University of al-Qarawiyyin

She writes, in a private journal she has kept intermittently since her husband's death and returns to more faithfully during this period of construction, of standing in the unfinished courtyard on an evening in early summer of eight hundred sixty, the walls around her lit gold by the setting sun, the scent of fresh-cut stone and drying mortar still hanging in the air, and feeling for the first time not merely the satisfaction of a project well-managed, but something closer to a physical sense of the sacred taking shape beneath her hands, as though the years of grief that had driven her to this work had, without her fully noticing the transformation, been converted stone by stone, course by course, into something that would outlive not only her grief, but her own mortal span entirely.

By the close of the period this chapter chronicles, in the early months of eight hundred sixty-one, the structural bones of the Al-Qarawiyyin Mosque and complex stand substantially complete across the greater part of its planned footprint, walls raised, the courtyard's arcades taking their final form, the great cedar beams of the main hall's roof set and secured, the mihrab's foundation prepared and awaiting the delicate decorative work that will occupy the artisans in the seasons to come.

It has been, by any measure, a monumental undertaking, but what distinguishes it in the minds of everyone who has labored upon it, the masons, the brickmakers, the carpenters, Abu Ibrahim himself, who has by now abandoned any pretense of managing the project without his patron's constant and informed involvement, is not merely its scale, but the unbroken thread of principle that has run through every stage of its construction, that what could be found within the land Fatima al-Fihri purchased with her own hand would be used before anything else was sought, that every stone and every measure of clay would be tested and proven sound before it was trusted to bear weight, and that the integrity of the building's origins would be honored as carefully as the integrity of its finished form.

Fatima stands, in the closing days covered by this chapter, at the center of the courtyard she has watched rise from bare purchased earth, and looks up through the still-open framework of the roof toward a sky beginning to lighten with the first colors of dawn.

Loneliness as something akin to laziness, something immoral.

Co-researcher Mohamed Zouiri from the University of Fes says that attitude is widespread and it's made loneliness invisible.

You go to a certain person, they don't look lonely, they don't have symptoms of loneliness, they don't look depressed.

And they themselves believe that they are not lonely.

They don't ask out of dignity.

They're, they're poor, they need, but they don't ask, okay? There was a funny joke one time, it's actually a true story, that there was a beggar always sitting there outside a Qarawiyyin in Morocco.

And, um, [clears throat] uh, the beggar, the, the, the Quran teacher, the faqih, the scholar, he, he never used to give him because a scholar believed panhandling is wrong.

You have two arms, two legs, two eyes, go and work.