The late king Hassan II of Morocco is reported to have said that his country was something like a tree “with its roots in Africa and its branches in Europe.” Visitors to the French capital will find that it is Morocco's European branches that are in the spotlight this autumn, with a major show on the kingdom's mediaeval history taking over the temporary exhibition spaces at the Louvre and an intriguing exhibition of contemporary Moroccan art and culture occupying most of the Institut du monde arabe a short distance away in the seventh arrondissement. Both exhibitions are jointly sponsored by the French and Moroccan authorities, with king Mohammed VI of Morocco giving his patronage to both. While the Louvre show is an ideal opportunity for visitors to remind themselves of Morocco's sometimes complicated mediaeval history, presented with the museum's customary curatorial scholarship and savoir-faire, the exhibition at the Institut du monde arabe is more surprising, perhaps even edgy in its choice of works on show. Both have been drawing large and appreciative audiences, raising Morocco's European profile and contributing to knowledge of the country abroad. The Louvre show, opening on 17 October, presents visitors with artifacts illustrating Morocco's early history from the conversion of the country to Islam in the 8th century CE to the fall of the ruling Marinid Dynasty some seven centuries later. It is the first major exhibition on the Muslim world to have been held at the Louvre since the opening of the museum's department of Islamic art two years ago (reviewed in the Weekly in September 2012), and according to curators Yannick Lintz, Claire Delery and Bulle Tuil-Leonetti it is intended to serve as a manifesto piece for other exhibitions to follow. The idea behind the show, the curators comment, is to allow visitors to “find out more about the art and culture that a particular area was producing during a specific period of time, in this case the area between Africa and Europe over a period of five centuries from the 10th to the 15th centuries CE. This period corresponds to the Middle Ages in western Europe, and the centre of this area was Morocco and the great cities of Fes, Marrakech and Rabat that were founded at this time along with the Spanish cities of Cordoba and Seville that were embellished by the Moroccan ruling dynasties.” The exhibition opens with a pair of spectacular works, specially lent by Moroccan institutions for the present show, which have much to say about the art and culture of the period. The first of these, a mosque lamp from the Al-Qarawiyyin Mosque in Fes and dating from the beginning of the 13th century CE, illustrates the high standards of craftsmanship attained by Moroccan craftsman of the period, making their work in high demand not only in Muslim North Africa and Spain, the exhibition says, but also in the neighbouring Christian world. The second is a mosque lamp of similar size, also from Al-Qarawiyyin, this time fashioned out of an originally Christian church bell that has been reused and adapted for new purposes. Unlike in the eastern Mediterranean, where the area's 7th-century Muslim conquerors encountered and then built upon very old and often highly urbanised pre-existing civilisations, Morocco was never profoundly Romanised, and Roman and post-Roman authority rarely extended further than coastal towns with the interior left in the hands of Berber tribes. Following the arrival of the Arabs and Islam at the end of the 7th century, it was left to the first of the area's new ruling dynasties, the Idrisids, to try to unify the different tribes and to establish the kind of religious, political and economic centres that had been lacking since the disappearance of Roman rule. This they did by founding the city of Fes at the beginning of the 9th century, the first of the new imperial cities whose foundation and development are followed in the exhibition. While few physical remains exist from this period in Moroccan history, the exhibition has been able to achieve something of a curatorial coup by arranging for the shipping to Paris of a 10th-century wooden minbar, or pulpit used by preachers, from the Al-Andalus Mosque in Fes. This object, apparently the oldest wooden structure of its kind to survive from the Arab Maghreb, bears curious, apparently Berber-influenced designs that mark it out as a product of specifically Maghreb Arab civilisation. Centuries later the Arab historian Ibn Khaldoun set out what he believed to be the pattern of the region's history, an affair, he said, of nomadic desert tribes, often animated by a rigorist version of Islam, attacking and eventually sweeping away settled urban dynasties. This pattern certainly seems to have established itself in Morocco early on as the Idrisids, ensconced in the urban fastness of their capital at Fes, soon came under attack by a coalition of desert tribes committed to an expansionist and revivalist version of Islam. This movement, al-murabitun, marched northwards out of what is now Mauritania, sweeping all before it. By the time its best-known leader, Yusuf b. Tashufin, died in 1107 CE, it had created a vast empire bringing together what are now the countries of the modern Maghreb, parts of west Africa and much of Muslim Spain. Called the Almoravids in European historiography, the movement established a dynasty that ruled Morocco for around one hundred years from 1049 to 1146 CE, establishing major new urban settlements at Rabat, originally a garrison city, and Marrakech as it did so. In the exhibition at the Louvre the Almoravids are represented by their cultural and architectural achievements, belying their later reputation for intolerance. When the Almoravids entered Morocco they found it to consist of a collection of warring tribes, but they left it as a unified state. They built much of the Al-Qarawiyyin Mosque in Fes, along with the Al-Barudiyyin school in Marrakech, testimony, the exhibition says, to their building programme and support for religious teaching. However, the Almoravids also fell victim to the pattern identified by Ibn Khaldoun. In the early decades of the 12th century a new movement, al-muwahhidun, led by the religious teacher Ibn Tumart and originally aiming at moral reform, set out to overthrow them. In a series of campaigns starting in the 1130s the al-muwahhidun, called the Almohads in European historiography, conquered Morocco and the rest of the Maghreb together with much of West Africa and Muslim Spain, establishing a vast empire stretching from Senegal in the south to what is now Tripoli in the east and as far north as Toledo. Like the earlier dynasty they displaced, the Almohads were committed to a rigorist interpretation of Islam, and this may have contributed to the exile of one of the greatest Jewish scholars of the age, Ibn Maymun (Maimonides), who left Cordoba in Spain where he had been living under Almoravid protection for safe haven in Egypt. But also like their Almoravid forebears, the Almohads later softened in their attitudes, eventually becoming known for their patronage of cultural and intellectual life and for their spectacular building programme. The philosophers Ibn Tufayl and Ibn Rushd (Averroes) lived and worked in Marrakech under the patronage of the Almohad rulers Abu Yakub Yusuf and Abu Yusuf Yakub, and the Almohads, initially opposed to Sufism, later protected the Maghreb Sufi orders. Mosques were built throughout the Almohad empire and citadels and fortresses constructed at Marrakech and Rabat. The flourishing intellectual and cultural life the region enjoyed under Almohad rule is illustrated in the Louvre exhibition by scientific instruments, copies of works by the religious writers Ibn Arabi and Ibn Tumart, and works in ceramics and bronze. There is a collection of exquisite copies of the Qur'an made by the Banu Ghattus workshop in Valence and written in characteristic Maghreb script, as well as items testifying to the political and economic importance of the Almohad empire. These include silk and ivory pieces exported northwards to neighbouring Christian kingdoms and letters from the Almohad sultan to Italian rulers. Eventually the Almohads also fell victim to the pattern established by Ibn Khaldoun, and a new dynasty, the Marinids, or Banu Marin, took over in Morocco. This dynasty ruled the country from the 13th to the 15th centuries CE, initially capitalising on Almohad weakness and their own military prowess to capture first the cities of Meknes and Fes in 1244-48 CE before occupying Marrakech, the capital, in 1269. Marinid rule led to a period of notable economic prosperity, urban development and administrative centralisation, with the dynasty fostering historical and geographical writing as well as the religious sciences. Some of the best-known writers of the period lived under Marinid rule, among them the traveler Ibn Battuta, born in Tangiers in 1304, and Ibn Khaldoun himself, born in 1332 in Tunis, at the time part of the Moroccan empire, and dying in Cairo in 1406. The Louvre exhibition illustrates the period through architectural elements, books and other materials, ending with a magnificent banner, originally belonging to the Marinid ruler Abu al-Hassan and captured by Christian forces at the battle of Rio Salado in 1340, now kept in Toledo Cathedral. According to the exhibition, conflict with neighbouring Christian states, internal instability, and plague from Mameluke Egypt eventually fatally weakened Marinid rule, leading to the Moroccan dynasty's replacement by a new set of rulers.
*** Visitors intrigued by the contemporary art and culture of Morocco will want to make the journey across Paris to the Institut du monde arabe on the left bank of the Seine for Le Maroc contemporain, the Institut's largest ever exhibition on a single Arab country and the centrepiece of a season of Morocco-themed lectures, film screenings, music and dance events and literary readings. Stretching across four floors of the Institut's temporary exhibition spaces and including a vast Berber tent erected on its forecourt, the exhibition aims to present contemporary work from what the Institut's president, former French minister of culture Jack Lang, has described as “the most creative and most lively country in the Mediterranean world.” King Mohammed VI of Morocco, himself a patron of the arts, had personally supported the exhibition, Lang said, but the choice of works had been made independently by exhibition curators Jean-Hubert Martin, Moulim El-Aroussi and Mohamed Metalsi. According to Martin, the intention is to present the work of contemporary Moroccan artists to the European public, as well as the work of the pioneers of modern Moroccan art working in the 1950s and 60s. “Until quite recently,” Martin said, “it would have been impossible to put on an exhibition on Morocco without showing the work of Matisse, Klee, and other European artists” inspired by Moroccan themes. “However, Morocco has a history of modern art that goes back to the 1950s, and the present exhibition is important not only because it presents the work of 80 Moroccan artists, but also because it indicates a new interest in new artistic scenes.” The exhibition is divided into four main areas, from the pioneers of modern Moroccan art, represented by figures such as Farid Belkahia, Mohamed Melehi, Abdelkebir Rabi' and El-Khalil El-Gherib, born in the 1930s or 40s, to contemporary artists illustrating themes such as Sufism, Revolt and Women. Commenting on this division, exhibition curator Moulim El-Aroussi, a former director of the Ecole des Beaux-Arts de Casablanca, said that recent years had seen a new interest on the part of Moroccan artists in figuration and social issues. Whereas the pioneering generation had been known for formal investigation, producing chiefly abstract work, younger artists, inspired by a “traditional society undergoing widespread change and the problems that are blocking the transition to genuine democracy, along with real freedom and real modernity,” were at least as likely to address themes such as the rise of Political Islam, the persistence of social inequalities, youthful feelings of frustration and the desire for emigration. The final section of the exhibition, featuring work by women artists such as Yasmina Ziyat, Nadia Bensallam, Randa Maroufi, and Fatima Mazmouz, born in the 1980s and 1990s, investigates the world of Moroccan women, caught, according to the exhibition, between a desire to develop themselves and the restrictions of a still conservative society. However, while their work might be seen as being narrowly related to their female identity, in fact, the exhibition suggests, it can be seen as expressing a new urgency and a new cosmopolitanism in Moroccan art, taking it from a concern to express Moroccan identity, common to the pioneering generation of the 1950s and 60s, to social issues that impact upon the world as a whole. Forms and techniques previously unknown in modern Moroccan art, among them installations and video, are features of this new experimentation. Today's young Moroccan artists, the Moroccan art journal Diptyk says, are likely to come from modest social backgrounds, to have trained in Morocco rather than abroad, and to want to intervene in the public sphere, often in order to address social issues such as continuing inequalities and the universal themes of racism, sexism, and social discrimination. While this can alienate them from the art-buying public, which in Morocco prefers to buy the perhaps less-challenging work of the previous generations, at least in part because it can be hung on walls, it has also made them more eclectic, more cosmopolitan, and less likely to be content with the sedentary postures of earlier artists who were “attached to Moroccan themes and Moroccan landscapes, their gaze fixed on the world within” more than that outside the country's borders. Today's artists, Diptyk comments, “work in diverse fields and are characterised by the eclecticism that marks post-modernism worldwide. Their work is marked by globalisation, as well as by a variety of concerns that are not only local, or identity-related, but which are also related to wider agendas and deal with questions concerning humanity as a whole and not just a single culture.” This seems to translate into a new spirit of openness towards the country's past and present identity, notably with regard to questions of ethnicity, language and religion. Visitors to the exhibition are greeted by an extract in Arabic, Berber and Hebrew from the country's new constitution, passed by referendum in July 2011, which says that the unity of the Kingdom of Morocco is “forged by the coming together of its Arab-Islamic, Amazigh [Berber] and Saharo-Hassaniyan [Bedouin] components and nourished and enriched by its African, Andalucian, Hebrew and Mediterranean elements.” This generous and inclusive conception of Moroccan identity, explored in the work of artists contributing to the present show, widens and deepens the country's self-conception, promoting fruitful internal dialogue and dialogue with the outside world. Le Maroc médiéval, un empire de l'Afrique à l'Espagne, musée du Louvre, Paris, until 19 January 2015; Le Maroc contemporain, Institut du monde arabe, Paris, until 25 January 2015
