Tlemcen

“ Moors from across the frontier—fierce men with eagle faces and striped cloaks—grouped together, whispering and gesticulating, stared at with suspicion by the milder Arabs, who attributed all the crimes of Tlemcen to the wild men from over the border. ”

“ Out of fifty-seven other minor mosques, most have been converted into cafés, shops, dwellings and sheep-folds, some are in ruins and some have disappeared entirely, but it is these unexpected fragments of a one-time splendour that makes the charm and value of Tlemcen for the artist. ”

“ In the basin of the Upper Isser, an eastern branch of the Tafna, the chief commune is that of Lamoriciere, a future station of the railway intended to connect Oran with Tlemcen through Sidi-bel- Abbes. Tlemcen, on a small affluent of the Isser, at the northern foot of a rocky eminence over 2,600 feet high, ranks fifth for population and first for historic memories of all the Algerian towns. It is pleasantly situated on a terrace planted with fruit-trees of all sorts, whence the Roman colony took the name of Pomaria. ”

“ A good deal of leatherwork is done, and there is a brisk business in harness and saddlery. Tlemçen is no longer the terminus of the railway which runs to the frontier, but many frontiersmen come here to trade.
It is in vain to look in Tlemçen, as in other towns of Algeria, for the pure-bred Arab. Those who pass by the name are the result of a continual mixture with the indigenous races; they are Berberized Arabs or Arabized Berbers. But in many ways they compare favourably with their compatriots elsewhere. Tlemçen has preserved some of its traditions as a city of learning. ”

“ The secular phase of Berber life in these ages is vividly illustrated in the person and career of Yarmorâsen Ben Zeiyân, the founder of the first kingdom of Tlemcen. He belonged to the tribe of Abd el-Wâd, who, with their cousins, the Beni-Mérin, under the pressure of the Arabs of the second invasion, came up from the desert and took possession of the coast, the former about Tlemcen and the latter in Morocco. For many years these tribes, under the Almohades, had exercised feudal rights over the country ”

“ Tlemçen occupies an important strategic position, close to the Moroccan frontier, and is garrisoned by French troops. At the Hôtel de France, a somewhat ramshackle but not uncomfortable hostelry, with very obliging hosts, breakfast many officers of the garrison. The variety of uniform is great; not less great the variety of human types:—from the fair, and apparently frail, young exquisite, whose physique suggests rather the counting-house than the Sahara, to the grizzled veteran of many campaigns.
Yet the native inhabitants lend colour and interest to the mean streets. ”

“ The examples at Tlemcen belong to this African branch of the art, which was patronized by the early king of Tlemcen, and was most illustrated, perhaps, by the Beni-Mérin prince in his reign at Mansourah; for his predecessors at Fez had been rulers on both sides the strait, and were, therefore, in more immediate contact with the sources of the art, which, however, had already by reason of the emigrant Andalusians made Fez a noble Moorish city. As compared with Fez, Tlemcen was provincial. ”

“ It has no great building like the Alhambra, although its mosques contain magnificent work, which is unsurpassed and perhaps unequalled elsewhere. Excessive praise which raises expectations destined to be disappointed is to be deplored. Tlemçen has enough of beauty and interest to stand on its own merits. In one respect it has an advantage over the Moorish cities of Spain. ”

“ The legend of the Mosque of Mansourah is{218} a classic among the Arabs who inhabit the mountain city of Tlemcen. A negro king of the Soudan, who himself as well as his followers were Mussulmans, invaded the region beyond the Atlas and laid siege to Tlemcen. So long and well-sustained was the siege that the invading army sought to build a mosque in their midst. A sort of competition was held, and the winners were a Jew and an Arab. ”

“ The mosque is divided by columns into five aisles. Delicate lacework extends from the spring of the arches to the roof. The tile mosaics are believed to have come from Morocco. The medressa is a building resembling the mosque.
Mansura, which is about 11/2 m. west of Tlemçen, owes its foundation to the attempts of the Beni-Marin rulers of Morocco to extend their sovereignty. The Amir Abu Yakub Yusef besieged Tlemçen in the early years of the 14th century The siege lasted eight years, and Yusef turned his camp into a walled city. ”

“ The Arabs of Tlemçen are said to eschew fanaticism, as becomes men of learning, to regard those who are not of their faith less with hate than with pity, as having missed the true way of salvation; an attitude not uncommon in other lands. ”

“ Far to the west, beyond Oran, and close to the frontiers of Morocco, lies a hill city, once the seat of empire and of learning, but now sunk to the condition of a provincial town. Yet Tlemçen has occupied so high a position in the Mohammedan world, and the reputation of its existing monuments is so widespread, that the enterprising traveller will desire to visit it. The distance from Algiers is great, some 800 miles there and back, and as there is little of interest on the road, a journey by motor-car is not inviting. ”

“ A special manufacture is that of red shawls, used throughout the department of Oran by Jewish women when in mourning.
In the immediate neighbourhood of the modern Tlemçen are numerous remains of the fortifications of Agadir (vide infra) , and the minaret of the mosque, a beautiful tower dating from the 13th century, the lower part of which is built of large hewn stones from the Roman Pomaria. More noteworthy, however, are the ruins of Sidi Bu Medin and of Mansura.Sidi Bu Medin. Sidi Bu Medin (more properly El Eubbad) is a little over a mile south-east of Tlemçen. ”

“ The nearer environs of the town, on the upper margin of the plateau, are exuberantly fertile. Luxuriant fruit-bearing hedges are interspersed with groves of gigantic olive, carob, and pistachio trees, from whose shade peep forth the white domes of numerous tombs of saints (p. 172) .
Tlemcen still contains historic memorials of its mediæval prime and a number of Moorish works of art, mostly of the Abdelwadite and Merinide periods (p. 188) . These last, like the buildings of Fez and Kairwan (p. 372) , are among the most interesting in Barbary. ”

“ TLEMÇEN, a town of Algeria, the capital of an arrondissement in the department of Oran, near the frontier of Morocco, 68 m. by road and 102 by rail S.W. of Oran. It stands 2500 ft. above the sea, on the north slope of the Lella Setta hills, which rise to a height of over 4000 ft. It is the chief town of a wide district exporting olive oil, esparto, corn and flour, wools and Algerian onyx; and has a population of (1906) 24,060. From Tlemçen the railway is continued westward to the Moroccan frontier at Lalla Maghnia, a distance of 44 m. ”

“ The excellent work of the Service des monuments historiques is bearing good fruit. At Timgad it has given a Roman City to the modern world; at Tlemçen it is safeguarding the treasures of Arab decorative art; the less important antiquities of Algiers and Constantine, and of a hundred less considerable places, should be its future care.
It is too much to expect that a trading and agricultural community should wax enthusiastic over such matters for their own sake. The point we have to emphasise is that there is money in them ”

“ The amateur will look in vain in Algiers for fine examples of Arab art, such as he may study at Cairo, at Granada, or at Tlemçen, in the province of Oran. The ravages of war, the stress of successive bombardments, amply account for this. The old minarets are gone; such work of the best period as may have 54existed has long disappeared; what the French have spared is chiefly of the Turkish domination. ”

“ Places unknown to the geography of the sixteenth century became notorious in their day, and Christian wives and mothers learned to tremble at the very names of Algiers and Tunis. From these places the rovers issued to capture, to destroy, and to enslave: in Oran and Tlemcen, in Tenes, Shershell, Bougie, Jigelli, Bizerta, Sfax, Susa, Monastir, Jerbah, and Tripoli they lurked ready for the raid and the foray. At one time all Northern Africa would thrill to the triumph of the Moslem arms, at another there would go up the wail of the utterly defeated ”

“ The minaret was built by Yar’morasen, the great Berber monarch who raised Tlemçen to its pitch of power in the thirteenth century; and in the fourteenth various auxiliary buildings, including a hospital for the aged and incurable, were added. ”

“ You may see here, as often you may see in Cairo and the cities of the East, a tradesman 156seated in his little shop poring over an Arab text. In Algeria generally the standard of education among the natives is very low; only a small fraction of one per cent can read and write. The religion of the Tlemçen Arabs is naturally of a somewhat higher type than that of those who, knowing nothing of the law and the prophets, are content with the observance of fast days and a cult of saints mixed with all sorts of survivals of fetishism. ”

“ He was soon the Mahdi, with a new Koran, institutor of the sect of the Unity of God, which after his death came to the throne of the country in the dynasty of the princely Almohades. The students of Tlemcen had once sent one of their number to the prophet with an invitation to come and teach them; he, however, found himself ill at ease in the college, and soon went away into hermitage among the mountains; but the youth remained with him as his disciple and companion, and it was this youth, Abd el-Moumin, who founded the new dynasty, like its predecessors prosperous and glorious ”

“ Inland, besides Constantine, are the important towns of Tlemcen ( 24,060) , Sidi-bel-Abbes (24,494) , Mascara (18,989) and Blida (16,866) . In the Sahara are Biskra (4218) , El Wad (7586) , Tuggurt (2073) and Wargla (3579) . All these places are separately noticed. ”

“ Comp. Marçais’s book on Tlemcen mentioned at p. 175 and A. Bel’s ‘Tlemcen et ses Environs’ (Oran, 1909) .
From the Porte de Sidi Bou-Médine (Pl. D, 2, 3) , the chief gate of the town, the Rue de Sidi Bel-Abbès leads in 2 min. to the Esplanade du Méchouar (Pl. C, 3) , planted with fine plane-trees. On the left rises the—
Méchouar (Arabic meshwâr, the king’s castle) , the residence of the Abdelwadites and Ziyanides, erected by Yarmorâsen about 1891255, a great quadrangular pile, forming like the Alhambra a complete quarter of the town. ”

“ Under the Sultan’s rule Tripoli has remained the capital of a truly barbaric state, virgin of improvements, with just enough dilapidated abandon, dirt and picturesqueness to make the delight of the artist. Arabs were everywhere; veiled women looked at the Christians with melting eyes above their wrappings. Mohammedanism, already twelve centuries old, has, after a period of inactivity, awakened anew in Africa, and is rapidly spreading. Very unlike the Christians, the faithful of today are the same fervid Faithful of Omar and Mohammed. ”

“ They are also still rigorously excluded from the Moslem sanctuary, where it is said stood King Solomon’s Temple in all its glory, though Christians have been admitted of late years to this jealously-guarded spot, containing as it does the Dome of the Rock—a very precious spot in Moslem eyes. Alas! everywhere the Jew in Jerusalem has to come in contact with ‘the pig of a Turk,’ as he contemptuously calls him. I wonder the wealthy Jews do not buy Jerusalem or Palestine itself of the Sultan, who, however, does all he can to keep the Jews from returning there to live and die. ”

“ The city had been under siege eight years and eight months, when suddenly the Morocco sultan was murdered by his eunuch, whereupon his grandson at once proclaimed himself heir to the throne, raised the siege and hurried back to Fez to establish his kingly rights. The Arab historians say that more than one hundred twenty thousand men perished during the investment of Tlemsen. It is, consequently, not to be wondered at that the inhabitants totally destroyed Mansura as soon as the besieging forces left. ”

“ Since the second capture of Jerusalem, the kingdom had been slowly but surely dying, as its inhabitants knew full well. Signs and wonders foretold to the pious the coming catastrophe; shrewd business men hastened to sell their property in the doomed country. Tripolis followed the fate of Antioch in 1289; Acre, Tyre, Sidon and Beirût were taken by Melik-el-Aschraf, the Sultan of Egypt, in 1291; and, with the fall of the last two strongholds of the Templars, Tortosa and Château Pèlerin, ended the rule of the Franks in Palestine. ”

“ But when one observes the fiery, proud looks of the natives and contemplates the great masonry of the walls and the ancient mosque, one involuntarily lives over in imagination a page in the history of Tlemsen. ”

“ However, in this great Tlemsen mosque I did come upon one new element which I never found in the appointment of any other until I reached the city of Algiers. Opposite the mihrab in the nave of the mosque stood a platform surrounded by a rail, on which the mokim, or younger mullah, takes his place during the services and announces to the people what parts of the office the Imam will read an d which prayers are to be repeated after him. This platform is called the "sedda," and is to be found only in some of the Algerian mosques, never in those of Morocco. ”

“ A group of high-class Arabs sat by themselves upon the decks, waited upon by a tall tribesman faced like a camel, and with the handle of his pistol and curved dagger outlined beneath his clothes. This group was composed of sherifs [17b] from Algeria, all high-caste men, dignified, slow, and soft of speech, deliberate in movement, their clothes as white as snow, nails dyed with henna, each with a heavy rosary in his hand, their business somewhat mysterious, but bound to see the Sultan in his camp. ”