Morocco's history: the sharifian throne the protectorate kept in place

How Mauretania became a Roman frontier province

Hominin fossils from Thomas Quarry I in Casablanca, described in 2026, are securely dated to about 773,000 years ago, and remains of early Homo sapiens from Jebel Irhoud were dated in 2017 to at least 300,000 years ago. Phoenician traders set up depots for salt and ore along the coast before the 8th century BCE, with early settlements at Chellah, Lixus and Mogador, and by the 5th century BCE Carthage held the coast.

A Berber kingdom called Mauretania covered the north of present-day Morocco from about the 3rd century BCE. It became a client of Rome in 33 BCE, and after Caligula had its last king, Ptolemy, executed in 39 or 40 CE it became the province of Mauretania Tingitana, with Volubilis as its capital. UNESCO describes the site as a fortified municipium of 42 hectares at the foot of the Jebel Zerhoun. Rome governed through alliances with the tribes and never took its administration beyond the northern coastal plain and valleys. Around 278 CE it moved the regional capital to Tangier, and the Vandals overran the region in the mid-5th century.

Why the Moroccan state is dated from the Idrisids

The Umayyad Caliphate completed the Muslim conquest of the Maghreb by 709, and Morocco was run at first as a subsidiary province of Ifriqiya. In 740 the Berber tribes of western Morocco rose against the Umayyads, and neither they nor the Abbasids managed to re-impose rule west of Ifriqiya. Small independent states took their place, among them the Barghawata on the Atlantic coast and the Midrarids, who founded Sijilmasa in the Tafilalt in 757.

Idris ibn Abdallah, a great-grandson of Hasan ibn Ali and so a descendant of the Prophet Muhammad, fled west after the Battle of Fakhkh near Mecca, where the Abbasids massacred his family. By 788 he had settled at Volubilis, and the Awraba Berbers made him their imam. In 789 he founded a settlement called Medinat Fas, and in 791 an Abbasid agent poisoned him. His son Idris II, born after his death, moved the seat of government to Fes in 809 and welcomed Arab immigrants there, from Córdoba in 818 and from Tunisia in 824. When he died in 828 the Idrisid state ran from western Algeria to the Sous. The mosques of al-Qarawiyyin and al-Andalusiyyin were founded in Fes under his grandson Yahya.

The Idrisids ruled the towns, while most people still spoke Berber languages. They held Fes for the last time in 927 and the line ended in 985. Historians nonetheless regard them as the founders of the first Moroccan state. They left sharifian families who traced their descent from Idris I, and two tombs, at Moulay Idriss and in Fes, that grew into pilgrimage sites.

How Marrakesh came to rule al-Andalus

Two religious movements from the south made Morocco the seat of an empire on both sides of the Strait of Gibraltar. The country's English name comes from their capital, through the Spanish Marruecos, which derives from Marrakesh.

The Almoravids grew out of a reform that Abdallah ibn Yasin, a teacher of Maliki law, preached in the 1040s among the Sanhaja tribes of the Sahara. By Britannica's dates they conquered Morocco and western Algeria as far as Algiers between 1054 and 1092, and in 1062 they made Marrakesh their capital. Invited in by the Muslim princes of al-Andalus, Yusuf ibn Tashfin crossed into Spain in 1085, halted a Castilian advance at al-Zallaqah in 1086 and from 1090 deposed the princes themselves. All of Muslim Spain except Valencia, held by El Cid, came under Almoravid rule.

The Almohads began in the High Atlas among the Masmuda tribes. Ibn Tumart proclaimed himself the mahdi in 1121 and built the fortified ribat of Tinmel around 1124. After his death in 1130 his successor Abd al-Mu'min, a Zenata from present-day Algeria, was proclaimed caliph, and Marrakesh fell to him in 1147. The Almohad caliphs ruled al-Andalus and the Maghreb from that city. Seville surrendered to them in 1172, the Giralda, the tower of their great mosque there, went up in 1184, and Yaqub al-Mansur, who protected the philosopher Averroes, defeated Castile at Alarcos in 1195. The historian Jonathan Bloom cites the white and green glazed tiles on the minaret of their Kutubiyya mosque in Marrakesh as the earliest reliably dated zellij in Morocco. A Christian coalition broke the Almohads at Las Navas de Tolosa in 1212, their army left Seville in 1228, and Castile took Córdoba in 1236 and Seville in 1248.

Why descent from the Prophet decided the throne

The Marinids, Zenata Berbers from the east, took Fez in the 1240s and Marrakesh in 1269, founded Fes Jdid in 1276 and built the first madrasas in the country. Portugal took Ceuta in 1415, and the Wattasids, who had served the Marinids as regents, ruled from Fez from the 1470s to 1554.

From 1549 Morocco was ruled by dynasties claiming descent from the Prophet, first the Saadis and then the Alawis, and both families came from the village of Yanbu al-Nakhil in the Hejaz. In this era, by the account of Wikipedia's article on the Alawi dynasty, many communities in Morocco came to see sharifian status as the best claim to rule. The Saadis made Marrakesh their capital, ended the Portuguese Aviz dynasty at Alcácer Quibir in 1578 and, under Ahmad al-Mansur, sent an expedition across the Sahara that brought down the Songhai Empire. His sons divided the country after his death, and in the breakup Moriscos expelled from Spain ran a corsair republic at Salé.

The Alawis had lived in the Tafilalt, the oasis of Sijilmasa, since the 12th or 13th century, and its people recognised the family head, Mawlay al-Sharif, as sultan in 1631. His son al-Rashid took Fez in June 1666 and Marrakesh in July 1668. Al-Rashid's half-brother Ismail then ruled for 55 years, from 1672 to 1727, with an army of slaves, the Black Guard, loyal to him alone. He took Tangier in 1684, moved the capital to Meknes and, in the words of Wikipedia's article on the dynasty, put "a definitive end to Ottoman attempts to gain influence in Morocco". After thirty years of succession wars Mohammed III restored order from 1757, founded Essaouira in 1764 and on 20 December 1777 placed American merchant ships under the sultanate's protection.

How Europe closed in on the sultanate

The pressure that ended Moroccan independence came from Europe and from French Algeria. Morocco sheltered the Algerian resistance leader Abd al-Qadir in 1844, and that August the French navy bombarded Tangier and Essaouira and Marshal Bugeaud routed the Moroccan army at Isly, near Oujda, on 14 August. A treaty with Britain in 1856 lowered customs tariffs to 10%, and to pay its debt after the war with Spain of 1859 and 1860 the government took a British loan larger than its national reserves. More than half of its spending went abroad on war indemnities and weapons, and in June 1904 France lent it 62.5 million francs against part of its customs revenue.

The powers then settled the country among themselves. Britain accepted French designs in the Entente Cordiale of 8 April 1904, and Spain agreed its share in secret that October. Kaiser Wilhelm II landed at Tangier on 31 March 1905 to speak for Moroccan independence, and the Algeciras Conference of 1906 gave France and Spain the policing of the country. In 1907 France occupied Oujda and bombarded Casablanca, and Abd al-Hafid took the throne from his brother in the civil war called the Hafidiya. When rebels besieged him in Fez in 1911 French troops relieved the city, and on 1 July the German gunboat Panther arrived at Agadir.

Abd al-Hafid signed the Treaty of Fez on 30 March 1912, which made Morocco a French protectorate, and signed his abdication on the quay at Rabat with the ship that would take him to France waiting. A Franco-Spanish treaty of 27 November 1912 gave Spain a northern zone and a southern one, and a protocol of December 1923 made Tangier an international zone.

What the protectorate kept of the sultanate

France kept the sultan because its first resident general, Hubert Lyautey, meant to rule through Morocco's own institutions. "In Morocco, there is only one government, the sharifian government, protected by the French," he said. The treaty gave France legislative power, defence, foreign policy and the courts, and in practice the sultan had no real power, but he went on issuing decrees in his own name and under his own seal and remained the country's religious leader. Spain copied the form, ruling its zone from Tétouan through a khalifa chosen from the royal family. Even the flag went through the same channel. The plain red flag of the Alawi sultans received its green five-pointed star by a dahir Sultan Yusef signed on 17 November 1915, a change Britannica records as made by the French.

The Zaian confederation of the Middle Atlas fought the French from 1914 to 1921, and some of its fighters carried on from the High Atlas well into the 1930s. In the Rif, Abd el-Krim destroyed a Spanish force at Annual in the summer of 1921, where Spain lost more than 13,000 soldiers, and held out in his Republic of the Rif until a French and Spanish force of more than 250,000 troops made him surrender in May 1926. The French then moved the court from Fez to Rabat, which has been the capital since.

The Office Chérifien des Phosphates, founded in 1920, raised output at Khouribga from 39,000 tons of phosphate in 1921 to almost 2 million tons in 1930, and half a million Europeans settled under the protectorate, most of them in Casablanca. The Berber Decree of 16 May 1930, which put Berber areas under French courts, set off the protests that the historian Susan Gilson Miller calls the "seedbed out of which the embryonic nationalist movement emerged".

Why France exiled the sultan and brought him back

How the sultan used his signature

Mohammed V was acclaimed sultan in 1927 at the age of 18. In the Second World War he refused to approve the Vichy regime's anti-Jewish legislation, and at the Anfa conference in 1943 he was left alone with Franklin D. Roosevelt, who expressed support for Moroccan independence after the war. In January 1944 the Istiqlal, or Independence, Party submitted a manifesto for independence with the sultan's approval, and the arrest of its leaders set off riots in Fes in which some 30 or more demonstrators were killed. In April 1947 he travelled through the Spanish zone to Tangier and spoke there of Morocco's links with the Arab world, leaving out the expected compliment to the protectorate.

His remaining lever was the signature. When the resident general Alphonse Juin proposed seating French citizens on elected municipal councils, the sultan refused to countersign his decrees, without which, Britannica notes, they had no legal validity. Juin ringed the palace with tribesmen and forced him to disown "a certain political party", but he still withheld his signature from many decrees, and Juin was replaced in August 1951. After riots in Casablanca in December 1952 over the killing of the Tunisian union leader Farhat Hached, the residency banned the Istiqlal.

What the exile changed

In 1953 Thami al-Glaoui and the religious scholar Abd al-Hayy al-Kattani led a campaign for the sultan's deposition, with the help of French officials. On 16 August al-Glaoui and his allies declared Mohammed Ben Arafa, a little-known member of the Alawi family, sultan, and on 20 August Mohammed V was sent into exile. Prayers said in Ben Arafa's name led to a boycott of the mosques. The Spanish high commissioner, who had not been consulted, went on treating Mohammed V as the sovereign, and the Spanish zone became a refuge for nationalists.

The Algerian war began in November 1954, and in June 1955 the government in Paris changed course. A conference on Morocco's independence opened on 23 August 1955, Ben Arafa had abdicated by 1 October, and that month al-Glaoui said publicly that only Mohammed V's restoration could restore harmony. The sultan landed at Rabat-Salé airport at 11:42 on 16 November 1955. Moroccan historiography calls the movement the Revolution of the King and the People. Independence was proclaimed on 2 March 1956, Spain gave up its zone on 7 April, Tangier was reintegrated on 29 October 1956, and in August 1957 the sultan took the title of king.

How the monarchy held power after independence

Mohammed V chose the ministers himself and kept the army and the police, and when the Istiqlal split in 1959 he used the quarrel, in Britannica's account, to stand as an arbiter above party strife. He died in 1961 and his son Hassan II became king on 3 March 1961. A constitution written by officials the king appointed was approved by referendum in December 1962 and gave the monarchy far-reaching executive powers, and from June 1965 to 1970 Hassan ruled under a state of exception with full legislative and executive power. Army officers tried to overthrow him in July 1971 and August 1972. The years of repression from roughly 1975 to 1990 are known as the Years of Lead, and a truth commission set up in 2005 confirmed nearly 10,000 cases of abuse during his reign, from death in detention to forced exile, with 592 people recorded killed. Under the Moroccanization policy of 3 March 1973 the share of industrial businesses in Moroccan hands rose from 18% to 55%.

Hassan II died in 1999 and his son succeeded him. About 8,000 political prisoners were freed, and a new family code, the Mudawana, followed in 2004. After protests in February 2011 a new constitution was approved by referendum that July. It made Tamazight an official language beside Arabic and uses a title the Almoravid Yusuf ibn Tashfin had left to the caliph in Baghdad: Article 41 names the king Commander of the Faithful and has him exercise that office's religious prerogatives by dahir, the form of decree that under the protectorate had needed the sultan's signature. On 8 September 2023 an earthquake of magnitude 6.8 struck Al Haouz Province in the Atlas Mountains, about 73 kilometres south-west of Marrakesh, and killed at least 2,960 people.

How Morocco pressed its claim to Spanish Sahara

Spain handed back Tarfaya in 1958 and Ifni in 1969, or 1970 by Britannica's date, and kept Ceuta and Melilla, which Morocco still claims. After Algeria became independent the two neighbours fought a border war around Tindouf in 1963 that ended without any change of territory. The larger claim was to Spanish Sahara. On 16 October 1975 the International Court of Justice found historical ties of allegiance between the Sultan of Morocco and some of the territory's tribes, but no legal ground for departing from self-determination. Hassan II answered with the Green March, in which unarmed civilians crossed the border on 6 November 1975; Wikipedia puts the marchers at about 350,000 and Britannica at some 200,000. The UN Security Council deplored the march the same day in Resolution 380.

Under an agreement signed in Madrid on 14 November 1975, Spain handed the administration of the territory to Morocco and Mauritania in early 1976, and Morocco took control of the northern two-thirds. The Polisario Front, formed in 1973 and backed by Algeria, proclaimed the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic (SADR) in 1976 and fought both. Mauritania made peace with it in August 1979 and Morocco annexed the southern part as well. Morocco left the Organisation of African Unity in 1984 when the SADR was admitted, and rejoined the African Union on 30 January 2017. A UN-monitored ceasefire took effect in 1991 on the promise of a referendum, but the two sides could not agree on who would vote, and by 2001 Morocco no longer accepted holding one; in 2007 it proposed autonomy under Moroccan sovereignty. The Polisario declared the ceasefire over in November 2020, and the next month the United States recognised Moroccan sovereignty over the territory as part of the agreement under which Morocco resumed relations with Israel.

The status of Western Sahara is disputed. Morocco calls the territory its Southern Provinces, the Polisario Front claims it for the SADR, which more than 40 countries recognise according to Britannica, and the United Nations, as Freedom House records, considers it a non-self-governing territory. This catalogue records the dispute and takes no position on it.