Only historical cities occupy that place on your northern side towards the heart, only those that have something of the spirit, and the tranquility of the soul, and something of the hymns of the knowers, and the dervishes of time, specific cities and only those that call you to perfume your hand with the musk of the Sufis and seekers of goodness and the never-ending remembrance, Kairouan for example, that city cloaked in history, soaked in the sweat of the conquerors, when the conquest was a light, and guidance and a market of knowledge, and a meaning for coexistence, and the advancement of man, from the day of that entry the country will be prosperous, and a city will be built in it that beautiful marriage between the Berber architecture that knew how to surround the place, like a collar of ribs, and what the Arab Muslims brought with them of spaciousness of place, and spaciousness in the councils, and that geometric formation of lines and calculations that will be revealed later to give that distinctive character to Islamic civilization wherever it is.
Marrakesh, for example, is a city that does not sleep except with remembrance. It is fortified by its pious men. Its dawn call to prayer creeps out to you from among those houses that cohabit with history when it began. It is the city of sultans when life is splendid, and the refuge of ascetics when tears of piety flow in the eye sockets. It takes you to the warmth of its places and the fragrant scent, and it wants nothing from you except to be intoxicated, either with gratitude, remembrance, or perfume.
Not far from Marrakesh, this walled city with the evidence of men hands you over to its two sisters, Fez and Meknes, two cities that opened their arms to the horses broken by the other enemy, to the groups that wept the last regret of the Arab there, to the Moriscos after they sighed with regret and sorrow for the time, for the days that were in humid Andalusia, you walk through them with the feet of purity, you enter them smiling, and with the right foot, you feel that they are an extension of Cordoba and Granada, and what the first ones did, two cities that you do not worry about if your heart is attached to them, because they are part of the heart of every lover who knows love and passion, and the divisions of passion and separation.
You cross the sea, without difficulty or fatigue. The walking stick lands with you, a visitor and a repentant, towards the red Granada. No foot holds you, and no land carries you. Some cities upset the balance of the wise traveler. Granada, for example, how beautiful its night is, and the breezes of its dawn!
The gypsy singing keeps following you in its darkness, taking you to its corners, you find yourself there, and you say: “It’s as if I was born here… or my people left here.” Granada surrounds you with a strange fabric, you want to hold on to one end, but another one slips away, and you don’t know why a childhood dream kept knocking on your fresh memory, this Andalusia… I wish you were here, and that regret takes hold of you, and you don’t know where it came from, and that “delusion” emerges from your chest like a fire that refuses to be extinguished.
Those historic cities are like a ray of distant light, holding your limbs and not letting you pass without insisting on something of them in you. They are cities that dispute your pious heart, and the paths of the past are distributed, either from them or to them. Only then does the mortal, devoted old man find peace, and wish for sleep under the shade of its trees, resting his head on its cold soil, holding the string of his rosary, lighting his waking head with the rings of remembrance, the majesty of poetry, and that statement in which there is knowledge and psalms of magic, and what makes a person then lean on happiness and not care about drunkenness.. And tomorrow we will continue
#Cities #inhabiting #northern #part
