I turned left and right, and then left again, searching for a way through the thicket of winding lanes when he appeared.

“This is the artistic district,” he said. “Would you like to see the house of Salvador Dali?”

“He” was Mohammed, beyond middle-age, with a greying short-cropped beard and wearing the traditional shoulder-to-shoe caftan, the housecoat, overcoat, and everything-else outerwear of men in North Africa. An Islamic prayer cap sat on his head. I was trying to find my way to the Bab Kasbah, or Kasbah Gate, which would lead to the greater city beyond, but Mohammed had different ideas. 

The “artistic district,” so it has been named, was a section of the Kasbah on the northern end of the Medina, or historic district of Tangier, Morocco. In the 1950s and ’60s it became the transit hub, way station, and all-purpose gathering point of artists, writers, and musicians, drawn by the free-spirited ambience of the city and the endless supply of cannabis and kif, the residue of cannabis leaves when reduced to green powder was fortified with high levels of THC. It was postwar 1920s Paris chic, San Francisco’s Haight Ashbury a decade before Haight Ashbury.

I took up Mohammed’s offer. Who could turn down a look at the house of Salvador Dali, who for a time had been one of the Kasbah’s residents? Farid led me through the little-more-than-a-meter-wide whitewashed lanes, left and right and left again, until we arrived at an iron gate guarding a tiny courtyard. At the end stood a wooden front door, intricately carved, glazed, washed, and polished. It was hard to believe that an artist almost obsessed with limitless landscapes could hole up in such cramped quarters, but it may have been the cramped quarters that produced the limitless landscapes that became one of the recurring motifs of the surrealistic movement. To support Mohammed’s claim that this was once the home of Salvador Dali, a stained-glass bird, in streaks of white and yellow, hung from a yardarm fixed to the wall beyond the gate. Not exactly a work of surrealism, but a faint reminder that honored the former resident.

We stopped for only a moment.

“Would you like to see the house of Tennessee Williams?” Mohammed bubbled.

Then we were off again, on another zigzag route, until we were standing in front of another hand-carved wooden door like many throughout the Kasbah, but this time without a postage-stamp courtyard and iron gate.

The American playwright passed through Tangier many times between the late 1950s and early 1970s, and it was where he wrote his semi-surrealistic play Camino Real. Its long list of disparate characters, some “real,” some fictional—Don Quixote and Sancho Panza among them—are thrown together in a nameless village. For almost 3 hours the audience watches their dreams and travails, existential and real, play out in a chaotic, jumbled portrayal of the Kasbah in its heyday.  

Yet Williams’ newfound paradise would come to an abrupt end. On his last visit, in 1973, at a visit to the post office he was questioned about his name, since his passport stated his given name, accurately, as Thomas. No matter, but the clerk obliquely asked about his sexual orientation, asking Farid Choukri, the Moroccan writer who had accompanied Williams, “Does he have ‘the disease?’” Williams was horrified and declared he would never return to the city. And he didn’t. It was a wake-up call to Williams. Islamism and Arab nationalism were on the rise, and the city had been swept into the changing order sweeping throughout Morocco that would cast laissez-faire permissiveness into history. 

Mohammed fired another question. “Do you know Jim Morrison?” I didn’t know Jim Morrison, but I knew he was the lead singer of The Doors and one of the ’60s rock icons who had made Tangier home. But before I could answer Mohammed shot back: “I’ll show you where he lived.”

He led me through another series of twists and turns and in a few minutes, we were standing in front of another iron gate with another pint-sized courtyard beyond. There was few seconds pause and then we were off again, through another series of lanes, dimly canyon-like under a bright, pearly blue sky that shined overhead. Mohammed stopped at another gate, another courtyard, and another wood-carved door beyond.

“Do you know who lived here?” A dramatic pause. “The Rolling Stones.” As houses in the Kasbah go it bordered on lavish. Besides the almost requisite gate, courtyard, and elaborately carved door a multi-paned widow, arched, and seated in a wooden frame, rose above it. The pause lasted long enough to pay my respects, and then we found ourselves in a tiny square where a handful of lanes collided. A small fountain stood in the center. It was little more than a water tap, encircled with a smudged and chipped tile base, but in Kasbah lore it carried the status of historic landmark.

“You know what this is called?” Mohammed asked. Another dramatic pause, but a little briefer than the one outside the Stones’ getaway. “The hippie fountain. The hippies would wash and bathe here. They would live on nothing and sleep in the streets. Do you know Mick Jones, of the Clash?”

I did, and didn’t, but it didn’t matter.

“He’d sleep in the street in a sleeping bag. He had a nice house but at night was too stoned to find it, so he’d sleep in the street. One morning I found him. I said to him, ‘Mick, why don’t you go sleep at home.’ He just opened his eyes and said, ‘Don’t bother me, I’m having an inspiration.’”

One of his inspirations was the hit song Rock the Casbah, which ranked number eight on the top 100 Billboard chart in 1982.

Mohammed chuckled, but he wasn’t finished. “This way,” he said, plunging down another lane. There were a few more zigzags and then we were standing in front of another door. Nothing differentiated from any of the others in the lane. It had no gate, no courtyard, no arched window, no stained-glass bird, and the wooden door had been polished through the decades but was otherwise unmemorable. Another pregnant pause.

“This was the house of Paul Bowles,” Mohammed intoned.

So the best was saved for best. If the Kasbah, or all of Tangiers, had a single literary light, a cultural patron saint, it would have to be Bowles. The American writer is forever identified with the city, and the city with Bowles. It was his home for 52 years, beginning in 1947, nine years before Morocco gained independence. It was in the Kasbah where Bowles wrote his first and most well-known novel, The Sheltering Sky, describing the journey of a New York couple who travel to North Africa to restart their troubled marriage, only to encounter deeper troubles—culturally, psychologically, and interpersonally—and of course, like many Western encounters with North Africa, it ends tragically. And Bowles knew his subject matter.  By the time he wrote it he had done a considerable amount of wandering through North Africa himself, first solo across Algeria and Morocco, and in 1931 stopping off in Tangiers with composer friend Aaron Copeland.

Unlike so many of the itinerants, Williams and Dali, the Clash and the Rolling Stones, Truman Capote, Jack Kerouac and Alan Ginsburg (who wrote his seminal poem Howl in the Kasbah), William Burroughs and Jimmy Hendrix (who spent most of his time in the seaside town of Essaouira), Tangiers had become Bowles’ home. For any adventurous spirit it would have been hard not to be drawn to Tangiers in the 1940s, hosting a continuous parade of spies, smugglers, shady diplomats and shadier businessmen, all due to its unique geographic position as the gateway to the Mediterranean and transit point between Europe and North Africa. 

At the other end of the Medina, within a section of American Legation, there is an exhibit, call it museum, or better a shrine, to Bowles. Letters, photos, early editions of his books, and an array of Bowles memorabilia are displayed in glass cases that fill three rooms, the last opening to a tranquil garden of palm trees surrounding a small fountain at the center of the compound. The building was the first diplomatic mission established by the United States on foreign soil, in 1821, Morocco being the first international authority to recognize the independence of the new nation.

On Farid’s itinerary there was one more stop. “Do you want to see three religions?” he asked, and without waiting for an answer led me to a viewpoint with a panorama of Tangier and a glimpse of the Mediterranean beyond.

“What do you see?” he asked.

I squinted—at the skyline of the city with the sea beyond.

“See,” Farid went on, and then to drive the point home— “Muslim, Christian, Jewish.”

Then there was no need to squint. Clearly visible were the minaret of the city’s largest mosque, the bell tower of St. Andrew’s Church, and the façade, glimmering in the late-afternoon light, of one of Tangier’s synagogues.

Throughout its history Tangier’s tolerant attitude toward ethnicities also embraced religions. For hundreds of years Tangier had been home to European Christians who passed through for stays both short and long, some measured in years and others in decades, as well as Jews who had been expelled from Spanish Andalucía after the conquest of Christian forces under Ferdinand and Isabella, in 1492, wresting Spain from centuries of Muslim rule.

We reached the Bab Kasbah. Farid’s tour was finished. But then, as expected, came the negotiation. This was, after all, North Africa, where no service offered to foreign visitors, however graciously and sincerely, is fulfilled without a price.

“I worked as a tour guide for thirty years,” he had reminded me all along the way, and now, again, but this time adding, “Now they charge twenty-five euros for this tour.”

I bargained him down twenty and we parted, but as a sign that he was satisfied I ran into him a few times in the coming days in my strolls through the Medina.

“My friend, my friend,” he beamed, and asked where I had been and what I had seen. And so we passed the necessary pleasantries, and he wished me a pleasant stay but asked for nothing more.  

Some stories are better told in reverse, often those of people, but sometimes civilizations and even cities, to better understand the path from their origin to their destination. The story of Tangier is one of them.

In 1925 Tangier gained the dubious distinction of international zone, which came about through the ritual tugs-of-war of colonial powers. At the beginning of the 19th century France and Spain vied for control of the city, while the United Kingdom sought neutrality to avoid the establishment of a rival to British dominance over the entrance to the Mediterranean through its control of Gibraltar. Negotiations over the fate of Tangier resumed after the end of World War I, with talks in Cannes, London, and finally Paris that concluded with a resolution that Tangier would be governed by a joint administration of the signing parties. As part of the agreement no armies would be stationed in Tangier, and it would remain free of taxation—on exports, imports, or income.    

The next three decades, until Moroccan independence in 1956, could be fairly described as the golden age of the city. Uncertain, fractious control meant no absolute control, and lack of clear legal designation fueled its bohemian atmosphere and further glossed its allure. Tangier became a haven smugglers, shady businessmen, and shadier politicians, and a refuge for refuseniks and revolutionaries seeking refuge from other parts of the Arab world, still under colonial rule. 

The Medina and its surrounds is a fading, dusty relic of Tangier’s past, but a lively one.  Fronting the roundabout of the Grand Socco, just outside the Bab Al Fahs, is the Cinema Rif, or Cinémathèque de Tangier, still done out in the art deco style in which it opened in 1938, now spruced up and refurbished. Tables spill onto the terrace in front to serve the customers of the in-house café.

Outdoor cafes are outdoor cafes everywhere in the world, but within the Rif sit, and sip, the customers who have long absorbed the cinematic history displayed in the posters that cover the walls—Bollywood gems and European “art house” films, the odd Hollywood product, film noir classics, and independent cinema from the Arab world, evoking the cultural renaissance that followed independence. But if the saying “All good things must end” holds any truth it finds proof in the Rif. The introduction of television in the 1950s was a body blow, and Moroccan independence saw the rise of Arab-Islamic values and anti-Western sentiment, driven by a wave of nationalism for which even a longtime institution like the Rif was no match. It continued to operate, but until its revival within the shadows of an altered cultural landscape.

After the Rif I wandered over to the Church of St. Andrews, its tower a standout at the end of Farid’s Kasbah tour. It was a 10-minute stroll from the Grand Socco, but a lengthy step back in Tangerine time. A white stone wall encircles the compound, down the street from one of the city’s midrange shopping plazas, one of the discordant juxtapositions of local history and bland modernization that occur throughout the city. Beyond the wall is a tree-filled garden and cemetery where many of Tangiers’ luminaries—the colorful, the legendary, and the infamous—rest. There is the grave of Paul Lund, British gangster and friend of American poet William Burroughs. Nearby lies Sir Henry McMillan, onetime British commander of the Moroccan navy, and Claire de Menasse, the third wife of the British writer Laurence Durrell.

The church would have trouble passing for a church anywhere in the Christian world. The design is Moorish, the centerpiece a plain square tower topped with a crenellated lookout that better resembles a Moroccan mosque.

Halfway through the garden stroll I met up with the caretaker, guide, host, and all-purpose authority on the grounds, fittingly named Andrew.

“Would you like to see the inside of the church?’ he asked.

He led me inside, where the Moorish theme continued. A grand, semicircular arch separating the sanctuary from the congregation rose above both. The same design was reflected in the windows lining the nave, but the theme of religious fusion wasn’t finished. The nave had no heaven-soaring vault, but a flat, wood-beamed ceiling borrowed from Greek and Roman temples, and later the synagogues of European Jews who had adopted it.  

Then came the highlight.

“See the hymns,” Andrew said, pointing to a wooden board mounted to the right of the sanctuary. I walked over to have a look. The hymns for the next service were listed on the expected plastic cards printed with bold black numbers, but above, carved into the wood, was a Hebrew inscription—a reminder of the time when the same board listed Judaic verses.  

St. Andrews was never a synagogue, but Tangier once had many, like the Moshe Nahon, still functioning deep within the lanes of the Medina. I stopped in one day. Well-worn prayer books were piled on a table at the entrance, awaiting a congregation, if sparse, to take the seats for the next service. In the glory days of Tangier’s religious harmony, the city was approximately 40 percent Muslim, a quarter Christian, and a quarter Jewish.

I asked Andrew a not-so-silly question-—if the church still had services.

“Oh, yes,” he piped up, “but now many who come are refugees.”

No doubt. Christian migrants, mainly from West Africa, on their way to western Europe but stalled in Morocco would need a place to pray for deliverance to their paradise here on Earth.

St. Andrew’s was founded in 1905, a few decades before the international zone was established, and its parishioners were drawn from an eclectic group of European exiles.

“Henri Matisse used to attend services here regularly,” Andrew went on. He led me outside and pointed to the upper rooms of a hotel just beyond the walls. “He lived there whenever he was in Tangier.”

The windows Andrew was pointing to had a clear view of the church and courtyard, and in 1912 the French postimpressionist painted the view from that vantage point. The work, Window at Tangiers, now hangs in the Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts in Moscow.

In appreciation of the inspiration he had found in Tangiers, Matisse wrote: “I have found landscapes in Morocco exactly as they are described in Delacroix’s paintings.”

And so, Matisse wasn’t the only French artist to be drawn to Tangier. Eugene Delacroix was brought to Morocco in 1832 by Count de Mornay, on a mission to cobble together a treaty that would result in the annexation of Algeria. But for Delacroix artistic inspiration trumped global power grabs. “Never in my life have I seen anything more bizarre than the first sight of Tangier,” he wrote to friend Alexis de Tocqueville. “It’s a tale out of A Thousand and One Nights. A prodigious mix of races continues . . . This whole world moves with an activity that seems feverish.”

What impressed Delacroix was the Orientalist subject matter swirling around him—the markets, bazaars and Arabesque architecture and interiors that had become all the rage for an art-hungry public in western Europe, which also craved the exotic. On the Rue de la Liberté, just outside the Medina, the Galerie Delacroix regularly holds exhibits of contemporary French and Moroccan artists along with works of French Moroccans, or Moroccan French—however identities are defined.

A step and a hop away was the Grand Teatro de Cervantes, today the dilapidated remains of what was once the Grand Teatro, the premier theater of Tangier in the days of Spanish domination. It was the dream come true of Esperanza Orellena and her husband Manuel Pena, who raised the money to build a grand teatro in the center of the city. The painted-tile marquee above the entrance still carries the year of its opening—1913—and on the inaugural night the pasha of Tangier was in attendance in a gesture of intercultural harmony. In the following years it staged productions from Shakespeare’s Othello to lighter fare, New Year’s Eve celebrations and more mainstream dramas that regularly filled its 1,400 seats. After independence its appeal waned—intercultural harmony had become the remnant of another era—and its doors finally closed in the 1990s.

Retreat in time a little further and the threads that formed the fabric of 20th-century Tangier begin to unravel. The city has long been a victim of its geography. As one pillar of the gateway to the Mediterranean, with an opening to the Atlantic on the northwestern tip of Africa, Tangier had always been, in commercial terms, prime real estate in the tug-of-war between colonial powers.

“All through our history the Europeans shared power over every part of our life here,” Farid told me over breakfast one morning in the courtyard of the hotel where I was staying, a ten-minute walk, uphill, from the Tangiers corniche, or promenade that fronts the Mediterranean.  On clear days the coast of Spain was visible on the other side. A scattering of palm trees provide needed shade in summer, but in January a handful of flame heaters offered meager warmth in the early morning chill. 

Farid was the owner of the hotel and about to take me on a tour of Tangier’s surrounds.  By profession he was a cinematographer and had worked on big-box-office Hollywood productions such as Kingdom of Heaven, the epic film that dramatized the fall of Jerusalem from Christian hands to the Muslim warrior Saladin in the 12th century, which was filmed in Morocco. His hotel was a throwback to the Tangier of another era, which meant the room doors were often a struggle to lock, the floorboards creaked, and heating was an add-on in all but the higher-priced rooms. The furniture was frumpy colonial chic—beds with brass bedsteads, and the chest and bureau drawers habitually jammed from the swelling and warping of the wood, but the staff at the reception switched easily from French to English to Spanish to Berber to Tuareg-infused Moroccan Arabic and darted around the grounds and up and down the stairs to meet the guests’ needs. 

Breakfast finished, we hopped in Farid’s car and headed west, where the Cape Spartel Lighthouse has stood guard over the entrance of the Mediterranean since 1864, when it was erected on the order of Alaouite Sultan Muhammad IV to serve as a beacon for ships loaded with valuable cargo returning from the New World or making their way up the coast of West Africa, Barbary pirates rather than geopolitics then being the greatest threat to the profit-reaping trading center that Tangier had become.

Along the way we passed through an upscale section of Tangier—chock-a-block apartment blocks clustered behind security walls and entrance gates, with billboards promoting outlet stores, “wellness centers,” and liposuction treatments not found in the reclusive world of the Medina.

Farid explained, “Since we’ve had a new king there has been so much development. His father had bad experiences here as a child, so he never wanted to spend money on the city. But the king had very different experiences here and liked Tangier very much.”

The new royal leader was Mohammed VI, who came to power in 1999, when a changing of the guard gave way to a new generation of leaders not only in Morocco but Syria and Jordan, and there was hope he would begin an era of progressive and forward thinking, in contrast to the “old guard” that had ruled for decades. Has this proved true in Morocco? To a point, yes. When the Arab Spring raked through Middle Eastern countries in 2011 the tremors were felt in Morocco, but Farid VI got ahead of outright rebellion by making concessions to greater democracy.

But now I was more interested in the city’s past than its future—the future meaning more gated apartment blocks for the city’s elite, and luxury brand stores popping up in high-end shopping malls for the same elite. 

A few minutes later we pulled off the highway and into the lighthouse parking lot.

“There’s a common belief that this is the northernmost point of Africa,” Farid added as he locked the car. “It’s not. It’s in Tunisia. But this is the furthest west. That’s the reason there were always sea battles here,” he went on, as we watched a scattering of tourists gather around the lighthouse. “First there were the Spanish and British, and then the French and sometimes the Portuguese.”

In North African history, when forced to choose, the west always trumps the north when the factors of trade and security are measured. For hundreds of years the north faced both allies and competitors in the Mediterranean trade routes and power plays. But the west faced the open Atlantic, and with it, besides the same Mediterranean rivals, the threat of pirates.

We were on the road again, this time south, to Asilah, where the Portuguese had constructed a fortified wall to encircle the Old Town, turning the seafront into a bastion to guard their merchant ships returning from the southern coast of Africa and the New World with plundered riches. We had thirty minutes to get there, plenty of time for Farid to give me a short course on the rest. All the way a bright winter sun shone. To the left of the road the sparsely green Moroccan coast awaited spring planting. On the right the waves of the Atlantic washed up against the shoreline and swept over the beaches as if engaged in a fingertip caress, a scene of tranquility that for the moment washed over a less than tranquil past.

“After the Portuguese took control, they used it as a base to launch a Crusade,” Farid went on. “It never happened. Maybe they never studied the geography.” Asilah faces west, and Jerusalem lies at the other side of Mediterranean. Farid continued, “Later the Spanish took control and then the Moroccans took the territory back, and the tug-of-war continued. At the beginning of the nineteenth century even the Austrians fired cannonballs into Tangier, trying to beat back the pirates.” And then came a broadside aimed, if belatedly, at the colonial powers.  “At least the pirates attacked all the Europeans equally.”

We rolled into Asilah, pulled into the parking lot outside the Medina and made our way through the entrance gate, where a scattering of boys were caught up in a game of football on a swathe of concrete in the shadow of the Alqamra Tower, erected by the Portuguese in the 15th century to protect ships from booty-hungry pirates. 

It was Friday, we were in the Medina, and for Farid being in the Asilah on a Friday meant a couscous lunch, the centerpiece of the Friday menu not only in Asilah or Tangier but everywhere in Morocco and North Africa. And Farid had just the place in mind to feast.

“This way,” he said, and he led me right and left and then through an archway that opened to another lane somewhere deep within the Medina. We stopped at a restaurant where a few tables were scattered outside and entered, to climb a flight of stairs and another and then another and a few more until we arrived at a rooftop terrace.

“Here we are,” he announced. “The best couscous in all of the Medina.”

The couscous was still to come, but if view was any hint of its appeal, it would be exquisite. The Medina and the fortress walls that surround it were in full view below. Beyond were the waters of the Atlantic rolling onto the coast in rhythmic waves. We settled in, a waiter took our order, and Farid resumed his tale of northern Morocco.

On restaurants menus throughout the city “tortilla,” “paella,” and “rioja” regularly appeared, a legacy of Spanish domination of northern Morocco.

Farid placed our orders, couscous for two, naturally, and resumed his rendition of the region’s troubled history.  

“Everyone wanted their claim to us—the British, the French, Spanish, the Portuguese. Whoever controlled Tangiers controlled the entrance to the Mediterranean. So many European countries opened consulates in Tangiers, long before independence, and not just the European powers, even some of the Scandinavian countries, to secure their presence.”

In the early 19th century, the kingdoms of Denmark and Sweden and the independent regions of Sardinia and Tuscany all has reason to set up consulates in Tangier. The cutting of the colonial pie meant that Tangier was divided into mini-states, with each power ruling its own occupied zones.

“Each one even had their own post offices,” Farid went on. “We became the entire colonial world compressed into a single city.”

Even the 1912 Treaty of Fey, establishing Morocco as a French protectorate, brought little cohesion. The eruption of World War I stalled any progress. Only Moroccan independence swept away all colonial presence, power, and influence.

Lunch was over. The plates once laden with tiny, granular yellow pasta topped with steaming vegetables—carrots, onions, eggplant, red pepper—had been cleaned. Two cups of Moroccan mint tea were also finished, and all that remained was the scent of coriander, cumin, and cayenne pepper kept aloft by the sea breeze that drifted over the rooftops.

To work off the lunch, Farid and I took a stroll that brought us to the outer walls of the Medina facing the sea, also constructed by the Portuguese. Cannon barrels once protruded from the niches lining the top of the wall.  In the middle of winter the broad walkway saw no visitors, only a few residents tending to their flower boxes and the odd day-trippers basking the bright winter sun. A few fishermen cast their lines from the rocks below. The street lining the wall was several meters wide, a counterpoint to the Medina’s twisting alleys.

As for the width of the promenade, Farid explained, “It was made this way so the troops could move cannons to wherever they were needed along the wall.”

As everywhere in the Medina, the streets were quiet, almost lifeless. The rest of Asilah was a hopping regional town, one of the largest along the coast, but here within the Medina it was almost deserted except for the restaurants and cafes and shops peddling cheap souvenirs. I asked Farid about the population. He answered with a question, “During the week or on the weekend?”

Asilah, the “old Asilah,” so he said, had become a casualty of modern-day commercialism, tourism, and commercialized tourism. “Many of the houses are now owned by the monied class in Rabat and Casablanca,” he added. “They use them on weekends and holidays.”

Once again, in telling the story of North Africa, it was time to take another step backward. Asilah had seen flush times long before it became a favored getaway for the leisure class. In the 10th century, after the town was ruled by the caliphs of the Isridid dynasty, it thrived as a trading hub under the rule of the Umayyad dynasty across the strait in Cordoba, Spain, and other powers in the western Mediterranean. The run of good fortune would last for 500 years.

It was time to head back to the city. For a quicker return we took the inland highway that links Tangier to Casablanca, a little over three hours to the south. We were on the road, heading north as the late afternoon sun was sinking into sea when Farid suddenly piped up. 

“You see them? See what I told you?”

What he had told me, on the road from Cape Spartel, was that in winter the beaches became impromptu parking lots for camper vans bearing license plates from Germany, Belgium, France, Austria, and other northern European countries, and he pointed them out at each band of open seaside. And beyond the makeshift parking lots more campers were tucked into the furrows between the smooth slopes that rose up from the seafront on the other side of the highway.

“They’re pensioners, retired people,” he had explained. “They come here in the winter for the sun and warm weather. They drive to Gibraltar and cross on the ferry and can stay for six months. They rent out their houses and can live here for half what they would back home. They buy their food at the local markets—everything fresher than what they would get back in Europe.  They help the local economy. One day before their visas expire they head back.”

Vegetable stands were clustered near the camper camps and set up along the highway that the campers traveled, not counting on the Europeans finding their way to them. But what we saw now was the beginning of the story.

“See them? See their faces? Their smiles?” Farid bubbled. “I see them all the time when they’re driving this way,” he went on. “They’re happy. I see them on the other way too, heading back. No one is smiling.”

The glare of the setting sun shimmering off the windshields of the southward-bound traffic threw a veil over the faces inside, smiling or otherwise, but I took Farid’s word for it. Maybe I couldn’t see the smiles of the drivers, but I did have a clear view of the license plates.  Farid was right. They were French and British and German and representing the gamut of colder European countries. Smiling or not, into Morocco or away from it, at last the relationship between Tangier and imperial, colonial Europe had settled into a happy harmony. That alone was worth smiling about.

Soon the fringes of contemporary, forward-looking, consumer-consumed Tangier began to crowd the flanks of a highway only recently over swept with fields of barley and citrus fruits. Shopping malls and chain store outlets lined the road, representing both East and West. But with the leap into the future Tangier also returned to its roots. When the northwestern tip of the continent was first explored by Phoenician traders in the tenth century B.C.E., they introduced the tradition of coexistence. They conducted business in two currencies, one coin with Punic inscription under the rule of the Mauritanians and much later others in Latin bearing the profiles of the Roman emperors Augustus and Cyzyia. Yet on both the Canaanite god Baal appeared on the reverse. The eastern and western Mediterranean were, however briefly, united.

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For five years Christopher Thornton was a special correspondent for the U.S. State Department’s International Information Programs. He currently teaches in the Department of American Studies at Jagiellonian University in Krakow, Poland. In recent years he has published over 70 articles and essays in numerous literary journals—Michigan Quarterly Review, Commonweal, Confrontation, Sewanee Review, Antigonish, American Scholar, Scarlet Leaf Review, Atlantic Online, and many others. His book-length travel narrative about traveling in Iran (Descendants of Cyrus: Travels through Everyday Iran) was published in 2019 by Potomac Books, a commercial branch of the University of Nebraska Press. Last year, he  followed up with a photo book on Iran, Iran in Pictures: A Photographic Insight, published by Europe Books, based in Rome. It also has about 125 pages of text--a kind of "short course" on Persian history and culture.

ART FEATURED
Cindy Rinne
Secret Whispered
collage on paper