single eternal presence permeating all. It cannot be a coincidence that each of the monotheistic religions was delivered from the dry desert womb of places like this. Is polytheism (in this I include The First Church of Liberal Capitalism and its technological talismans) born instead from the constant alternation of plenty and drought? I write this stuck in a remote restaurant in the Sahara where a storm outside blows sand at more than 100 km/h. Here I cannot separate the Islamic conception of God from the permanent drought of the desert and the inconceivable power and constancy of the natural forces at work here.

In the morning I woke and made friends with a timid young bitch, barely out of puppyhood herself but with heavy and scarred teets. It took awhile but she was hungry and my khobs, the flat, round bread ubiquitous here, proved too strong to resist. I gave her a few pieces and went to make my increasingly urgent toilet. I wasn't sick but the vast amounts of excellent olive oil everyone eats here keeps the alimentary canal healthy and active. Though my khobs was gone she was no longer afraid of me and found what I was getting rid of as appetizing as what I'd already given her. The position I was in is not especially stable and trying to parry the hungry advances of a young dog used every bit of my not-great balance. After finishing I built a small but effective pile of rocks, my puritanism winning over sympathy for her hunger.

I walked back to the parking lot and drank a couple B'rad ah thé sheeba and pieces of fresh khobs with a few Spanish surfers before again meeting the four who dropped me off. An old toothless Majorcan with named Jau who bummed a few cigarettes off me told me of waterfall about 12 km south. After the French bought breakfast we got in their rental car to search for it. After turning around a few times and asking the old shepherds sitting next to the road for directions we parked the car under the shepherds' guard and walked down the wide dry riverbed. Because of season or dams or both I don't know but the river here barely amounted to a stream; in the widest places it was easily hopped over. Arriving at the cascade we found just a few trickles falling off 3 meter tall stone steps. We rested awhile and headed back to Sidi Kaouki, stopping to give a few dirhams and a couple of cigarettes to the two old men who'd not moved in the hours we were away.

We took lunch and they insisted on paying the whole bill of almost 250 Dh (about 35 USD) saying “you are living a dream we all have and it is a pleasure to help you on your journey.” Though I had the money, I am living most days on about half what my share would have come to and have learned not to refuse blessings. I wish I could recount every instance of kindness bestowed upon me in Morocco. Due to the kindnesses of both Moroccans and other tourists I have rarely lacked a place to sleep or food in my belly. God protects the mad and the foolish with the hearts of his people. Most gently acknowledge that I am both. Returning to Essaouira they dropped me off on the main road to Agadir.

At the crossroads I waited for awhile and a young Moroccan arrived from the fields and sat on the rock across the road from me. I offered him a cigarette which he gratefully and carefully put in his shirt pocket. I returned to my pack and waited for nearly an hour with a 3 day old Guardian I'd pulled out of the trash. The Moroccan simply sat. The capacity Moroccans have for sitting, without apparent boredom or agenda is astounding. For hours at time, across the country, young men and old sit on rocks and chairs and their own heels thinking about I don't know what but the contemplation of God seems inevitable.