In 1971, Aziz BineBine – a junior officer in the Moroccan army – was ordered to take part in a military exercise. Unbeknown to him, the attack on King Hassan’s summer palace near Casablanca was in fact a coup attempt.
The coup failed – and Aziz, who had never fired a shot, was accused of being part of the plot. He found himself publicly disowned by his father, a devout Islam scholar and close associate of the King. Sentenced to 10 years in jail, Aziz was soon transferred to the dungeon of a secret prison in the Atlas mountains - Tazmamart.
It was what Aziz describes as hell; his cell, furnished only with a concrete bench, was dark and dank, liable to flooding by blocked sewers, shared with scorpions and cockroaches, searing in summer and freezing in winter. Many of his fellow prisoners perished. Aziz was to remain at Tazmamart for 18 years.
But he found astonishing inner resources to survive this hell. Even before entering Tazmamart, he had made an act of complete, unconditional surrender to God, which enabled him to live one day at a time and forget everything else, even any desire to regain his freedom.
Aziz tells the story of his captivity and the faith that sustained him in conversation with John McCarthy, who himself experienced a long imprisonment as a British hostage in Lebanon in the 1980s. Both men were eventually released in 1991.
(Photo: The prison of Tazmamart, a former barracks in the eastern Middle Atlas mountains 60km from the city of Errachidia, Morocco. Credit:: Abdelhak Senna/AFP/Getty Images)
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