Mevloud

At Meknes, in inland Morocco, a bored French sergeant marched a platoon through the white deserted streets before dawn one day last week, posted his men at strategic street corners. The men lit cigarets and waited.

At dawn the sound of drums and shrill fifes commenced. It was Mevloud, 1,361st anniversary of the birth of Mohammed, a celebration that lasts 28 days in Meknes. There the rites are hotly colored with Negro practices from the Sudan. White-robed Moors filled the narrow streets, gathered in shouting groups around the throbbing drums.

Hours later when the heat, the dust, the drums and the waiting had worked up the crowd beyond restlessness, dervishes from the Sidi-Mohammed-Ben-Aissa tribe appeared and the great procession to the sanctuary of Moulai Ismail got under way. French soldiers were on duty to prevent anti-French rioting or manslaughter. Otherwise their orders were not to interfere in any religious ceremony.

The soldiers did not interfere when some of the dervishes stripped themselves to the waist, slashed themselves with knives, lashed themselves with knouts. Howling like dogs, other dervishes crawled toward the sanctuary, chewing glass till their mouths ran with bloody foam. Others hacked at their heads with hatchets, swallowed strips of blazing cotton. Some carried fat, dust-colored puff adders which they encouraged to bite them. Others swallowed molten wax. Circles of crazy dancing men moved through the streets tossing live sheep into the air, jerking the animals apart as they fell, stuffing bits of bloody flesh into their mouths.

Mevloud fanaticism is for men only. While the fanatic crowd moved slowly on toward the mosque, veiled Moorish women crowded the housetops, clapping their hands, shrilling "You-you! You-you!"

At sunset the blood-spattered streets of Meknes were deserted. The French sergeant assembled his platoon, marched it back to barracks.

Elsewhere in Islam than at Meknes, no such lavish gestures marked the observance of Mohammed's birthday. Celebrations of the Prophet's anniversary vary locally, like those of Christmas, but they preserve in general an orderly and charitable character appropriate to Mohammed's disclaimer of divinity. In Egypt, Mevloud is a holiday which Moslems devote to house-to-house visiting, attending services at the mosques. In Constantinople, the minarets are lighted, the orphans and poor, as elsewhere in Islam, receive food and candy.

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