Fez

Fez lies in the valley of the Wadi Fās in northern Morocco, at the crossing of the routes from the Mediterranean to the Sahara and from the Atlantic to Ifriqiya. Idrīs I founded a settlement on the river’s right bank in 789 and his son Idrīs II founded another on the left in 809; refugee quarters from Córdoba and Kairouan filled the two banks, and the twin towns fused into the metropolis of the far Maghreb. Its Qarawiyyīn mosque-university, founded in 859 by a Kairouani merchant’s daughter, became the great school of the west; under the Marinids, who made it their capital in the thirteenth century, Fez reached its medieval height.

The name Fās is short, old, and unexplained, which the city’s chroniclers repaired with stories. The Rawḍ al-Qirṭās, the fourteenth-century chronicle of the city, offers a shelf of them: a silver pickaxe, fa’s, dug the foundations and named the town; or the founder was handed an axe; or an old city called Sāf lay nearby and its name was reversed. The legends are transparent afterthoughts, folk etymology doing its ordinary work of making a meaningless syllable mean something, and they are the entry’s real content, a rare case where the documentation of a name’s origin is rich precisely because the origin was already lost. Kairouan’s name records what the founders spoke; Fez’s records only that, within five centuries, nobody remembered, and the city preferred a good story to an honest blank.