By Philip Weiss

January 17, 1999 | 7:00 p.m

I met Abdul after our unofficial guide was led away in handcuffs at the

Merenid ruins, on the north side of Fez, on Dec. 31. We got the message and drove back to the hotel. We figured the hotel had sicced the police on us that morning when we declined an official guide. I went back to the desk and obediently requested an official guide. Abdul appeared wearing a government guide badge on his brown burnoose. He was tall and lugubrious, with chocolate-colored eyes and a grim judgmental expression. But then, it was Ramadan. I don't know whose idea it was to go to Morocco in the off-season, at the height of Ramadan, but there we were, and at the tender mercies of Abdul. At first we liked him. He was a peculiar combination of insolent and imperious. He led us around the medina, the covered old city of Fez, and clapped his hands to keep us to the side when donkeys walked by and berated us when we were moving too slowly or when anyone strayed. There were six of us and a baby. He led us down the intestinal passageways, with their atmosphere of ancient menace, trapped air and claustrophobia, and made us feel helpless. In mid-afternoon, Abdul proposed that we go back to his house to break Ramadan with him. He called his wife on a cell phone, and as it got closer to 5:30 he became more and more impatient. By this time, I should add, I was fasting, too. I felt too guilty eating, surrounded by sallow fasting Muslims with sour Ramadan breath. Isn't that what religious ritual is all about, peer pressure? Do you think I chose to be an American Jew? We drove rapidly through the west side of Fez. Inside Abdul's apartment his wife was busy cooking, and his son was copying out Arabic letters in a notebook. His pretty daughter flirted with us, and I wondered how soon before she was married off and her charms beaten into the earth. I sat next to Abdul and his wife brought out a big platter. A nature show was going on television and there was a portrait of King Hassan II on the wall. That's the compass of free speech in Morocco. There are pictures of King Hassan II everywhere, but no one is allowed to say anything about the king, though everyone privately whispers that he has a harem of hundreds of concubines. A guy I picked up hitchhiking in the mountains later explained that speech is strictly forbidden on three subjects: the king, the nation and religion. So you're not allowed to question the wanton destruction of women's public talents, or the notion that the memorization of the Koran at age 6 is religious study. As visitors, we acted out. We called the King, King HaHa the Second. Abdul ate three bowls of harira rapidly, then, taking my biceps, announced solemnly that we were invited to his house the following night, too. It would be a feast. His in-laws were coming in from the country, with chicken from the country. "We're going to Marrakech," I said. "You can leave the next day," Abdul said. "You only need a day in Marrakech." He drove with us back to the hotel. We were going out at 9 to celebrate New Year's, and I lay down to take a nap. I'd been asleep five minutes when Abdul called from downstairs. I went down and he informed me dolefully that we had to eat at the hotel that night, their New Year's gala at $100 a head. I told Abdul it was none of his business and went back upstairs. We'd been over this with the management that morning, before our illegal guide got handcuffed. They said we had to eat the dinner there. We threatened to check out. The hotel backed down. Now the hotel was reneging. My friend John and I made a pact not to lose our temper and went to the front desk to talk to the manager. A short, fat choleric man with a thick mustache, he kept pointing at an unintelligible line he'd scrawled across the bottom of my wife's typewritten fax when confirming our reservation, a line he said read, " Dîner Saint Sylvestre, obligatoire, 900d par personne ." "Saint Sylvestre is known all over the world," the manager cried. "Saint Sylvestre is the feast of New Year's." The manager kept shouting at us, telling us not to shout. I suppose it was inevitable that we lost our temper. He waved the fax in John's face. "You are an American actor. But I tell you, by my god, you will pay for this meal." John's an architect. Neither John and I had been so upset for years. It wasn't like we were going to put our god up against his god. We don't really have gods in the United States, just the media. We sat down on a nearby couch to figure things out, but we sensed we were powerless to stop them charging us. The Moroccan unit of currency is the dirham, worth about 11 cents. Basically, $99 a head for bad hotel food, a lot more than our hotel bill. All my cultural relativism went out the window. I remembered the friends who'd said, You take your freedom for granted, you have no idea what it's like to live in an Islamic country. The culture was grinding, authoritarian and overwhelmingly masculine. Our ally joined us on the couch. "I think you must eat here," Abdul said. "I would spit their food out of my mouth before I ate it," I said. Abdul sat up straight and shook his head. "You must not say that," he said. Then he held me by the biceps and asked how many of us would be coming to his house tomorrow night for dinner. "Right now, we have enough problems, Abdul." "But we have chicken coming from the country. I have called my in-laws." John leaned toward Abdul, crossing his wrists at his chest in a vaguely religious gesture. "Abdul? No. No. No. No. No." Abdul stood up dolefully. I gave him 300 dirhams for the guiding, $33. That's not counting his cut of the inflated purchases we made in the market, the burnoose he got one of us to fork over $120 for that was worth $30. He started to walk away, then turned back to me lugubriously. "If you change your mind–" It was more relaxed in the south. We went to Essaouira on the coast, a town whose name endeared me because it has all five vowels. My wife and I rented bikes and rode the 10 kilometers to the dusty settlement of Diabat, where Jimi Hendrix once lived. We left the bikes with kids in the village and walked out along the sands, looking for Jimi's house. A handsome guy with a goatee appeared between the dunes, leading a camel with two Germans riding on it, and said to follow him through the scrub, he was going to Jimi's house. He insisted that my wife get up on the camel with the Germans. Jimi's crib was an abandoned pavilion of white stone that Aziz said had been a royal palace in the something century. It had hippie graffiti going back many years. Sand filled the interior passageways. A drug dealer in blue harem pants sat out on a broken wall, whittling and listening to music on a boombox. The others ate lunch on Jimi's porch and I sat in the sand investigating the camel, his huge soft footpads and milky blue eye. He had a flat, callused, footstool-sized bump on his chest that Aziz said he uses to grind his enemies into the ground. Now and then Max issued a bubbling roar. Aziz asked us to come over to his house for dinner. We did. There was the usual nature show going on the black-and-white TV, and Aziz's wife brought out a ceramic platter filled with couscous. Three of us used our hands, but my wife used a spoon. She ate a lot of couscous and vegetables but didn't touch the chicken in the middle. "You don't eat the chicken?" Aziz asked. "I'm a vegetarian," my wife said. "You are not," I said. "You're lying." My wife gave me an unbelievable look. She was toasted over that for days. Walking back to our hotel that night, she said, "Even Sissela Bok would understand that lie." I blamed it on all the time I've spent hanging out in the anti-Clinton camp. The camp followers act as if no one lies about anything. They quote Ms. Bok's crisp, stupid statement, "Veracity functions as the foundation of relations among human beings; when this trust shatters or wears away, institutions collapse." Actually, lies sometimes serve to preserve institutions. In his revisionist treatise on lying, A Pack of Lies , the Australian sociologist John A. Barnes points out that in many societies, people go into agonies of shame when certain lies are exposed. In politics there is an expectation that people lie, that it is sometimes their duty to do so. Politicians who don't lie don't last–Walter Mondale and Michael Dukakis, whose deficit in that department the Democrats set out to correct with a vengeance in 1992. This is not to endorse lying, but to recognize its inevitability. Still, a politician couldn't lie successfully if there weren't an understanding that mostly people tell the truth. "Coherent public life would, I think, be impossible if no one ever trusted any politician," Mr. Barnes writes. "To maintain a complex social fabric we have to be prepared sometimes to give some politicians the benefit of the doubt; they have to avoid excessive, and hence counterproductive, lying." Mr. Barnes' delightful book is filled with examples. My favorite is the Mehinacu community of Brazil. At the time they were visited in the late 60's, there were 57 of them and they had lots of adultery. But because everything could be so easily observed in a small community, and gossip was rampant, the people constantly lied about adultery, too. People learned not to believe their own eyes. The social order had a couple of co-existing realities at the same time, one half-fictional. Lying preserved social order. We got home on the 10th. I had cultural readjustment problems. For some reason, I didn't want to be back. I called the Moroccan Embassy in Washington and asked the media officer about King HaHa the Second's hundreds of concubines. She bridled. "No, that is not true. I'm not aware of that." I chuckled, but then I turned on the television and the king's harem was all anyone here could talk about. I'd worried about being out of touch and asked my sister to save all the papers. But what had I missed? Nothing. Everyone was still talking about Monica a year later. It was hard to say which was worse, not being able to talk about the king's exploitation of women, or being forced to talk about that and nothing else for years. I don't know whose idea it was to go to an Islamic country during Ramadan in the off-season, but I missed it bad.