Almaghrib Aljadid - May 22nd, 1936.

When you visit this museum, you need not make more than a few steps there to be in contact with the Middle Ages and have the feeling to discover this period whose traces, dissimulated in the books of history, and whose vestiges, submitted to the proof of time, could be preserved only thanks to their conservation in this high place of culture. Here, you are exempted to make studies after studies and resort to multiple methods of research and analysis so that you can penetrate the utmost secrecies of the elapsed times.

The museum does not reflect only an image of the past life; it provides many more others, at one's own free will, and under multiple facets. By visiting it, one is sure to collect a great deal of informations. Those who are interested in the study of human history's great stages, will be able to find among the collections exposed there the explanation to the obscure and incomprehensible questions that remained in their mind defying solution.

This museum which shelters a large variety of exposures must always face the rush of visitors groups succeeding to one another. Hardly one takes a step towards the entrance that, at once, one looses the notion of time and forgets that one lives in an era of progress which has nothing to do with this remote time of humanity that the museum brings back to life out of its ashes. While passing from a store to another, one is delighted to see the arranged and documented parts. Sometimes one yields completely to the charm of some of them and spends a long time observing them with the meticulesness of the most exacting researcher.

Then, one stops in front of an objects collection which holds the visitor's attention by revealing him its secrets and entertaining him, - so far as we admit it could speak - with the most strange conditions and the most remote and astonishing dreams. It tells the story of life in its naivety, its calm, its stumbling march, its currents reduced to silence, and its scrappy and most denatured principles.

The life which this museum recalls does not make any room for progress. On the contrary, it does not consider seriously all the stages traversed by mankind after it. In spite of the very high level of the courses professed in Universities, no amphitheater can describe this life with as much accuracy as this museum of the Middle Ages, Here, we are provided with real informations about a series of the historical periods where the living conditions where quite different from what they are today.

If you have the chance to visit this museum, do not expect to see a disparity of exposed objects needing the scientific knowledge of the archeologist to delimit their origins and establish the bonds which link them to one another. You must quite simply know that you have in front of you the spectacle of a homogeneous life. You have to keep in mind that you are dealing with objects which present a certain coherence between them and agree all together to show you how to raise the veil on the secrecies of the ancient civilizations.

The exposed objects are considered, in the archeological point of view, as living matters which do not require studies and deep researches, so that one can apprehend what they contain as images, present as amalgam of colors on one hand, and have a keen sense of what they hide in the very bottom of themselves on the other hand.

After this introduction, perhaps is it useless to reveal the locality of this museum to those among the readers who are eager to admire the exposures hosted in its shelters. This museum is neither far away nor bears an unknown name. The objects which it contains are not foreign to us, Moroccans. We are ourselves these objects, and this museum is not less than our Morocco itself with its extended areas and levelled and opened ways. We are the museum of the Middle Ages, and why would we not be that museum whereas everything in our society is strangely based on the premises of the past, has no relationship with the present, and is totally unaware of future events in their historical perspective?

No doubt, we represent the past, but which of the ancient periods do we represent? Of which stage of human history are we the museum? We must be frank with ourselves during this visit. The past we reflect is far from being the prestigious era or the golden age which allowed our nation to reach the pinnacle of glory and grandeur. We are rather the representatives of the periods of decline when the moroccan nation weakened and fell victim of its own inertness. We are this past during which our nation let itself sweep away by the current and be the toy of the waves, such as a block of wood which the sea pushes little by little towards the shore. We are even not fully awake to the dangers that are awaiting us when we feel secure on firm ground.

Is this the shore where the human beings are involved to combat one another? Is this the shore where one fights to be able to carry out a decent and honest life, or that of the mortal rest and the eternal sleep?

There is no room for doubt that the spectacle of the exposed objects brings us back to the reality in which we live, namely that of every moment of our wakefulness, during which we are gained by a sleep even deeper. Any attempt to adapt our way of living to the living conditions of our time makes us deplore a bitter acknowledgement of incapacity and weakness, which we even do not know how they ceased us.

We are now about to review, would it be in a succint summary, the exposed objects which are nothing else than a reflection of the obsolete images of the past which are projected on our present life.

Here is the eduction of our children on the operating table. We are invited to perform of it a meticulous anatomical study, and submit the results which we will have obtained to a profound reflection. Do you see it obeying to the standards of modern education as defined by science and tested by experiments? Do you see it drawing from the breviary of knowledge, following the example of the man who deserves to live in our epoch only after having drunk from its clear sources? Is it enough to commit the crime to generate a child with our image instead with that of his time? Don't we make of him in these circumstances a factor of destruction, which ramsacks all what he finds on his route and behaves as an animal following its instincts and yielding completely to its natural impulses? When the child starts school, it is for him an opportunity to learn nothing; and when he leaves the school, it is to take the bad direction and find himself on the edge of the precipice where others, who have also not received any education, preceded him.

Here is the circle of our families. Has it evolved from the lower forms of life? Is it aware of what each member of the family group thinks and feels? Does it know that the atmosphere in which he lives makes quite a dent in his conscious and sensitive ego? Does it realize how shocking is this atmosphere which poisons every individual and makes of him a corpse totally stripped from its physical and moral resources?

Let's pause for a moment on our ideas. Which difference do we see between them and the conceptions of former times during which one did not even manage to know oneself, and was very far from knowing the real siginificance of its existance as human being having rights and subjected to obligations. Don't you remark that we keep quarreling about the most elementary principles and expressing our disapproval to what is allowed and admitted by averybody?

Let us consider now our customs and habits which remain deeply rooted in the distance, taking care of the conservation of motionless images which reflect neither the soul of the past nor the spirit of the present. We perpetuate them automatically, without asking any question about the morality they are supposed to teach. We don't even wonder for which reasons our ancestors adopted them.

Here are finally our activities. Did we ever notice that they left the narrow circle of individualism which characterises the nations in the lowest stages of their history? Did we ever see them becoming productive as requested by the activities of the modern times, in which the fate decided to place us? But before asking if our activities are productive, we should wonder wether we do have any activity, and then appreciate if it is productive or not. Actually, our only contribution to the cyclical nature of economic activities is our tendency to consume what the modern civilization produces, managing no effort to avoid getting involved in the cycle of production. Our share in this dynamic remains extremely modest, and is similar to the insignificant contribution which was ours during the most distant past of our history.

We must unfortunately end our visit to the museum of Middle Ages, convinced that all it contains as historical testimonies has a character of a burning actuality, since all what is located between the walls of the ocean and the saharian space keeps living in this part of the world faded by the succession of the centuries and refusing to belong to the modern times and bathe in their brilliant light sources.