THE PARIS GRAND MOSQUE for mint tea and a hammam


The Paris mosque, a monument all its own, used to be my retreat on dreary winter days. It was a bit of a find in my junior year in college when I enrolled myself into the Sorbonne at the age of 21. I was living in an attic apartment in a six story walk up thatched with heavy wooden beams. Floral chinoiserie on a black background papered the a-framed ceiling and there were two beds flanking opposite sides of the room—one for me and one for my studio mate, a girl I met in an international foyer in the Fifth Arrondissement from Los Angeles. She was having an affair with an ivory skinned 17 year-old-boy with rose cheeks whose name escapes me. (One night during a student uprising, he witnessed a murder on our street, Rue Monsieur le Prince. He returned with tears flowing and a story about Malik, a North African who became a victim of police brutality at the hands of the CRS— the state police.) My roommate always did her best to consol him. The night of Malik's death I walked home through the deserted streets around the Sorbonne. Fires burned and unmoored cobblestones peppered the street. They were used as ammunition against the riot police.
To have any sort of privacy, especially on cold votile winter days, I would escape to the Paris Mosque. There I could get a true Moroccan mint tea and honey filled sweets served to me while I reclined naked on mats set in a vaulted and warm columned chamber. The room was strewn with Parisian and North African women resting, reading and chatting. This was the first room in the multi-chambered bathhouse. In the next room, larger than life Moorish women scrubbed the delicate bodies of paper skinned Parisian girls with savon noir (a black soap with a caustic quality that I used for my paintbrushes) and jute rags to take off the dead skin. The treatment lasted 15 to 20 minutes and cost almost nothing. The steamy chamber opened into the main hammam, a large enclosed courtyard — the center being a marble slab bathed in shimmering in a misty light from a skylight above. On the outskirts of this water drenched room were series of chapel like washrooms and dark corners with silhouetted bodies. The water flowed endlessly from brass spickets and women, as if in a harem, shared in the task of weaving henna through each other’s hair. Walking lithely through the steam, I came to the last room. A hothouse that took my breath away and so steamy it burned my eyes. I didn’t last long there.
For what could have amounted to 10 dollars, I stayed the day. Like in scenes in an Ingres painting I passed by in the Louve, I reclined on the mats with scrubbed skin. I drank sweet mint tea in hand painted glass cups and ate little plates of baklava.
I revisited la Mosquee de Paris my last trip like I do each time I come to Paris. In a teahouse outside the hammam, I drank tea once again while Parisian students and professors smoked cigarettes over brassy tables. My boyfriend and I marveled at the scene—so different from home, different from the themed teahouses in San Francosco where belly dancers in Middle Eastern restaurants serve hummus urging clients to order a water pipe filled with sweet tobacco. While we kissed, a painting of a woman in a hijab (حجاب) fell on our heads. Kissing in the Muslim teahouse, even in Paris, isn’t...halal.
Hammam de la Grande Mosquée
39, rue Geoffroy-Saint-Hilaire
75005 Paris
Métro Jussieu
Tél : 01.43.31.18.14
Check for days open to women. The teahouse is open most days. The mosque itself is being restored.