classes started and mosques visited

yesterday was my first day of classes, and here's the brief run-down:

8.00 - islamic civilisation - started off with a bang of sorts. time rolled around, and i was in class and then so was the professor...but no one else. we waited (and stared at each other or, actually tried not to stare at each other) for a few minutes before he threw a tantrum of sorts and cancelled class. extra hour and a half to run over to the library and check emails...

11.00 - arabic i for beginners - in a nutshell: the most fun i've had in class in a very long time. i have a little moroccan professor named abrihim, and he's the cutest, most adorable little old man i have ever met. in our first class we covered some basic greetings and learned to read and write the six vowel sounds and the three basic consonants. at the end of the lesson, we has our first complete word: bab which means "door" in english - practical, huh? i have to say, though, there's nothing more exhilerating than to see so clearly knowledge enter and take root in your mind.

14.00 - political anthropology - a relatively intense professor, but not anything out of the norm for bc. the class will be relatively easy work-wise, only five short papers, and a mandatory field trip to volubilis, the ancient roman city in morocco - how cool is that? what is political anthropology, you ask? it's apparently the study of the development of political structures, and particularly the aspects of the communities out of which they were born. i think it will be a really enlightening class...

15.30 - history and culture of the berber people - oh my goodness...professor peyron, of this class, might actually be in a dead heat race for my favorite professor, and it's a tough match. a lovely, ramblingly loquacious english chap whose provencal french father gave him that...whatever it is that makes french things french. the opening lecture consisted of eighty or so black and white photographs of his early travels in the middle and high atlas in the 1960's and his encounters with the amazigh (berber) people there that would spark a life-long process of learning berber language, studying and documenting their history and culture, and translating and commenting on berber epic poetry. my kind of guy, for sure. who else would say, "ah, here we are. some bucolic scenes of a similar vein..."

and i'm done with class! i rush over to the morocco-guinea football match, only to be tortured to death by the lack of the lead player from tuesday's match, soufiane alloudi. we could barely hold it together against the guinean defensive players who made me think i was watching american football by the way they rampaged the field. a painfully close 3-2 loss...

and today? today i spent the morning sorting out my silly bankcard who had frozen itself because it forgot that i had told it (the bank, actually, not the card itself) that i was going to be in morocco and that i was planning to use it from time to time. i mixed a little of my homework into the process, and then met up with eva and a moroccan student, sara, who had offered to host us for friday prayer at the mosque on campus.

i won't go into detail this time around, but let me just say that it was a beautiful, peaceful, enlightening experience. i sat silently in the back of the women's section, listening to the droning sound of the imam's arabic voice exhorting the students to a good and proper life, and watched the scarved and silent figures around me. there was no doubt of the devotion evident in their faces, and i was moved to see the love i feel for my lord and savior echoed in these women and their prayerful attendence to allah. as i have said to many people many times before, i do not ascribe to the thought that there is really only one mountain and many paths to the top - that seems to me to devalue, in a way, everyone's journey. but in the same breath, i acknowledge the reality that my finiteness does not allow me to possibly comprehend the mysterious designs of my heavenly father, and therefore i will not dare to assume a throne of judgement lest i be placed in front of it myself. what does all of this mean, exactly? i'm not even sure i know, but i do know that i had a really wonderful lunch (couscous and vegetable tajine) with this gracious student afterward in which we were both exceedingly open about our own faiths and our own prejudices, and it was a beautiful thing.

the afternoon brought a trip to neighboring azrou and my first taste of what morocco may actually be like once one leaves the european-villa-ed hamlet of ifrane, and that little amuse bouche puts me in a very good place for the experience of fes tomorrow...