THE ALAWID DYNASTY, born in the great oasis complex of the Tafilalt (the region of the lower Ziz river, south of the High Atlas), has lasted from 1659 to the present day. Moulay Ismail (r. 1672 – 1727), a sultan of almost demonic energy and cruelty, was the first to bring the whole country under something approaching centralized rule from his capital at Meknes. The Saadids and Alawids institutionalized the leading status in the Moroccan Muslim community of the shurfa (singular, sharif), the numerous families claiming descent from the Prophet through his daughter Fatima. This strain – indicated by the honorific name Moulay – provided the royal family (thus, the ‘Sharifian Kingdom of Morocco’), but their privileges did not extend to a monopoly of power. The concept of royalty was that the sultan, in his temporal role, was the arbiter between the religious leadership, the urban merchant class who created wealth, and the feudal tribes of the hinterland whose crops and herds provided much of its raw material. In theory all were supposed to profit from this compact: the sultan raised taxes, by means of which he pursued the work of the Prophet and provided protection and justice through his ministers and judges.
A senior regional lieutenant of the sultan was termed a khalifa; the most important of these viceroys – particularly the khalifas of Marrakesh and the Tafilalt – were selected from among his relatives, but the title was also awarded to lesser, non-sharifian chieftains recognized as local governors. Appointment as a khalifa was a man’s licence to wield the power of death in the name of the sultan while enriching himself and his family – if he had the strength to tame the locals, and the wit not to appear to his master as tactlessly over-successful. Even the greatest men were wise to approach their sovereign on their knees, pressing their foreheads to the carpet. The sultan’s power was absolute, in the sense that we associate with Old Testament times, but his continued legitimacy rested on his performance in protecting the House of Islam from external aggression and in governing according to sharia law. The throne passed to a nominated favourite son, but legitimate succession required the endorsement of the ulama, the colleges of learned doctors of the Islamic faith who were based in the imperial cities of Fes, Meknes and Marrakesh.
Necessarily compressed, this summary may suggest a dignified continuity, but the true flavour of life at the Moroccan court was rather more stimulating. The number of potential alternative claimants sired in the harems ensured that the succession was under more or less constant challenge; court life was a snake-pit of intrigue, and power might rest on fragile foundations. Royal relatives lived precarious lives, and in the course of a day, even a much-caressed minister who had overplayed his hand might fall from power and riches to penury – if he was lucky. In this society, power was displayed by dazzling magnificence, serviced by abject slavery, and implemented by unremitting violence. Forgiveness was weakness, and weakness attracted hyenas. In Morocco the true symbol of public authority was not the sultan’s crimson-and-gold parasol, but the row of severed heads festooning every city gate-tower.
(The Jewish ghetto was termed the mellah – ‘salt’ – in reference to one of the Jews’ traditional tasks for their disdainful protectors: the salting of these ghastly trophies, which were usually hung up by means of a wire passed through an ear. The ears did not last forever, of course, and there are anecdotes of regrettable coincidences when visiting European dignitaries happened to be passing through the gates below.)
IN THE LAST YEARS of the nineteenth century the compact between the sultan’s urban government – the Maghzan – and the tribes in the hinterland had degenerated (not for the first time) into near anarchy. The energetic Sultan Moulay Hassan I (r. 1873 – 94) had inherited large debts following defeat in a war with Spain in 1859 – 60; he needed to refill his treasury, and to strengthen himself against European pressure by demonstrating control over his territory. He spent his reign in the saddle, making repeated expeditions to enforce his authority and increase his revenues, but these efforts were often stubbornly resisted by the tribes. In this context, the term ‘taxcollecting’ fails to convey the true spectacle of such a progress: the sultan’s resplendent tented court travelled in the midst of a colourful but barely organized army tens of thousands strong, stripping the country like a plague of locusts as they flooded across the plains and jostled through the mountain passes. The Arabic term for such a throng – harka – literally translates as ‘a burning’.3
The probing by the French military into the Sud-Oranais of Algeria, just over Morocco’s undefined south-eastern borders (as described at the end of Chapter 2) worried Moulay Hassan, and in 1893 – 4 he led an expedition from Fes down to the Tafilalt to negotiate with regional leaders in an attempt – only marginally successful – to gain some control over events. He was even less successful in achieving his main goal of restraining the shameless marauders of the Ait Atta nation (a sort of Berber equivalent of the Comanches, who will reappear often in these pages).4 The sultan only narrowly survived the return journey; his horde had already been reduced to perhaps one-third its strength by sickness, hunger and desertion by the time the retreating rabble was caught in the High Atlas by the onset of winter. ‘Under a canopy of ravens and with a rearguard of jackals’, the starving remnant would have left their bones in the snowbound Tizi n’Tichka pass had they not been saved by the young caid (chief) of the Glaoua tribe, Madani el Glaoui, who led them to his castle at Telouet and put his whole resources at the sultan’s command. Madani is described as a strikingly ugly young man, combining a horse face with the very dark colouring that he owed to his Ethiopian mother, but his large, glowing black eyes were full of intelligence. Before continuing north, Moulay Hassan rewarded his rescuer with the nominal but potentially lucrative status of khalifa over the tribes to the south of the mountains, and a rather more practical gift of arms and ammunition – including a Krupp field gun.5
Since this was the only modern artillery piece in the country outside the sultan’s own arsenals, it would contribute powerfully to the spread of Glaoua influence. Madani el Glaoui (then 27 years old, and known as ‘the Literate’ – a significant distinction among his competitors) had previously been able to field only about half the strength of either of his two main rivals in the Atlas, the caids El Mtouggi and El Goundafi. He owed his wealth not to numbers but to location: he owned a valuable salt-mine, and control of the Tizi n’Tichka also allowed him to tax the rich caravans carrying produce from the southern oases over the pass to Marrakesh and thence to Fes. These resources were a temptation for his more powerful neighbours, and his Krupp gun provided a more reliable insurance than the sultan’s public endorsement.6
MOULAY HASSAN WAS ALREADY a sick man when he returned to Marrakesh, and he died in June 1894. He was nominally succeeded by his 13-year-old son, Moulay Abd el Aziz, who was kept in luxurious isolation while for six years a rapacious regency was exercised by the black grand vizier, Ba Ahmad ibn Musa. The vizier continued to delegate authority to the three ‘lords of the Atlas’, and El Glaoui expanded his territory southwards; he and his younger brother Tahami led expeditions down into the Draa and Dades valleys, defeating ‘rebels’, sending their heads to Marrakesh and adding their lands to the Glaoua domains.7
Between 1894 and Ba Ahmad’s death in spring 1900, a worsening trade imbalance with the European powers caused raging inflation, and the Maghzan’s treasury was in a hopeless spiral of debt and re-borrowing by the time the 19-year-old sultan emerged from seclusion in May 1900. Abd el Aziz was not a figure to command fearful obedience; he was a relatively gentle soul, whose looks were spoiled by a deeply receding chin under unsuccessful wisps of beard. His enthusiasm for Western education and technology was shared by neither the devout nor the xenophobic – descriptions that embraced Morocco’s entire traditional leadership. Abd el Aziz was described as a charming, intelligent, well-meaning boy who was ill-equipped for power, and many interested parties ensured that he remained that way. His ministers exploited his interest in all things Western by distracting him with ruinously costly playthings
while they proceeded to plunder the exchequer.
The deeply mortgaged treasury was also a magnet for foreign financiers and unscrupulous salesmen. Foreigners were supposed to be confined to Tangier to prevent them tainting the House of Islam, but from that nest of international intrigue advisers from competitive powers swarmed to the young sultan’s court, eager to offer expensive assistance in lifting Morocco into the twentieth century. Given the Moroccans’ deep distrust of Christians, the sultan’s appointment of several foreigners to posts of influence caused great local resentment and suspicion. Some of these rumis were simply technicians who tried conscientiously to impose system on chaos, but others were avaricious rogues, and many were serving their own governments’ agendas. Robbed and frustrated by his corrupt courtiers and receiving contradictory advice from the foreigners, Abd el Aziz was easily diverted from his vague plans for reform with the latest gilded toys, while his country slipped deeper into debt and disorder and his people raged that he was selling their common legacy to the Nazarenes. In the first years of the twentieth century random attacks on foreigners increased; consequent demands for reparation from the nations that were bankrolling the Maghzan had the effect of ratcheting up European privileges, and thus increasing Muslim fury.
As central control grew ever weaker, two particular regional warlords continued to defy the Maghzan with impunity. In the Djibala country of the north-west, effective power was held by the notorious sharifian brigand Moulay Ahmad er Raisuli; and in the north-east, in the mountains around Taza, a convicted forger calling himself Bou Himara (widely known simply as El Rogi, ‘the Pretender’) would mount from 1902 an actual challenge for the throne. Raisuli’s activities complicated relations with the Spanish presidio at Ceuta, and El Rogi’s with that at Melilla; his independence in an area so close to the border with French Algeria also created further complications for the Maghzan.8
SINCE MOROCCO APPEARED TO BE DYING as a functioning state, during the 1890s European vultures gathered around the sickbed. To complete its North African possessions France – and the leaders of its Algerian settlers – coveted this potentially rich country, and in the early 1900s it would exploit the useful provocation offered by the raids of apparently ungovernable south-eastern Moroccan tribes across the debatable borders with Oran province. Britain was well placed at court, and had manoeuvred to thwart French ambitions more or less out of habit, spurred from 1899 by France’s outspoken support for the South African Boers. However, its vital interests were limited to preventing any rival power fortifying the coast facing Gibraltar, and from 1902 its diplomacy would shift towards the entente cordiale that was formally established in 1904.9 Closest to Morocco was ramshackle Spain, humiliated by its defeat at American hands in Cuba and the Philippines in 1898; it was protective of its presidios on the Mediterranean coast, but lacked either a coherent plan to exploit them or the muscle to influence France or Britain. Italy’s foreign policy was too unstable to predict, but anti-French sentiment was strong. A few years previously Prime Minister Francesco Crispi had been desperate for a war – any war – in the hope of creating the sense of nationhood that eluded the young state. A shocking defeat by an Ethiopian army at Adua in March 1896, and the need to deploy troops against rioters everywhere from Milan to Sicily, had cooled Italian enthusiasm for foreign expeditions, if only temporarily.10 The young Kaiser’s sullen demands for international respect had to be taken much more seriously than either Spain’s or Italy’s, and not only because of Germany’s military strength; its interest in Morocco was solidly based on the enterprise of the German businessmen who had achieved an unrivalled commercial penetration of the country. Representatives of all these nations clustered around the court of Abd el Aziz, and their attempts to manipulate his government revealed, to a greater or lesser extent, their understanding of the actual mechanisms of local power.
MOST DESCRIPTIONS OF LATE NINETEENTH-CENTURY MOROCCO insist upon a fundamental political distinction between, on the one hand, the bled el maghzan or ‘zone of government’ – the cities and their surrounding fertile plains, under the control and taxation of the sultan’s regime; and on the other, the bled es siba or ‘zone of dissidence’ – the mountains, steppes and desert where tribal anarchy defied any government constraints. Obviously, it was in the interests of French colonialists to stress the weakness of the first and the lawlessness of the second in order to justify intervention to create a new order of peace and security. While naturally biased, this argument was supported by visible facts: much of the country did indeed present a medieval spectacle of violent turmoil, and government in the European sense was indeed non-existent. We may smile at the French tendency to label all non-Europeans who opposed them as mere ‘pillards’, but a great deal of pillaging was certainly going on.
Given the attitudes of the day, France’s goals seemed reasonable to its fellow Europeans, and the methods by which it would pursue them would be relatively restrained when compared with those of the Moroccans themselves. Morocco was trapped in a state of violent upheaval between the medieval and the modern worlds; its past isolation could no longer be maintained, but the external forces dragging it into the future (for reasons of self-interest) were fiercely resisted. However, the colonialists exaggerated what they claimed to be the formless chaos of Moroccan political life, which actually depended upon patterns of relationships far more complex than was admitted by those who described rigid frontiers dividing the bled el maghzan from the bled es siba. In fact the relations between particular tribal leaders and the sultanate covered as wide a range of distance or warmth as any human courtship. Few rifts were ever final, and subtly worded communication might continue through intermediaries. The degree and the tone of contacts varied with the fluctuating fortunes of groups and individuals, but the sultan’s (usually) unquestioned religious authority meant that the relationship was always potentially salvageable, with even the most distant and independently minded tribe.11 It was precisely this fluidity that would offer the French opportunities for creating temporary coalitions of interest with particular groups.
Serious studies of French colonialism in Morocco depend upon sophisticated analysis of the triangular dealings between the Maghzan, the tribes and the French; but even in a book with the present modest aims, if we are to make sense of a summary of French campaigns, then some rough-and-ready description of the tribal aspect of Moroccan life has to be attempted.
ALMOST ANY GENERAL STATEMENT about the ‘tribe’ as an entity invites endless qualifications from specialists, and our everyday use of the word fails to distinguish between widely varying types of group; as a description, it is no more exact than ‘tree’. Tribal identity might depend on simple geography, on an actual or mythical common origin, or on various composites of client relationships and factional obligations, all of these evolving over different timescales. What we carelessly call a tribe might be the loosest association of tens of thousands of people, dispersed over large areas – perhaps a ‘nation’, in the Native American sense. Within these, tribes and sub-tribes thousands strong were made up of constituent clans, and the clans of lineages with some common ancestor. At the very tip of a tribal twig, a few dozen people linked by immediate ties of blood and marriage inhabited tiny hamlets scattered over a couple of hillsides, or a few neighbouring tents as they followed their flocks across the steppe.
A tribe certainly cannot be represented as a neat pyramid-shaped diagram of kinships, and – crucially – it was normally divided by internal quarrels. To pursue the tree analogy, at every level its boughs, branches, twigs and leaves grew independently of one another, at one moment in harmony, at another in competition. Some tribes had become geographically dispersed, and significant elements were to be found simultaneously in different areas of the map; migrations had spread seedlings far from the original tree trunk, some of them now growing amongst other types of tree. Within the tribal tree the sources of dynamic leadership might shift upwards, downwards or sideways with time and circumstance, depend
ing upon bloodlines, religious prestige, intelligence and ambition, wealth, and strength in fighting men. Above all, bonds and boundaries were almost always provisional: each area of growth strove to reach the sun for itself. There is a much-quoted Arabic proverb: roughly, ‘I against my brothers; I and my brothers against our cousins; I, my brothers and cousins against the world’. It was said that at any given moment, members of any group had to take account of not one but three leaders: the actual chief, his more or less impatient strongest son, and at least one resentful rival for the succession.
Our Friends Beneath the Sands Page 38