Students and the Bohemian Spirit is the title of a chapter from the book Fès ou les nostalgies andalouses, written by Enrique Gómez Carrillo and translated from Spanish by Charles Barthez (1927, Librairie Charpentier et Fasquelle). Here is an excerpt:
Visiting the madrasas is a ritual obligation for pilgrims to Fez. One must see them all. One must marvel inside the venerable Sahridj, whose crumbling walls are reflected melancholically in the crystal of a dulled pool. One must linger in admiration before each of the wonders of the incomparable Attarine, with its mihrab of polychrome zellige and its immense, prodigious lamp. One must be astonished by the grandeur of the Cherratine, the largest of them all, built upon the ruins of another university that the faithful destroyed because it had been profaned. One must search, in the patio of the Mesbahia, for the remnants of marbles brought from Algeciras to adorn the famous school where the scholar Mesbah ben Abdallah commented on the words of the Prophet Muhammad before doctors who came from all the countries of the East to hear him. One must spend long hours—many days—observing the cloisters, oratories, loggias, and galleries of the sacred Bou Inania Madrasa, whose miraculous beauty so deeply inspired Leo Africanus.
Though religious in nature, these seminaries—open to the curiosity of foreigners and bearing the distinctive imprint of the eras in which they were built by sultans devoted to learning—constitute the purest reliquaries of Moorish tradition and art. What gives them, in our eyes, an extraordinary value is that, like the impenetrable mosques, these buildings have never ceased to possess life, pulsation, spiritual activity, and a direct influence on the development of the Maghrebian people. Open one of the small doors leading onto the upper galleries of any one of them, and as you step into a student’s cell, you will notice it immediately…
According to official information, there are more than five hundred tolba pursuing higher studies here. And not all of them are Moroccan. The prestige of the University of Fez has remained so intact throughout the Islamic world that from the most distant cities of Assyria, Arabia, and India, young men flock to this great college, eager to hear the eloquent words of the heirs of Sidi Boumediene, Averroes, Avicenna, and Sidi Abd-el Aziz ed Debbar. Only the glorious Al-Azhar University in Cairo can rival, in the entire Islamic world, the group of teaching chairs gathered within the cathedral of Al-Qarawiyyin Mosque.
“Fâs,” writes an Arab professor from Oran, “is still the dar el ‘ilm*, the palace of knowledge, the refuge of Muslim learning; its great mosque continues to be the foremost school in the world.*”
Throughout the East—from Tlemcen to Baghdad and from Damascus to Samarkand—there is no fqih who does not bow with superstitious respect before the tolba bearing an ijaza (licentiate diploma) signed by the masters of the Moroccan University. For everyone knows that in this Mecca of knowledge, studies last at least ten years and encompass all branches of human learning. In a remarkable work entitled The Book of Intelligent Men, written toward the end of the last century by Sidi Mohammed El Harchaoui, one finds listed and explained the various courses taught beneath the vaults of the cathedral of Fez.