The Berkeley Guides:
Berkeley Guide to Europe:
Morocco:
Fès
In Fès the streets are thick with donkeys, narrow shops, and smells that range from pungent to putrid to just plain mysterious. In a raw way, this is Morocco at its best--a place where dead chickens and spices, street merchants and hustlers, form a street scene you won't soon forget. Almost the quintessential Moroccan city, the only thing conspicuously missing in Fès is that vexing, Energizer bunnytype hustler endemic to the rest of the country. Indeed, hustlers are everywhere, but now so are the police--busy condemning just about any suspected unofficial guide to two months in Fès's notoriously awful prison.
It's said that in the Islamic world, only Cairo could rival the opulence of 14th-century Fès; the same could probably be said of Fès's religious and academic traditions. The Kairaouine Mosque, one of the world's oldest universities (ad 859), educated generations of Fassis (Fès residents), not to mention Christians and Muslims from all over the world. As the Christian reconquest of Spain gained momentum, Fès attained further prestige and influence in North Africa; after the fall in 1492 of Granada (the last Muslim kingdom on the European continent), persecuted Jews and Muslims fled here from southern Spain, and Fès was left heir to almost 800 years of Andalusian culture.
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