Hameesh al-Qobson’s diary: the view from across the Maghreb
6 April 2023
WHEN I AM OUTSIDE the jurisdiction, I do gig work under cover for “N”, the mysterious novel-reading head of the Scottish Secret Service (as noted in my last post). He, she, it, or they spent 3,051 days playing the part of First Minister in Scotland’s perceived parliament, but now the worm has turned. In the end, it was a case of ars est celare artem – the art is in concealing the art. The real purpose of Holyrood is to mask the control of Scotland by more powerful people than MSPs and their shepherds in Cabinet. That is where Humza Yousaf comes in.
Sitting in the Rif mountains of northern Morocco, reading Scottish administrative history through a haze of local contraband while resting from the nocturnal labours in Tangier which I wrote about last time, I come upon a sentence which so exactly defines “N’s” position vis-à-vis “continuity Humza” that it is worth quoting.
In 1932, Walter Elliot, an experienced ex-minister, wrote to Sir Archibald Sinclair after he resigned as Secretary of State for Scotland (over free trade versus imperial preference): “I know the queer double feeling that comes over one on going out [from Ministerial office], so well – the physical relief at the lifting of an almost intolerable burden of work and the hankering that always remains for a hand on the tiller.”
This seems to explain the “queer double feeling” that “N” is now exhibiting. She is glad to be free but still wants to keep her hand on Humza’s tiller. Since I happen to be in Morocco on other business anyway (ferry construction research), “N” asks me if I could help “oor Humza” find his feet as a Muslim among Scots by researching the leading case of a Scot among Muslims. “Perhaps we could reverse engineer a solution going forward,” she writes, in flawlessly meaningless Aspiranto.
After a bit of come and go, “N” selects Robert Cunninghame Graham from my list of options, mainly because he was one of the joint founders of the SNP and therefore counts as an “authentic Scot”, despite his aristocratic background and Harrovian education. In 1898, CG as I will call him for convenience, published a highly readable book called A Journey in Morocco. In it, he described his search for the hidden city of Taroudant, in the high Atlas to the south of the country, above the Sus valley. He describes his perilous approach to the citadel of the Kaid (the local governor/warlord) on horseback through the mountains. The Kaid was capricious and xenophobic, but CG was well disguised as an Arab, being an experienced horseman and wearing a white jellaba with panache but no underpants.
After sunset and breakfast – this being Ramadan – I sit down at my Encrypt-a-Scot keyboard and tap out a memo to “N”. My first recommendation is that Hooray Humza might consider reviving the term “North Britain”, which the founder of his Party used without embarrassment. For example, having said that “Protestant missionaries in Morocco are almost all Scotchmen”, CG speculates on why an “Arab knave” might have rejected an invitation to convert to Protestantism: “Perhaps he found the North British water of their baptism too cold for him.”
Later, the SNP champion, in whose honour a half-hour debate was held in the Holyrood parliament as recently as 24 May 2022, wrote this about the Berber tribes of the Atlas mountains he was passing through: “One thing is certain, they [the Berbers] cannot lie more than the Arabs do, but then the Arabs lie so prettily, with so much circumstance and such a nice choice of words, that it all comes to be a matter of individual taste, for there are those who had rather be deceived with civil manners by an Italian than be cheated brutally by a North Briton.”
My next recommendation is perhaps a little specialised, but Arabic has a word to describe those who do not submit to the discipline of Islam, and that is “kaffir”. Since Humble Humza has already said that he wants to govern for “the whole of Scotland”, it might reinforce his message to say explicitly to those who retain a vestigial suspicion of Islamic discipline in a diversified democracy that he wishes to “reach out to all Scottish Kaffirs”.
And why not? CG reported proudly that he heard an Arab say of him: “This Kaffir here fears neither God nor the Devil.” Later he is told by his Lebanese guide that his disguise is so good that “in Mecca he could take me to the house of a friend, who is as big a Kaffir as myself.”
Finally, CG quotes an Arab he met in the hills when they are half-way to Taroudant. He brings the first news of the outside world for some time. “Humza would like this,” I note in the margin for “N”.
“Our Lord the Sultan is indeed a king,” the messenger says. “Fifty-one heads cut off, two tribes quite eaten up, and three hundred Kaffirs wounded! Oh what a joy it was to see the ‘maquina’ [Spanish for “machine”], the Christian devil gun, which fires all day, play on the enemies of our Lord the King.”
Later, CG explains the apparent prejudice. “No Mahommedan ever desires that Kaffirs shall triumph over ‘those of the faith’.”
Though I make many other positive recommendations, including one based on CG’s elegant reference to “Gentlemen of the Third Sex”, I do issue a single, important warning to Hopeful Humza through his tiller-handler. There are better ways to destroy your MSPs’ autonomy and moral integrity than by getting Angus Robertson to write fatuous codes of silence for those of the faithful who are tempted to express individual opinions.
True, it is imperative that such people do not sully the Party’s reputation for blank-faced unanimity. But a more effective way of suppressing free thought, I suggest, would be to apply the principles refined at Tazmamart, the secret prison in the southern deserts where disobedient officers of the Sultan were locked up with their families for decades on end They disappeared from view completely. Not a single parched croak pleading for mercy ever wafted over the sand hills and into the Tangier Times, where it might have caused embarrassment to the wealthy ex-pat Kaffirs living in luxury on the heights above the Kasbah at the tolerance of the same Sultan.
My recommendation is to turn the isle of Rùm into an equivalent prison for Nationalist dissidents. The island already has the smell of death about it, having been for half a century now the graveyard for lost generations of “conservationists” (remember them, with their woolly hats and penetrometers?). There would plenty of deer available for food, and endless rain to drink, for the Party renegades. They could be left entirely alone. Merely staying alive would keep them busy enough, and the experience might help them understand what complete independence really feels like.
This far I am prepared to go, but no further. I am a humane man and I refuse on grounds of Christian principle to take the ultimate step. I warn Humza’s tiller handler that it would be unwise in a country populated almost entirely by Kaffirs to treat any of them the way the Sultan treated Muhammed bin Abd al-Kabir al-Kittani, the founder of an opposition movement in the Rif mountains in 1905. Just a few years after CG returned to his patrimony in the Lake of Menteith to write his book, al-Kittani called for a jihad due to the Entente Cordiale between Britain and France, two of the main proponents of African colonialism (France eventually taking over Morocco, with British agreement, by the Treaty of Fez in 1912).
Al-Kittani was as much a supporter of Moroccan independence as the Sultan, Mawlay Abdelhafid, was. But Abdelhafid did not like the way al-Kittani had expressed a different view about how to maintain it in the face of a nearby continent filled with covetous Kaffirs armed with devil guns. Kittani was a firebrand who did not accept, as Angus Robertson might have put it, “that no member shall publicly criticise decisions or policy.”
The Sultan had al-Kittani flogged in public then tortured to death in front of his wife and children. That was not the end of His Excellency’s vengeance. A more sustainable solution was devised for another rebel, Abu Himara, at the same time. He was stripped naked, exhibited in an iron cage in the medina of Fez, then fed, alive, to the palace lions.
“Surely,” I say in conclusion to “N”, “the nature of modern Scottish prisons, from Barlinnie to Cornton Vale (even without Isla Bryson), makes this sort of treatment unnecessary?”
“Inshallah,” she texts back in fluent Govan Arabic.
“Shukran,” I reply woozily, as the local haze begins to internalise, evolve and ameliorate.
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Hamish Gobson lives on the Hebridean isle of Great Todday (Todaidh Mór) and features in Nicola Sturgeon: the Years of Ascent (1970-2007) – A Citizen’s Biography of a Driven Woman in a Drifting Parliament (Ian Mitchell, 2022) – available on Amazon.co.uk and also reviewed here by Tom Gallagher.
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Photo of a hand on tiller, steering a Schooner sailboat by Mark Herreid from Adobe stock
