My grandmother had been born into a wealthy family in the province of Tafilalt, in the city of Er-Rachidia, in the early years of the twentieth century. In those days, birthdays weren’t always carefully recorded, but she remembered the French marching into Morocco in 1912. Her family owned land in the region, and she used to tell me about the date palms there, and the cows, sheep, goats, and horses they kept. Her relatives were considered nobility because of their connection to the Prophet. Such people are sometimes called by honorifics—moulay and sharif for the men and sharifa or lalla for the women—but my grandmother never used her formal title.
She was married young, at thirteen or fourteen, to the son of a close friend of her father’s, a prosperous and wellborn boy a bit older than she. She gave birth to a baby boy about a year later. Over the next few years, they had another son and a daughter, but her husband grew violent, hitting her and their children. She told her parents she wanted a divorce. This was discussed in the family, but the friendship and business ties between her father and her father-in-law proved too strong. Have patience, her family told her, these things sometimes pass. My grandmother refused. She divorced her husband and left, taking her three children with her.
It was a radical move in those days, and my grandmother became an outcast. She was a young woman on her own who couldn’t read or write, and she had never learned to work because she’d never had to. She fled with her children to Meknes, one of Morocco’s four royal cities, where she married again. She never talked about her second husband, except to say that the union was brief: he left her while she was pregnant with another child, a girl named Zahra. Now she was alone again, with children from two different men. She swore never to marry again, vowing instead to work and support her family alone. In those years, she made her living mainly as a nurse and midwife, and she also mixed and sold healing oils.
My grandmother took risks but she always knew who she was—and she never forgot her roots. She told me that some of her most crucial role models had been the wives of the Prophet. His first wife, Khadija, had been a successful businesswoman who was older and had supported Muhammad financially and emotionally when his own tribe turned against him. She is honored by Sunnis and Shia as the first convert to Islam and as Muhammad’s most loving and faithful confidante. Another of his wives, Aisha, was known for her intellect and extensive knowledge of the Sunnah, the tradition of sayings and activities of Muhammad, which is the second most important theological and legal source for many Muslims after the Koran. While Sunnis revere her as one of the Prophet’s sources of inspiration, some Shia see Aisha more critically, suspecting her of having been unfaithful to the Prophet and arguing that her opposition to Muhammad’s son-in-law Ali was an unforgivable sin. “Don’t think women have to be weak in Islam,” my grandmother told me.
She met the man who would become my grandfather in Meknes. His name was Abdelkader, and he, too, came from a wealthy background. But by the time they met, prison and torture had broken his body and his fortune was gone.
My grandfather came from a province known as al-Haouz and its outskirts, not far from Marrakech, which was known to have one of the strongest opposition movements against the French. In al-Haouz and other parts of Morocco, Muslims and Jews fought side by side for independence. My grandfather had been a tribal chief and a local leader in the independence movement, developing strategy and helping to funnel weapons and supplies to fighters trying to force out the French. They called it a jihad, but my grandfather and his comrades had strict rules: they could target only French soldiers and known torturers who worked on behalf of the French, not women or civilians.
One day in the late 1940s, the French arrested my grandfather and asked him to give up the names of those belonging to the resistance in his area. “You will get even more land and privileges,” the French interrogator told him. “If you don’t work with us, we will throw you in jail and take away your lands.”
Grandfather believed in the rebellion. He believed that even if the French took away his property, one day his country would get independence and he would get his land back. They threw him in jail, where he was beaten. They made my grandfather and other prisoners stand naked in contorted positions, urinated on them, and doused them with cold or hot water; some were raped with bottles. They seized his olive trees, his almond and orange groves, and his horses. They gave many of his possessions to collaborators.
He spent a few months in prison. When he was released, the French banned him from returning to his lands; he had lost everything but his pride and hope. He went to Meknes, where he found work as a laborer, building houses. He didn’t know the trade, but he had to survive. Meknes was booming, and people needed places to live.
This man who had once owned horses and many acres of land decided to settle in Sidi Masoud, a ragged community that resembled a shantytown. Sidi Masoud was home to Moroccans who had come to the city from different regions and for different reasons; they built their dwellings hurriedly and poorly from wood, sheet metal, and whatever else they could find or get cheaply.
One day, a woman of noble lineage moved into Sidi Masoud with her children. One of Abdelkader’s friends, who knew of his past as a tribal chief, told him laughingly that his status in the neighborhood would now be topped by that of a true sharifa.
Abdelkader knew that this woman had children, so he went to welcome her and brought along some sweets. Instantly suspicious, she told him she didn’t need candy or gifts. He was impressed. Within a few weeks, he’d asked her to marry him. Abdelkader was in his midtwenties, younger than my grandmother, and while he still felt strongly about Moroccan independence, the jail and torture had weakened and scarred him. As a child, when I asked about the marks on his hands and arms, he said they were from lit cigarettes that the French had pressed into his skin; he bore the marks of a horse whip on his back. I think he was drawn to my grandmother in part because of her strength, and because she was a healer. He undertook to provide for her and her children, even adopting her youngest daughter, who had been born fatherless and had only her mother’s name on her birth certificate.
In 1950, less than a year after their marriage, my grandmother gave birth to my father; he was her youngest, and her favorite. The family lived in a small, simple dwelling made of iron and wood. The walls were roughly nailed together, leaving gaps where you could see the sky. There were two small rooms and no running water or kitchen. The washroom was a partitioned corner with a hole in the ground for a toilet and a bucket of water for washing.