What it Means to be Clean

Sometimes there are conversations so frank, or personal, or emotional that you just want to melt into the floor. To escape. To cover your ears and retreat. It’s not an inability – intellectual, emotional, or otherwise – to engage in this kind of discussion that makes them so discomfiting, it’s their unexpectedness that throws us off track. They generally start off innocuous enough . . . an introduction, some banal pleasantries, and the like, but then a comment is made that launches the raft across the Rubicon. Today, that fateful comment is nothing more than, “Do you know what it means to be clean?”

The questioner is a Moroccan-born marathoner, who now lives in New Mexico. He runs a 2:14 marathon, which is fast. Fast enough to win a half-dozen marathons in the States and elsewhere in the world. Not quite fast enough to be a household name. He calls Albuquerque Mecca for athletes, given the city’s good weather and altitude, not to mention that he starts the stopwatch the minute he leaves his doorway, whereas when he lived in New York, it took him thirty minutes just to reach the Park. “Marathoners don’t like to waste time,” Haki says. Or anything, it seems, given his slight frame in which ever tendon and muscle has an appointed task and his quick-to-the-point conversation style.

Every summer Haki returns with his wife and three children to Marrakech for a month-long visit. Hamoud had mentioned him to us and is anxious to introduce us, connecting the fellow Americans in top Marrakechi networking style. It’s Friday, the Muslim holy day and therefore all the men, even those on the less devout end of the spectrum, head off to mosque for a midday prayer and two hours of Koran reading. They dress in all white, including crocheted white scull caps. “We’ll get you in there [the mosque] in one of these next week, Sam,” Haki says, gesturing to his long, white linen djellabah. He’s momentarily forgotten that here, unlike his progressive mosque in Albuquerque, non-Muslims are not allowed into the mosque.

We’re all sitting in the office off the dining room, the Dowe-Sandes, Hamoud, his friend Hassan, Youssef and Haki’s son Zachariah. Hassan is working on the computer since the internet’s on the fritz. Hamoud circulates with a chilled bottle of water, refilling glasses as we chat. He’s obviously pleased to have introduced us and he and Hassan talk in hushed tones, leaving Haki and us to go thru the why, how of our presence in Morocco.

“You know you must be clean to go into the mosque,” Haki explains. “Yes,” we mumble together. I can’t help but look at my bare, dirty feet, wishing I’d thrown on a pair of socks or shoes before heading upstairs.

“You know what it means to clean yourself, right?”

“Yeah, I mean you wash your hands and feet, right,” we chime in. We’ve seen the hurried splashing in the public fountains that abut each of the mosques a thousand times.
“No, it’s not that kind of dirty that I’m talking about,” he replies. “I will talk frankly here,” he continues, the hair on the back of my neck suddenly alert. “Sex with our wives makes us dirty, and we must shower after sex before we go into the mosque. Clean.”

“It’s not the feet and hands that matter, it’s the . . .” he cuts himself short, gesturing towards his lap. “And it’s not touching a woman,” he continues to our mutual discomfort, bordering on horror, “it’s . . . you know . . . [yes, we do, and you don’t need to say any more!] having sex, that makes you dirty.”

“WE GOT THE POINT. ENOUGH!” I’m screaming silently in my head. It’s not so much what Haki is saying, it’s the context. Here we are sitting in a room with three white-robed Muslims – and their sons – who we hardly know, by the way, with just one woman present, who is barefoot, wearing a knee-baring dress and is the focus of this uncomfortable clean-dirty seminar.

Haki, obviously happy to have made his point turns, at last, the discussion to our home renting/buying quandary. He’s been prepped, I’m guessing, by both Hamoud and Hassam. He launches into a long diatribe about why we should buy, not rent. That to rent is to throw money away (in Marrakech, unlike LA, rents are so expensive relative to lower purchase prices, that three year’s worth of rent is equivalent to the cost of ownership) and that with the Marrakech real estate market, one is guaranteed to make money. This topic has become so stressful and played for us that we’d normally take pains to change the subject. Not today. We’re happy to hear Haki regurgitate all that we’ve already learned about labor costs, pros and cons of various neighborhoods, and on and on.

“You know,” he concludes without so much as a wink, “there’s nothing to worry about in Marrakech. Most of the houses are just a bit dirty.”