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My residence contained a sitting room and a bedroom, with elaborately handcrafted bookshelves, couches covered in embroidered cushions, and Berber rugs on the floors. Upstairs, beyond the top of the estate’s walls, no windows opened onto the outer world. Those peeking in from a vantage point on the hills outside the city would see only a bare white surface. As I unpacked my belongings, the muezzin’s call from the mosque next door resonated through the hard-tiled courtyard. It was easily the most fantastic residence I had ever seen, much less stayed in, a building many times older than my whole country.

My host was a serious man, although he possessed a well-hidden whimsical streak. His former life revealed itself only in flashes – a spark of interest in the mention of a Western film, a sudden yen for an American cigarette. Other than that, he was concerned only with his home, his lifestyle, and the preservation of Fez’s traditions. He was resolute in his determination to restore the property fully to its former glory, and, if possible, to influence others to do the same. Fez is now under siege of a different sort, as hundreds of thousands of Moroccans, dispossessed from their rural homes by drought or poverty, have flooded the old city in recent decades. The buildings are filled with squatters; the infrastructure is crumbling. The tendrils of the Great Satan – Internet cafés, housing developments, fast-food joints – lick at the outer walls. The once-proud elite of political thinkers, philosophers, and merchants has largely fled elsewhere.

It was my host’s work with plaster that spoke most articulately of his seriousness and dedication. There are no faces in Islamic art, nor any images of animals, plants, historical tableaux, or landscapes. Anything God created is a taboo subject for an artist. The artist must speak in severely constrained fashion, within the framework of centuries-old traditions and practice. Yet despite those constraints, I saw in Abdelfettah’s work – and, later, in the works of other Islamic artists – a universe of possibilities for beauty and expression. I was reminded of Moroccan food, where there may be only a few standard dishes but infinite room for subtle variations exists. Abdelfettah showed me how he did the work, allowed me to feel as the metal tools pushed through one section of softly yielding plaster, routing delicately into the pristine white surface. Again and again, I saw those tiny repeating patterns, never varying from God’s plan, always within the controlled borders of the design, kept firmly in control yet emanating outward, layer upon layer, ring around ring. It takes a long time to do a single piece – how long, I have no idea. And there were scores of them all over the house. (On occasion, Abdelfettah worked for others. He did, he confided, Mick Jagger’s bathroom recently.) The challenge of all that work, all that elaborate detail, and his unwavering faith in what he was doing, his discipline, his certainty that he’d chosen the right path, provoked and disturbed me in new ways. Why couldn’t I be that certain – about anything? Why had I never found anything that so commanded my attention and effort, year after year after year? I looked at Abdelfettah, wondered what he was really seeing in all those tiny grooves and repeating patterns, and I envied him. The professional kitchen has always provided me with my own measure of certainty, a thing to believe in, a cause. Cooking, the system, has been my orthodoxy – but never like this. Mine has been a sloppy, dysfunctional life. I yearned for whatever it was he had that I didn’t, imagining it could only be peace of mind. My efforts, during a lifetime of cooking, have all been eaten – by the next day, a memory at best. Abdelfettah’s work will live on forever. I spent the evening reading the Koran, moved by its seductive, sometimes terrible severity, its unquestioning absolutism, trying to imagine the people within its pages, their very human problems and their extraordinary,