September 11 at the Oasis By Peter H. Hansen Director of International Studies, Associate Professor of Humanities and Arts, Morocco (A ‘10)
idnight at the oasis always sounded to me ochre. After the sun slipped above the horizon, more like an orientalist pop song than a possibility the silence was broken by whooping and hollerfor real life. Yet listening to music and prayers dur- ing as some of us descended the sand with long ing a late-night dinner for WPI students at a Sufi strides and others slid on rugs like toboggans. The community in a Moroccan oasis provided a more ride back in the jeeps was filled with lively chatter powerful lesson in the possibilities of mutual unand talk of memories of a lifetime. derstanding. Yet sunrise was soon overshadowed by Our WPI group traveled to the oasis by our dinner that night at a Sufi zawiya that began crossing the Atlas Mountains from Al Akhawayn after dark. Sufism is a mystical, esoteric order of University in Ifrane to the small market town of Er- Islam and a zawiya is a school or lodge for a foud. Much of the route follows a strip of fertile community of believers. Female students from land watered by a river flowing south from the WPI were told they would be honorary men for mountains that eventually disappears into the the evening, since women were not normally desert. The Tafilalt Oasis along the river is the larg- permitted in the room where we would eat. After est in North Africa after the Nile valley. Several a delicious tagine meal of chicken, couscous, times we left the tourist track to see irrigation and tea, one of the men of the zawiya sang a techniques old and new. Traditional methods still prayer for Christians, which they assumed all of us prove more effective and sus“Early one morning, we rattled were. This prayer song was foltainable than modern engilowed by drumming and ecalong dirt roads in the dark to neering projects cast in constatic invocations that, when the edge of the dunes. The crete. translated by a colleague from headlights of our jeeps illumi- Al Akhawayn University, we Water has sustained life in the oasis for millennia, a span nated a line of kneeling cam- learned recited passages in the els and their blue-robed han- Koran about tolerance and muof time that is difficult to grasp dlers. ” in your mind but easy to hold in tual understanding. the palm of your hand: small Drumming turned to diafossils that are millions of years old as well as Palogue, a discussion of life at the zawiya and in the leolithic hand axes, Mesolithic points, and NeoUnited States. One of the brothers asked what lithic arrowheads collected in the Sahara are for we thought about debates over building an Issale in Erfoud. We also visited the nearby ruins of lamic cultural center in lower Manhattan near a city that numbered 100,000 people a thousand the site of the World Trade Center. The issue had years ago, then among the largest in the world. been widely covered on Arabic language televiThe mud walls bore more recent scars from serv- sion, but the brothers of the zawiya offered no ing as the backdrop for filming Hollywood block- opinion of their own and said it was something for busters such as The Mummy. the United States to solve. Our trip to the oasis Yet for us, as for most visitors, Erfoud was had been timed to coincide with the end of the gateway to the sand dunes of Erg Chebbi. Ramadan in 2010. To our astonishment, we realEarly one morning, we rattled along dirt roads in ized that we were sharing our meal on Septemthe dark to the edge of the dunes. The headber 11. The significance of our eating together lights of our jeeps illuminated a line of kneeling that night did not require translation. As we left camels and their blue-robed handlers. After a the zawiya under the light of a small crescent short ride into the sands, the camels halted in a moon, I hoped that the spirit of the evening basin at the bottom of a ridge. We scrambled up would last well beyond midnight and remain with as the dark sky turned gray blue then shades of each of us long into the future. 27
unpacked * Fall 2013