In Morocco
by
Edith Wharton
Part 3 out of 4
patriarch, and the youngest brother of the majestic bearded gentleman
engaged in tea-making. While he was still in his father's arms two more
sons appeared: charming almond-eyed schoolboys returning from their
Koran-class, escorted by their slaves. All the sons greeted each other
affectionately, and caressed with almost feminine tenderness the dancing
baby so lately added to their ranks; and finally, to crown this scene of
domestic intimacy, the three negresses, their gigantic effort at last
accomplished, passed about glasses of steaming mint and trays of
gazelles' horns and white sugar-cakes.
VI
IN MARRAKECH
The farther one travels from the Mediterranean and Europe the closer the
curtains of the women's quarters are drawn. The only harem in which we
were allowed an interpreter was that of the Sultan himself, in the
private harems of Fez and Rabat a French-speaking relative transmitted
(or professed to transmit) our remarks; in Marrakech, the great nobleman
and dignitary who kindly invited me to visit his household was deaf to
our hint that the presence of a lady from one of the French government
schools might facilitate our intercourse.
When we drove up to his palace, one of the stateliest in Marrakech, the
street was thronged with clansmen and clients. Dignified merchants in
white muslin, whose grooms held white mules saddled with rose-coloured
velvet, warriors from the Atlas wearing the corkscrew ringlets which are
a sign of military prowess, Jewish traders in black gabardines,
leather-gaitered peasant-women with chickens and cheese, and beggars
rolling their blind eyes or exposing their fly-plastered sores, were
gathered in Oriental promiscuity about the great man's door; while under
the archway stood a group of youths and warlike-looking older men who
were evidently of his own clan.
The Caid's chamberlain, a middle-aged man of dignified appearance,
advanced to meet us between bowing clients and tradesmen. He led us
through cool passages lined with the intricate mosaic-work of Fez, past
beggars who sat on stone benches whining out their blessings, and pale
Fazi craftsmen laying a floor of delicate tiles. The Caid is a lover of
old Arab architecture. His splendid house, which is not yet finished,
has been planned and decorated on the lines of the old Imperial palaces,
and when a few years of sun and rain and Oriental neglect have worked
their way on its cedar-wood and gilding and ivory stucco it will have
the same faded loveliness as the fairy palaces of Fez.
In a garden where fountains splashed and roses climbed among cypresses,
the Caid himself awaited us. This great fighter and loyal friend of
France is a magnificent eagle-beaked man, brown, lean and sinewy, with
vigilant eyes looking out under his carefully draped muslin turban, and
negroid lips half-hidden by a close black beard.
Tea was prepared in the familiar setting; a long arcaded room with
painted ceiling and richly stuccoed walls. All around were ranged the
usual mattresses covered with striped ticking and piled with muslin
cushions. A bedstead of brass, imitating a Louis XVI cane bed, and
adorned with brass garlands and bows, throned on the usual platform; and
the only other ornaments were a few clocks and bunches of wax flowers
under glass. Like all Orientals, this hero of the Atlas, who spends half
his life with his fighting clansmen in a mediaeval stronghold among the
snows, and the other half rolling in a 60 h.p. motor over smooth French
roads, seems unaware of any degrees of beauty or appropriateness in
objects of European design, and places against the exquisite mosaics and
traceries of his Fazi craftsmen the tawdriest bric-a-brac of the cheap
department-store.
While tea was being served I noticed a tiny negress, not more than six
or seven years old, who stood motionless in the embrasure of an archway.
Like most of the Moroccan slaves, even in the greatest households, she
was shabbily, almost raggedly, dressed. A dirty _gandourah_ of striped
muslin covered her faded caftan, and a cheap kerchief was wound above
her grave and precocious little face. With preternatural vigilance she
watched each movement of the Caid, who never spoke to her, looked at
her, or made her the slightest perceptible sign, but whose least wish
she instantly divined, refilling his tea-cup, passing the plates of
sweets, or removing our empty glasses, in obedience to some secret
telegraphy on which her whole being hung.
The Caid is a great man. He and his famous elder brother, holding the
southern marches of Morocco against alien enemies and internal
rebellion, played a preponderant part in the defence of the French
colonies in North Africa during the long struggle of the war.
Enlightened, cultivated, a friend of the arts, a scholar and
diplomatist, he seems, unlike many Orientals, to have selected the best
in assimilating European influences. Yet when I looked at the tiny
creature watching him with those anxious joyless eyes I felt once more
the abyss that slavery and the seraglio put between the most
Europeanized Mahometan and the western conception of life. The Caid's
little black slaves are well-known in Morocco, and behind the sad child
leaning in the archway stood all the shadowy evils of the social system
that hangs like a millstone about the neck of Islam.
Presently a handsome tattered negress came across the garden to invite
me to the harem. Captain de S. and his wife, who had accompanied me,
were old friends of the Chief's, and it was owing to this that the
jealously-guarded doors of the women's quarters were opened to Mme. de
S. and myself. We followed the negress to a marble-paved court where
pigeons fluttered and strutted about the central fountain. From under a
trellised arcade hung with linen curtains several ladies came forward.
They greeted my companion with exclamations of delight; then they led us
into the usual commonplace room with divans and whitewashed walls. Even
in the most sumptuous Moroccan palaces little care seems to be expended
on the fittings of the women's quarters: unless, indeed, the room in
which visitors are received corresponds with a boarding-school
"parlour," and the personal touch is reserved for the private
apartments.
The ladies who greeted us were more richly dressed than any I had seen
except the Sultan's favourites, but their faces were more distinguished,
more European in outline, than those of the round-cheeked beauties of
Rabat. My companions had told me that the Caid's harem was recruited
from Georgia, and that the ladies receiving us had been brought up in
the relative freedom of life in Constantinople; and it was easy to read
in their wistfully smiling eyes memories of a life unknown to the
passive daughters of Morocco.
They appeared to make no secret of their regrets, for presently one of
them, with a smile, called my attention to some faded photographs
hanging over the divan. They represented groups of plump
provincial-looking young women in dowdy European ball-dresses; and it
required an effort of the imagination to believe that the lovely
creatures in velvet caftans, with delicately tattooed temples under
complicated head-dresses, and hennaed feet crossed on muslin cushions,
were the same as the beaming frumps in the photographs. But to the
sumptuously-clad exiles these faded photographs and ugly dresses
represented freedom, happiness, and all they had forfeited when fate
(probably in the shape of an opulent Hebrew couple "travelling with
their daughters") carried them from the Bosphorus to the Atlas.
As in the other harems I had visited, perfect equality seemed to prevail
between the ladies, and while they chatted with Mme. de S. whose few
words of Arabic had loosed their tongues, I tried to guess which was the
favourite, or at least the first in rank. My choice wavered between the
pretty pale creature with a _ferronniere_ across her temples and a
tea-rose caftan veiled in blue gauze, and the nut-brown beauty in red
velvet hung with pearls whose languid attitudes and long-lidded eyes
were so like the Keepsake portraits of Byron's Haidee. Or was it perhaps
the third, less pretty but more vivid and animated, who sat behind the
tea-tray, and mimicked so expressively a soldier shouldering his rifle,
and another falling dead, in her effort to ask us "when the dreadful war
would be over"? Perhaps ... unless, indeed, it were the handsome
octoroon, slightly older than the others, but even more richly dressed,
so free and noble in her movements, and treated by the others with such
friendly deference.
I was struck by the fact that among them all there was not a child; it
was the first harem without babies that I had seen in that prolific
land. Presently one of the ladies asked Mme. de S. about her children,
in reply, she enquired for the Caid's little boy, the son of his wife
who had died. The ladies' faces lit up wistfully, a slave was given an
order, and presently a large-eyed ghost of a child was brought into the
room.
Instantly all the bracelet-laden arms were held out to the dead woman's
son; and as I watched the weak little body hung with amulets and the
heavy head covered with thin curls pressed against a brocaded bosom, I
was reminded of one of the coral-hung child-Christs of Crivelli,
standing livid and waxen on the knee of a splendidly dressed Madonna.
The poor baby on whom such hopes and ambitions hung stared at us with a
solemn unamused gaze. Would all his pretty mothers, his eyes seemed to
ask, succeed in bringing him to maturity in spite of the parched
summers of the south and the stifling existence of the harem? It was
evident that no precaution had been neglected to protect him from
maleficent influences and the danger that walks by night, for his frail
neck and wrists were hung with innumerable charms: Koranic verses,
Soudanese incantations, and images of forgotten idols in amber and coral
and horn and ambergris. Perhaps they will ward off the powers of evil,
and let him grow up to shoulder the burden of the great Caids of the
south.
VI
GENERAL LYAUTEY'S WORK IN MOROCCO
I
It is not too much to say that General Lyautey has twice saved Morocco
from destruction: once in 1912, when the inertia and double-dealing of
Abd-el-Hafid abandoned the country to the rebellious tribes who had
attacked him in Fez, and the second time in August, 1914, when Germany
declared war on France.
In 1912, in consequence of the threatening attitude of the dissident
tribes and the generally disturbed condition of the country, the Sultan
Abd-el-Hafid had asked France to establish a protectorate in Morocco.
The agreement entered into, called the "Convention of Fez," stipulated
that a French Resident-General should be sent to Morocco with authority
to act as the Sultan's sole representative in treating with the other
powers. The convention was signed in March, 1912, and a few days
afterward an uprising more serious than any that had gone before took
place in Fez. This sudden outbreak was due in part to purely local and
native difficulties, in part to the intrinsic weakness of the French
situation. The French government had imagined that a native army
commanded by French officers could be counted on to support the Makhzen
and maintain order, but Abd-el-Hafid's growing unpopularity had
estranged his own people from him, and the army turned on the government
and on the French. On the 17th of April, 1912, the Moroccan soldiers
massacred their French officers after inflicting horrible tortures on
them, the population of Fez rose against the European civilians, and for
a fortnight the Oued Fez ran red with the blood of harmless French
colonists. It was then that France appointed General Lyautey
Resident-General in Morocco.
When he reached Fez it was besieged by twenty thousand Berbers. Rebel
tribes were flocking in to their support, to the cry of the Holy War,
and the terrified Sultan, who had already announced his intention of
resigning, warned the French troops who were trying to protect him that
unless they guaranteed to get him safely to Rabat he would turn his
influence against them. Two days afterward the Berbers attacked Fez and
broke in at two gates. The French drove them out and forced them back
twenty miles. The outskirts of the city were rapidly fortified, and a
few weeks later General Gouraud, attacking the rebels in the valley of
the Sebou, completely disengaged Fez.
The military danger overcome. General Lyautey began his great task of
civilian administration. His aim was to support and strengthen the
existing government, to reassure and pacify the distrustful and
antagonistic elements, and to assert French authority without irritating
or discouraging native ambitions.
Meanwhile a new Mahdi (Ahmed-el-Hiba) had risen in the south.
Treacherously supported by Abd-el-Hafid, he was proclaimed Sultan at
Tiznit, and acknowledged by the whole of the Souss. In Marrakech, native
unrest had caused the Europeans to fly to the coast, and in the north a
new group of rebellious tribes menaced Fez.
El-Hiba entered Marrakech in August, 1912, and the French consul and
several other French residents were taken prisoner. El-Hiba's forces
then advanced to a point half way between Marrakech and Mazagan, where
General Mangin, at that time a colonial colonel, met and utterly routed
them. The disorder in the south, and the appeals of the native
population for protection against the savage depredations of the new
Mahdist rebels, made it necessary for the French troops to follow up
their success, and in September Marrakech was taken.
Such were the swift and brilliant results of General Lyautey's
intervention. The first difficulties had been quickly overcome; others,
far more complicated, remained. The military occupation of Morocco had
to be followed up by its civil reorganization. By the Franco-German
treaty of 1911 Germany had finally agreed to recognize the French
protectorate in Morocco; but in spite of an apparently explicit
acknowledgment of this right, Germany, as usual, managed to slip into
the contract certain ambiguities of form that were likely to lead to
future trouble.
To obtain even this incomplete treaty France had had to sacrifice part
of her colonies in equatorial Africa; and in addition to the uncertain
relation with Germany there remained the dead weight of the Spanish
zone and the confused international administration of Tangier. The
disastrously misgoverned Spanish zone has always been a centre for
German intrigue and native conspiracies, as well as a permanent obstacle
to the economic development of Morocco.
Such were the problems that General Lyautey found awaiting him. A long
colonial experience, and an unusual combination of military and
administrative talents, prepared him for the almost impossible task of
dealing with them. Swift and decisive when military action is required,
he has above all the long views and endless patience necessary to the
successful colonial governor. The policy of France in Morocco had been
weak and spasmodic; in his hands it became firm and consecutive. A
sympathetic understanding of the native prejudices, and a real affection
for the native character, made him try to build up an administration
which should be, not an application of French ideas to African
conditions, but a development of the best native aspirations. The
difficulties were immense. The attempt to govern as far as possible
through the Great Chiefs was a wise one, but it was hampered by the
fact that these powerful leaders, however loyal to the Protectorate,
knew no methods of administration but those based on extortion. It was
necessary at once to use them and to educate them; and one of General
Lyautey's greatest achievements has been the successful employment of
native ability in the government of the country.
II
The first thing to do was to create a strong frontier against the
dissident tribes of the Blad-es-Siba. To do this it was necessary that
the French should hold the natural defenses of the country, the
foothills of the Little and of the Great Atlas, and the valley of the
Moulouya, which forms the corridor between western Algeria and Morocco.
This was nearly accomplished in 1914 when war broke out.
At that moment the home government cabled the Resident-General to send
all his available troops to France, abandoning the whole of conquered
territory except the coast towns. To do so would have been to give
France's richest colonies[A] outright to Germany at a moment when what
they could supply--meat and wheat--was exactly what the enemy most
needed.
[Footnote A: The loss of Morocco would inevitably have been followed by
that of the whole of French North Africa.]
General Lyautey took forty-eight hours to consider. He then decided to
"empty the egg without breaking the shell", and the reply he sent was
that of a great patriot and a great general. In effect he said: "I will
give you all the troops you ask, but instead of abandoning the interior
of the country I will hold what we have already taken, and fortify and
enlarge our boundaries." No other military document has so nearly that
ring as Marshal Foch's immortal Marne despatch (written only a few weeks
later): "My centre is broken, my right wing is wavering, the situation
is favorable and I am about to attack."
General Lyautey had framed his answer in a moment of patriotic
exaltation, when the soul of every Frenchman was strung up to a
superhuman pitch. But the pledge once made, it had to be carried out,
and even those who most applauded his decision wondered how he would
meet the almost insuperable difficulties it involved. Morocco, when he
was called there, was already honeycombed by German trading interests
and secret political intrigue, and the fruit seemed ready to fall when
the declaration of war shook the bough. The only way to save the colony
for France was to keep its industrial and agricultural life going, and
give to the famous "business as usual" a really justifiable application.
General Lyautey completely succeeded, and the first impression of all
travellers arriving in Morocco two years later was that of suddenly
returning to a world in normal conditions. There was even, so complete
was the illusion, a first moment of almost painful surprise on entering
an active prosperous community, seemingly absorbed in immediate material
interests to the exclusion of all thought of the awful drama that was
being played out in the mother country, and it was only on reflection
that this absorption in the day's task, and this air of smiling faith in
the future, were seen to be Morocco's truest way of serving France.
For not only was France to be supplied with provisions, but the
confidence in her ultimate triumph was at all costs to be kept up in the
native mind. German influence was as deep-seated as a cancer: to cut it
out required the most drastic of operations. And that operation
consisted precisely in letting it be seen that France was strong and
prosperous enough for her colonies to thrive and expand without fear
while she held at bay on her own frontier the most formidable foe the
world has ever seen. Such was the "policy of the smile," consistently
advocated by General Lyautey from the beginning of the war, and of which
he and his household were the first to set the example.
III
The General had said that he would not "break the egg-shell"; but he
knew that this was not enough, and that he must make it appear
unbreakable if he were to retain the confidence of the natives.
How this was achieved, with the aid of the few covering troops left him,
is still almost incomprehensible. To hold the line was virtually
impossible: therefore he pushed it forward. An anonymous writer in
_L'Afrique Francaise_ (January, 1917) has thus described the manoeuvre:
"General Henrys was instructed to watch for storm-signals on the front,
to stop up the cracks, to strengthen weak points and to rectify doubtful
lines. Thanks to these operations, which kept the rebels perpetually
harassed by always forestalling their own plans, the occupied territory
was enlarged by a succession of strongly fortified positions." While
this was going on in the north, General Lamothe was extending and
strengthening, by means of pacific negotiations, the influence of the
Great Chiefs in the south, and other agents of the Residency were
engaged in watching and thwarting the incessant German intrigues in the
Spanish zone.
General Lyautey is quoted as having said that "a work-shop is worth a
battalion." This precept he managed to put into action even during the
first dark days of 1914, and the interior development of Morocco
proceeded side by side with the strengthening of its defenses. Germany
had long foreseen what an asset northwest Africa would be during the
war; and General Lyautey was determined to prove how right Germany had
been. He did so by getting the government, to whom he had given nearly
all his troops, to give him in exchange an agricultural and industrial
army, or at least enough specialists to form such an army out of the
available material in the country. For every battle fought a road was
made;[A] for every rebel fortress shelled a factory was built, a harbor
developed, or more miles of fallow land ploughed and sown.
[Footnote A: During the first year of the war roads were built in
Morocco by German prisoners, and it was because Germany was so
thoroughly aware of the economic value of the country, and so anxious
not to have her prestige diminished, that she immediately protested, on
the absurd plea of the unwholesomeness of the climate, and threatened
reprisals unless the prisoners were withdrawn.]
But this economic development did not satisfy the Resident. He wished
Morocco to enlarge her commercial relations with France and the other
allied countries, and with this object in view he organized and carried
out with brilliant success a series of exhibitions at Casablanca, Fez
and Rabat. The result of this bold policy surpassed even its creator's
hopes. The Moroccans of the plain are an industrious and money-loving
people, and the sight of these rapidly improvised exhibitions, where the
industrial and artistic products of France and other European countries
were shown in picturesque buildings grouped about flower-filled gardens,
fascinated their imagination and strengthened their confidence in the
country that could find time for such an effort in the midst of a great
war. The Voice of the Bazaar carried the report to the farthest confines
of Moghreb, and one by one the notabilities of the different tribes
arrived, with delegations from Algeria and Tunisia. It was even said
that several rebel chiefs had submitted to the Makhzen in order not to
miss the Exhibition.
At the same time as the "Miracle of the Marne" another, less famous but
almost as vital to France, was being silently performed at the other end
of her dominions. It will not seem an exaggeration to speak of General
Lyautey's achievement during the first year of the war as the "Miracle
of Morocco" if one considers the immense importance of doing what he did
at the moment when he did it. And to understand this it is only needful
to reckon what Germany could have drawn in supplies and men from a
German North Africa, and what would have been the situation of France
during the war with a powerful German colony in control of the western
Mediterranean.
General Lyautey has always been one of the clear-sighted administrators
who understand that the successful government of a foreign country
depends on many little things, and not least on the administrator's
genuine sympathy with the traditions, habits and tastes of the people. A
keen feeling for beauty had prepared him to appreciate all that was most
exquisite and venerable in the Arab art of Morocco, and even in the
first struggle with political and military problems he found time to
gather about him a group of archaeologists and artists who were charged
with the inspection and preservation of the national monuments and the
revival of the languishing native art-industries. The old pottery,
jewelry, metal-work, rugs and embroideries of the different regions were
carefully collected and classified, schools of decorative art were
founded, skilled artisans sought out, and every effort was made to urge
European residents to follow native models and use native artisans in
building and furnishing.
At the various Exhibitions much space was allotted to these revived
industries, and the matting of Sale, the rugs of Rabat, the embroideries
of Fez and Marrakech have already found a ready market in France,
besides awakening in the educated class of colonists an appreciation of
the old buildings and the old arts of the country that will be its
surest safeguard against the destructive effects of colonial expansion.
It is only necessary to see the havoc wrought in Tunisia and Algeria by
the heavy hand of the colonial government to know what General Lyautey
has achieved in saving Morocco from this form of destruction also.
All this has been accomplished by the Resident-General during five years
of unexampled and incessant difficulty; and probably the true
explanation of the miracle is that which he himself gives when he says,
with the quiet smile that typifies his Moroccan war-policy: "It was easy
to do because I loved the people."
THE WORK OF THE FRENCH PROTECTORATE, 1912-1918
PORTS
Owing to the fact that the neglected and roadless Spanish zone
intervened between the French possessions and Tangier, which is the
natural port of Morocco, one of the first preoccupations of General
Lyautey was to make ports along the inhospitable Atlantic coast, where
there are no natural harbours.
Since 1912, in spite of the immense cost and the difficulty of obtaining
labour, the following has been done:
_Casablanca._ A jetty 1900 metres long has been planned: 824 metres
finished December, 1917.
Small jetty begun 1916, finished 1917--length 330 metres. Small harbour
thus created shelters small boats (150 tons) in all weathers.
Quays 747 metres long already finished.
16 steam-cranes working.
Warehouses and depots covering 41,985 square metres completed.
_Rabat._ Work completed December, 1917.
A quay 200 metres long, to which boats with a draught of three metres
can tie up.
Two groups of warehouses, steam-cranes, etc., covering 22,600 square
metres.
A quay 100 metres long on the Sale side of the river.
_Kenitra._ The port of Kenitra is at the mouth of the Sebou River, and
is capable of becoming a good river port.
The work up to December, 1917, comprises:
A channel 100 metres long and three metres deep, cut through the bar of
the Sebou.
Jetties built on each side of the channel.
Quay 100 metres long.
Building of sheds, depots, warehouses, steam-cranes, etc.
At the ports of Fedalah, Mazagan, Safi, Mogador and Agadir similar plans
are in course of execution.
COMMERCE
COMPARATIVE TABLES
1912 1918
Total Commerce Total Commerce
Fcs 177,737,723 Fcs 386,238,618
Exports Exports
Fcs 67,080,383 Fcs 116,148,081
ROADS BUILT
National roads 2,074 kilometres
Secondary roads 569 "
RAILWAYS BUILT
622 kilometres
LAND CULTIVATED
1915 1918
Approximate area Approximate area
21,165 17 hectares 1,681,308 03 hectares
JUSTICE
1. Creation of French courts for French nationals and those under French
protection. These take cognizance of civil cases where both parties, or
even one, are amenable to French jurisdiction.
2. Moroccan law is Moslem, and administered by Moslem magistrates.
Private law, including that of inheritance, is based on the Koran. The
Sultan has maintained the principle whereby real property and
administrative cases fall under native law. These courts are as far as
possible supervised and controlled by the establishment of a Cherifian
Ministry of Justice to which the native Judges are responsible. Special
care is taken to prevent the alienation of property held collectively,
or any similar transactions likely to produce political and economic
disturbances.
3. Criminal jurisdiction is delegated to Pashas and Cadis by the Sultan,
except of offenses committed against, or in conjunction with, French
nationals and those under French protection. Such cases come before the
tribunals of the French Protectorate.
EDUCATION
The object of the Protectorate has been, on the one hand, to give to the
children of French colonists in Morocco the same education as they would
have received at elementary and secondary schools in France; on the
other, to provide the indigenous population with a system of education
that shall give to the young Moroccans an adequate commercial or manual
training, or prepare them for administrative posts, but without
interfering with their native customs or beliefs.
Before 1912 there existed in Morocco only a few small schools supported
by the French Legation at Tangier and by the Alliance Francaise, and a
group of Hebrew schools in the Mellahs, maintained by the Universal
Israelite Alliance.
1912. Total number of schools 37
1918. " " " " 191
1912. Total number of pupils 3006
1918. " " " " 21,520
1912. Total number of teachers 61
1918. " " " " 668
In addition to the French and indigenous schools, sewing-schools have
been formed for the native girls and have been exceptionally successful.
Moslem colleges have been founded at Rabat and Fez in order to
supplement the native education of young Mahometans of the upper
classes, who intend to take up wholesale business or banking, or prepare
for political, judicial or administrative posts under the Sultan's
government. The course lasts four years and comprises: Arabic, French,
mathematics, history, geography, religious (Mahometan) instruction, and
the law of the Koran.
The "Ecole Superieure de la langue arabe et des dialectes berberes" at
Rabat receives European and Moroccan students. The courses are Arabic,
the Berber dialects, Arab literature, ethnography, administrative
Moroccan law, Moslem law, Berber customary law.
MEDICAL AID
The Protectorate has established 113 medical centres for the native
population, ranging from simple dispensaries and small native
infirmaries to the important hospitals of Rabat, Fez, Meknez, Marrakech,
and Casablanca.
Mobile sanitary formations supplied with light motor ambulances travel
about the country, vaccinating, making tours of sanitary inspection,
investigating infected areas, and giving general hygienic education
throughout the remoter regions.
Native patients treated in 1916 over 900,000
" " " " 1917 " 1,220,800
Night-shelters in towns. Every town is provided with a shelter for the
indigent wayfarers so numerous in Morocco. These shelters are used as
disinfection centres, from which suspicious cases are sent to quarantine
camp at the gates of the towns.
_Central Laboratory at Rabat._ This is a kind of Pasteur Institute. In
1917, 210,000 persons were vaccinated throughout the country and 356
patients treated at the Laboratory for rabies.
_Clinics for venereal diseases_ have been established at Casablanca,
Fez, Rabat, and Marrakech.
More than 15,000 cases were treated in 1917.
_Ophthalmic clinics_ in the same cities gave in 1917, 44,600
consultations.
_Radiotherapy._ Clinics have been opened at Fez and Rabat for the
treatment of skin diseases of the head, from which the native children
habitually suffer.
The French Department of Health distributes annually immense quantities
of quinine in the malarial districts.
Madame Lyautey's private charities comprise admirably administered
child-welfare centres in the principal cities, with dispensaries for the
native mothers and children.
VII
A SKETCH OF MOROCCAN HISTORY
[NOTE--In the chapters on Moroccan history and art I have tried to set
down a slight and superficial outline of a large and confused subject.
In extenuation of this summary attempt I hasten to explain that its
chief merit is its lack of originality.
Its facts are chiefly drawn from the books mentioned in the short
bibliography at the end of the volume, in addition to which I am deeply
indebted for information given on the spot to the group of remarkable
specialists attached to the French administration, and to the cultivated
and cordial French officials, military and civilian, who, at each stage
of my rapid journey, did their best to answer my questions and open my
eyes.]
I
THE BERBERS
In the briefest survey of the Moroccan past, account must first of all
be taken of the factor which, from the beginning of recorded events, has
conditioned the whole history of North Africa: the existence, from the
Sahara to the Mediterranean, of a mysterious irreducible indigenous race
with which every successive foreign rule, from Carthage to France, has
had to reckon, and which has but imperfectly and partially assimilated
the language, the religion, and the culture that successive
civilizations have tried to impose upon it.
This race, the race of Berbers, has never, modern explorers tell us,
become really Islamite, any more than it ever really became Phenician,
Roman or Vandal. It has imposed its habits while it appeared to adopt
those of its invaders, and has perpetually represented, outside the
Ismalitic and Hispano-Arabic circle of the Makhzen, the vast tormenting
element of the dissident, the rebellious, the unsubdued tribes of the
Blad-es-Siba.
Who were these indigenous tribes with whom the Phenicians, when they
founded their first counting-houses on the north and west coast of
Africa, exchanged stuffs and pottery and arms for ivory,
ostrich-feathers and slaves?
Historians frankly say they do not know. All sorts of material obstacles
have hitherto hampered the study of Berber origins, but it seems clear
that from the earliest historic times they were a mixed race, and the
ethnologist who attempts to define them is faced by the same problem as
the historian of modern America who should try to find the racial
definition of an "American." For centuries, for ages, North Africa has
been what America now is: the clearing-house of the world. When at
length it occurred to the explorer that the natives of North Africa were
not all Arabs or Moors, he was bewildered by the many vistas of all they
were or might be: so many and tangled were the threads leading up to
them, so interwoven was their pre-Islamite culture with worn-out shreds
of older and richer societies.
M. Saladin, in his "Manuel d'Architecture Musulmane," after attempting
to unravel the influences which went to the making of the mosque of
Kairouan, the walls of Marrakech, the Medersas of Fez--influences that
lead him back to Chaldaean branch-huts, to the walls of Babylon and the
embroideries of Coptic Egypt--somewhat despairingly sums up the result:
"The principal elements contributed to Moslem art by the styles
preceding it may be thus enumerated: from India, floral ornament; from
Persia, the structural principles of the Acheminedes, and the Sassanian
vault. Mesopotamia contributes a system of vaulting, incised ornament,
and proportion; the Copts, ornamental detail in general; Egypt, mass
and unbroken wall-spaces; Spain, construction and Romano-Iberian
ornament; Africa, decorative detail and Romano-Berber traditions (with
Byzantine influences in Persia); Asia Minor, a mixture of Byzantine and
Persian characteristics."
As with the art of North Africa, so with its supposedly indigenous
population. The Berber dialects extend from the Lybian desert to
Senegal. Their language was probably related to Coptic, itself related
to the ancient Egyptian and the non-Semitic dialects of Abyssinia and
Nubia. Yet philologists have discovered what appears to be a far-off
link between the Berber and Semitic languages, and the Chleuhs of the
Draa and the Souss, with their tall slim Egyptian-looking bodies and
hooked noses, may have a strain of Semitic blood. M. Augustin Bernard,
in speaking of the natives of North Africa, ends, much on the same note
as M. Saladin in speaking of Moslem art: "In their blood are the
sediments of many races, Phenician, Punic, Egyptian and Arab."
They were not, like the Arabs, wholly nomadic; but the tent, the flock,
the tribe always entered into their conception of life. M. Augustin
Bernard has pointed out that, in North Africa, the sedentary and nomadic
habit do not imply a permanent difference, but rather a temporary one of
situation and opportunity. The sedentary Berbers are nomadic in certain
conditions, and from the earliest times the invading nomad Berbers
tended to become sedentary when they reached the rich plains north of
the Atlas. But when they built cities it was as their ancestors and
their neighbours pitched tents; and they destroyed or abandoned them as
lightly as their desert forbears packed their camel-bags and moved to
new pastures. Everywhere behind the bristling walls and rock-clamped
towers of old Morocco lurks the shadowy spirit of instability. Every new
Sultan builds himself a new house and lets his predecessors' palaces
fall into decay, and as with the Sultan so with his vassals and
officials. Change is the rule in this apparently unchanged civilization,
where "nought may abide but Mutability."
II
PHENICIANS, ROMANS AND VANDALS
Far to the south of the Anti-Atlas, in the yellow deserts that lead to
Timbuctoo, live the wild Touaregs, the Veiled Men of the south, who ride
to war with their faces covered by linen masks.
These Veiled Men are Berbers, but their alphabet is composed of Lybian
characters, and these are closely related to the signs engraved on
certain vases of the Nile valley that are probably six thousand years
old. Moreover, among the rock-cut images of the African desert is the
likeness of Theban Ammon crowned with the solar disk between serpents,
and the old Berber religion, with its sun and animal worship, has many
points of resemblance with Egyptian beliefs. All this implies trade
contacts far below the horizon of history, and obscure comings and
goings of restless throngs across incredible distances long before the
Phenicians planted their first trading posts on the north African coast
about 1200 B.C.
Five hundred years before Christ, Carthage sent one of her admirals on a
voyage of colonization beyond the Pillars of Hercules. Hannon set out
with sixty fifty-oared galleys carrying thirty thousand people. Some of
them settled at Mehedyia, at the mouth of the Sebou, where Phenician
remains have been found, and apparently the exploration was pushed as
far south as the coast of Guinea, for the inscription recording it
relates that Hannon beheld elephants, hairy men and "savages called
gorillas." At any rate, Carthage founded stable colonies at Melilla,
Larache, Sale and Casablanca.
Then came the Romans, who carried on the business, set up one of their
easy tolerant protectorates over "Tingitanian Mauretania,"[A] and built
one important military outpost, Volubilis in the Zerhoun, which a series
of minor defenses probably connected with Sale on the west coast, thus
guarding the Roman province against the unconquered Berbers to the
south.
[Footnote A: East of the Moulouya, the African protectorate (now west
Algeria and the Sud Oranais) was called the Mauretania of Caesar.]
Tingitanian Mauretania was one of the numerous African granaries of
Rome. She also supplied the Imperial armies with their famous African
cavalry, and among minor articles of exportation were guinea-hens,
snails, honey, euphorbia, wild beasts, horses and pearls. The Roman
dominion ceased at the line drawn between Volubilis and Sale. There was
no interest in pushing farther south, since the ivory and slave trade
with the Soudan was carried on by way of Tripoli. But the spirit of
enterprise never slept in the race, and Pliny records the journey of a
Roman general--Suetonius Paulinus--who appears to have crossed the
Atlas, probably by the pass of Tizi-n-Telremt, which is even now so
beset with difficulties that access by land to the Souss will remain an
arduous undertaking until the way by Imintanout is safe for European
travel.
The Vandals swept away the Romans in the fifth century. The Lower Empire
restored a brief period of civilization; but its authority finally
dwindled to the half-legendary rule of Count Julian, shut up within his
walls of Ceuta. Then Europe vanished from the shores of Africa, and
though Christianity lingered here and there in vague Donatist colonies,
and in the names of Roman bishoprics, its last faint hold went down in
the eighth century before the irresistible cry: "There is no God but
Allah!"
III
THE ARAB CONQUEST
The first Arab invasion of Morocco is said to have reached the Atlantic
coast, but it left no lasting traces, and the real Islamisation of
Barbary did not happen till near the end of the eighth century, when a
descendant of Ali, driven from Mesopotamia by the Caliphate, reached the
mountains above Volubilis and there founded an empire. The Berbers,
though indifferent in religious matters, had always, from a spirit of
independence, tended to heresy and schism. Under the rule of Christian
Rome they had been Donatists, as M. Bernard puts it, "out of opposition
to the Empire"; and so, out of opposition to the Caliphate, they took up
the cause of one Moslem schismatic after another. Their great popular
movements have always had a religious basis, or perhaps it would be
truer to say, a religious pretext, for they have been in reality the
partly moral, partly envious revolt of hungry and ascetic warrior tribes
against the fatness and corruption of the "cities of the plain."
Idriss I became the first national saint and ruler of Morocco. His rule
extended throughout northern Morocco, and his son, Idriss II, attacking
a Berber tribe on the banks of the Oued Fez, routed them, took
possession of their oasis and founded the city of Fez. Thither came
schismatic refugees from Kairouan and Moors from Andalusia. The Islamite
Empire of Morocco was founded, and Idriss II has become the legendary
ancestor of all its subsequent rulers.
The Idrissite rule is a welter of obscure struggles between rapidly
melting groups of adherents. Its chief features are: the founding of
Moulay Idriss and Fez, and the building of the mosques of El Andalous
and Kairouiyin at Fez for the two groups of refugees from Tunisia and
Spain. Meanwhile the Caliphate of Cordova had reached the height of its
power, while that of the Fatimites extended from the Nile to western
Morocco, and the little Idrissite empire, pulverized under the weight of
these expanding powers, became once more a dust of disintegrated tribes.
It was only in the eleventh century that the dust again conglomerated.
Two Arab tribes from the desert of the Hedjaz, suddenly driven westward
by the Fatimites, entered Morocco, not with a small military
expedition, as the Arabs had hitherto done, but with a horde of
emigrants reckoned as high as 200,000 families; and this first
colonizing expedition was doubtless succeeded by others.
To strengthen their hold in Morocco the Arab colonists embraced the
dynastic feuds of the Berbers. They inaugurated a period of general
havoc which destroyed what little prosperity had survived the break-up
of the Idrissite rule, and many Berber tribes took refuge in the
mountains; but others remained and were merged with the invaders,
reforming into new tribes of mixed Berber and Arab blood. This invasion
was almost purely destructive, it marks one of the most desolate periods
in the progress of the "wasteful Empire" of Moghreb.
IV
ALMORAVIDS AND ALMOHADS
While the Hilalian Arabs were conquering and destroying northern Morocco
another but more fruitful invasion was upon her from the south. The
Almoravids, one of the tribes of Veiled Men of the south, driven by the
usual mixture of religious zeal and lust of booty, set out to invade the
rich black kingdoms north of the Sahara. Thence they crossed the Atlas
under their great chief, Youssef-ben-Tachfin, and founded the city of
Marrakech in 1062. From Marrakech they advanced on Idrissite Fez and the
valley of the Moulouya. Fez rose against her conquerors, and Youssef put
all the male inhabitants to death. By 1084 he was master of Tangier and
the Rif, and his rule stretched as far west as Tlemcen, Oran and finally
Algiers.
His ambition drove him across the straits to Spain, where he conquered
one Moslem prince after another and wiped out the luxurious civilization
of Moorish Andalusia. In 1086, at Zallarca, Youssef gave battle to
Alphonso VI of Castile and Leon. The Almoravid army was a strange rabble
of Arabs, Berbers, blacks, wild tribes of the Sahara and Christian
mercenaries. They conquered the Spanish forces, and Youssef left to his
successors an empire extending from the Ebro to Senegal and from the
Atlantic coast of Africa to the borders of Tunisia. But the empire fell
to pieces of its own weight, leaving little record of its brief and
stormy existence. While Youssef was routing the forces of Christianity
at Zallarca in Spain, another schismatic tribe of his own people was
detaching Marrakech and the south from his rule.
The leader of the new invasion was a Mahdi, one of the numerous Saviours
of the World who have carried death and destruction throughout Islam.
His name was Ibn-Toumert, and he had travelled in Egypt, Syria and
Spain, and made the pilgrimage to Mecca. Preaching the doctrine of a
purified monotheism, he called his followers the Almohads or Unitarians,
to distinguish them from the polytheistic Almoravids, whose heresies he
denounced. He fortified the city of Tinmel in the Souss, and built there
a mosque of which the ruins still exist. When he died, in 1128, he
designated as his successor Abd-el-Moumen, the son of a potter, who had
been his disciple.
Abd-el-Moumen carried on the campaign against the Almoravids. He fought
them not only in Morocco but in Spain, taking Cadiz, Cordova, Granada as
well as Tlemcen and Fez. In 1152 his African dominion reached from
Tripoli to the Souss, and he had formed a disciplined army in which
Christian mercenaries from France and Spain fought side by side with
Berbers and Soudanese. This great captain was also a great
administrator, and under his rule Africa was surveyed from the Souss to
Barka, the country was policed, agriculture was protected, and the
caravans journeyed safely over the trade-routes.
Abd-el-Moumen died in 1163 and was followed by his son, who, though he
suffered reverses in Spain, was also a great ruler. He died in 1184, and
his son, Yacoub-el-Mansour, avenged his father's ill-success in Spain by
the great victory of Alarcos and the conquest of Madrid.
Yacoub-el-Mansour was the greatest of Moroccan Sultans. So far did his
fame extend that the illustrious Saladin sent him presents and asked the
help of his fleet. He was a builder as well as a fighter, and the
noblest period of Arab art in Morocco and Spain coincides with his
reign.
After his death, the Almohad empire followed the downward curve to which
all Oriental rule seems destined. In Spain, the Berber forces were
beaten in the great Christian victory of Las-Navas-de Tolosa, and in
Morocco itself the first stirrings of the Beni-Merins (a new tribe from
the Sahara) were preparing the way for a new dynasty.
V
THE MERINIDS
The Beni-Merins or Merinids were nomads who ranged the desert between
Biskra and the Tafilelt. It was not a religious upheaval that drove them
to the conquest of Morocco. The demoralized Almohads called them in as
mercenaries to defend their crumbling empire; and the Merinids came,
drove out the Almohads, and replaced them.
They took Fez, Meknez, Sale, Rabat and Sidjilmassa in the Tafilelt; and
their second Sultan, Abou-Youssef, built New Fez (Eldjid) on the height
above the old Idrissite city. The Merinids renewed the struggle with the
Sultan of Tlemcen, and carried the Holy War once more into Spain. The
conflict with Tlemcen was long and unsuccessful, and one of the Merinid
Sultans died assassinated under its walls. In the fourteenth century the
Sultan Abou Hassan tried to piece together the scattered bits of the
Almohad empire. Tlemcen was finally taken, and the whole of Algeria
annexed. But in the plain of Kairouan, in Tunisia, Abou Hassan was
defeated by the Arabs. Meanwhile one of his brothers had headed a revolt
in Morocco, and the princes of Tlemcen won back their ancient kingdom.
Constantine and Bougie rebelled in turn, and the kingdom of Abou Hassan
vanished like a mirage. His successors struggled vainly to control their
vassals in Morocco, and to keep their possessions beyond its borders.
Before the end of the fourteenth century Morocco from end to end was a
chaos of antagonistic tribes, owning no allegiance, abiding by no laws.
The last of the Merinids, divided, diminished, bound by humiliating
treaties with Christian Spain, kept up a semblance of sovereignty at Fez
and Marrakech, at war with one another and with their neighbours, and
Spain and Portugal seized this moment of internal dissolution to drive
them from Spain, and carry the war into Morocco itself.
The short and stormy passage of the Beni-Merins seems hardly to leave
room for the development of the humaner qualities; yet the flowering of
Moroccan art and culture coincided with those tumultuous years, and it
was under the Merinid Sultans that Fez became the centre of Moroccan
learning and industry, a kind of Oxford with Birmingham annexed.
VI
THE SAADIANS
Meanwhile, behind all the Berber turmoil a secret work of religious
propaganda was going on. The Arab element had been crushed but not
extirpated. The crude idolatrous wealth-loving Berbers apparently
dominated, but whenever there was a new uprising or a new invasion it
was based on the religious discontent perpetually stirred up by
Mahometan agents. The longing for a Mahdi, a Saviour, the craving for
purification combined with an opportunity to murder and rob, always gave
the Moslem apostle a ready opening; and the downfall of the Merinids was
the result of a long series of religious movements to which the European
invasion gave an object and a war-cry.
The Saadians were Cherifian Arabs, newcomers from Arabia, to whom the
lax Berber paganism was abhorrent. They preached a return to the creed
of Mahomet, and proclaimed the Holy War against the hated Portuguese,
who had set up fortified posts all along the west coast of Morocco.
It is a mistake to suppose that hatred of the Christian has always
existed among the North African Moslems. The earlier dynasties, and
especially the great Almohad Sultans, were on friendly terms with the
Catholic powers of Europe, and in the thirteenth century a treaty
assured to Christians in Africa full religious liberty, excepting only
the right to preach their doctrine in public places. There was a
Catholic diocese at Fez, and afterward at Marrakech under Gregory IX,
and there is a letter of the Pope thanking the "Miromilan" (the Emir El
Moumenin) for his kindness to the Bishop and the friars living in his
dominions. Another Bishop was recommended by Innocent IV to the Sultan
of Morocco; the Pope even asked that certain strongholds should be
assigned to the Christians in Morocco as places of refuge in times of
disturbance. But the best proof of the friendly relations between
Christians and infidels is the fact that the Christian armies which
helped the Sultans of Morocco to defeat Spain and subjugate Algeria and
Tunisia were not composed of "renegadoes" or captives, as is generally
supposed, but of Christian mercenaries, French and English, led by
knights and nobles, and fighting for the Sultan of Morocco exactly as
they would have fought for the Duke of Burgundy, the Count of Flanders,
or any other Prince who offered high pay and held out the hope of rich
spoils. Any one who has read Villehardouin and Joinville will own that
there is not much to choose between the motives animating these noble
freebooters and those which caused the Crusaders to loot Constantinople
"on the way" to the Holy Sepulchre. War in those days was regarded as a
lucrative and legitimate form of business, exactly as it was when the
earlier heroes started out to take the rich robber-town of Troy.
The Berbers have never been religious fanatics, and the Vicomte de
Foucauld, when he made his great journey of exploration in the Atlas in
1883, remarked that antagonism to the foreigner was always due to the
fear of military espionage and never to religious motives. This equally
applies to the Berbers of the sixteenth century, when the Holy War
against Catholic Spain and Portugal was preached. The real cause of the
sudden deadly hatred of the foreigner was twofold. The Spaniards were
detested because of the ferocious cruelty with which they had driven the
Moors from Spain under Ferdinand and Isabella, and the Portuguese
because of the arrogance and brutality of their military colonists in
the fortified trading stations of the west coast. And both were feared
as possible conquerors and overlords.
There was a third incentive also: the Moroccans, dealing in black slaves
for the European market, had discovered the value of white slaves in
Moslem markets. The Sultan had his fleet, and each coast-town its
powerful pirate vessels, and from pirate-nests like Sale and Tangier the
raiders continued, till well on into the first half of the nineteenth
century, to seize European ships and carry their passengers to the
slave-markets of Fez and Marrakech.[A] The miseries endured by these
captives, and so poignantly described in John Windus's travels, and in
the "Naufrage du Brick Sophie" by Charles Cochelet,[B] show how savage
the feeling against the foreigner had become.
[Footnote A: The Moroccans being very poor seamen, these corsair-vessels
were usually commanded and manned by Christian renegadoes and Turks.]
[Footnote B: Cochelet was wrecked on the coast near Agadir early in the
nineteenth century and was taken with his fellow-travellers overland to
El-Ksar and Tangier, enduring terrible hardships by the way.]
With the advent of the Cherifian dynasties, which coincided with this
religious reform, and was in fact brought about by it, Morocco became a
closed country, as fiercely guarded as Japan against European
penetration. Cut off from civilizing influences, the Moslems isolated
themselves in a lonely fanaticism, far more racial than religious, and
the history of the country from the fall of the Merinids till the French
annexation is mainly a dull tale of tribal warfare.
The religious movement of the sixteenth century was led and fed by
zealots from the Sahara. One of them took possession of Rabat and
Azemmour, and preached the Holy War; other "feudal fiefs" (as M.
Augustin Bernard has well called them) were founded at Tameslout, Ilegh,
Tamgrout: the tombs of the _marabouts_ who led these revolts are
scattered all along the west coast, and are still objects of popular
veneration. The unorthodox saint worship which marks Moroccan Moslemism,
and is commemorated by the countless white _koubbas_ throughout the
country, grew up chiefly at the time of the religious revival under the
Saadian dynasty, and almost all the "Moulays" and "Sidis" venerated
between Tangier and the Atlas were warrior monks who issued forth from
their fortified _Zaouias_ to drive the Christians out of Africa.
The Saadians were probably rather embarrassed by these fanatics, whom
they found useful to oppose to the Merinids, but troublesome where their
own plans were concerned. They were ambitious and luxury-loving princes,
who invaded the wealthy kingdom of the Soudan, conquered the Sultan of
Timbuctoo, and came back laden with slaves and gold to embellish
Marrakech and spend their treasure in the usual demoralizing orgies.
Their exquisite tombs at Marrakech commemorate in courtly language the
superhuman virtues of a series of rulers whose debaucheries and vices
were usually cut short by assassination. Finally another austere and
fanatical mountain tribe surged down on them, wiped them out, and ruled
in their stead.
VII
THE HASSANIANS
The new rulers came from the Tafilelt, which has always been a
troublesome corner of Morocco. The first two Hassanian Sultans were the
usual tribal chiefs bent on taking advantage of Saadian misrule to loot
and conquer. But the third was the great Moulay-Ismael, the tale of
whose long and triumphant rule (1672 to 1727) has already been told in
the chapter on Meknez. This savage and enlightened old man once more
drew order out of anarchy, and left, when he died, an organized and
administered empire, as well as a progeny of seven hundred sons and
unnumbered daughters.[A]
[Footnote A: Moulay-Ismael was a learned theologian and often held
religious discussions with the Fathers of the Order of Mercy and the
Trinitarians. He was scrupulously orthodox in his religious observances,
and wrote a treatise in defense of his faith which he sent to James II
of England, urging him to become a Mahometan. He invented most of the
most exquisite forms of torture which subsequent Sultans have applied to
their victims (see Loti, _Au Maroc_), and was fond of flowers, and
extremely simple and frugal in his personal habits.]
The empire fell apart as usual, and no less quickly than usual, under
his successors; and from his death until the strong hand of General
Lyautey took over the direction of affairs the Hassanian rule in
Morocco was little more than a tumult of incoherent ambitions. The
successors of Moulay-Ismael inherited his blood-lust and his passion for
dominion without his capacity to govern. In 1757 Sidi-Mohammed, one of
his sons, tried to put order into his kingdom, and drove the last
Portuguese out of Morocco; but under his successors the country remained
isolated and stagnant, making spasmodic efforts to defend itself against
the encroachments of European influence, while its rulers wasted their
energy in a policy of double-dealing and dissimulation. Early in the
nineteenth century the government was compelled by the European powers
to suppress piracy and the trade in Christian slaves; and in 1830 the
French conquest of Algeria broke down the wall of isolation behind which
the country was mouldering away by placing a European power on one of
its frontiers.
At first the conquest of Algeria tended to create a link between France
and Morocco. The Dey of Algiers was a Turk, and, therefore, an
hereditary enemy; and Morocco was disposed to favour the power which had
broken Turkish rule in a neighbouring country. But the Sultan could not
help trying to profit by the general disturbance to seize Tlemcen and
raise insurrections in western Algeria; and presently Morocco was
engaged in a Holy War against France. Abd-el-Kader, the Sultan of
Algeria, had taken refuge in Morocco, and the Sultan of Morocco having
furnished him with supplies and munitions, France sent an official
remonstrance. At the same time Marshal Bugeaud landed at Mers-el-Kebir,
and invited the Makhzen to discuss the situation. The offer was accepted
and General Bedeau and the Caid El Guennaoui met in an open place.
Behind them their respective troops were drawn up, and almost as soon as
the first salutes were exchanged the Caid declared the negotiations
broken off. The French troops accordingly withdrew to the coast, but
during their retreat they were attacked by the Moroccans. This put an
end to peaceful negotiations, and Tangier was besieged and taken. The
following August Bugeaud brought his troops up from Oudjda, through the
defile that leads from West Algeria, and routed the Moroccans. He wished
to advance on Fez, but international politics interfered, and he was not
allowed to carry out his plans. England looked unfavourably on the
French penetration of Morocco, and it became necessary to conclude peace
at once to prove that France had no territorial ambitions west of
Oudjda.
Meanwhile a great Sultan was once more to appear in the land.
Moulay-el-Hassan, who ruled from 1873 to 1894, was an able and energetic
administrator. He pieced together his broken empire, asserted his
authority in Fez and Marrakech, and fought the rebellious tribes of the
west. In 1877 he asked the French government to send him a permanent
military mission to assist in organizing his army. He planned an
expedition to the Souss, but the want of food and water in the
wilderness traversed by the army caused the most cruel sufferings.
Moulay-el-Hassan had provisions sent by sea, but the weather was too
stormy to allow of a landing on the exposed Atlantic coast, and the
Sultan, who had never seen the sea, was as surprised and indignant as
Canute to find that the waves would not obey him.
His son Abd-el-Aziz was only thirteen years old when he succeeded to the
throne. For six years he remained under the guardianship of Ba-Ahmed,
the black Vizier of Moulay-el-Hassan, who built the fairy palace of the
Bahia at Marrakech, with its mysterious pale green padlocked door
leading down to the secret vaults where his treasure was hidden. When
the all-powerful Ba-Ahmed died the young Sultan was nineteen. He was
intelligent, charming, and fond of the society of Europeans; but he was
indifferent to religious questions and still more to military affairs,
and thus doubly at the mercy of native mistrust and European intrigue.
Some clumsy attempts at fiscal reform, and a too great leaning toward
European habits and associates, roused the animosity of the people, and
of the conservative party in the upper class. The Sultan's eldest
brother, who had been set aside in his favour, was intriguing against
him; the usual Cherifian Pretender was stirring up the factious tribes
in the mountains; and the European powers were attempting, in the
confusion of an ungoverned country, to assert their respective
ascendencies.
The demoralized condition of the country justified these attempts, and
made European interference inevitable. But the powers were jealously
watching each other, and Germany, already coveting the certain
agricultural resources and the conjectured mineral wealth of Morocco,
was above all determined that a French protectorate should not be set
up.
In 1908 another son of Moulay-Hassan, Abd-el-Hafid, was proclaimed
Sultan by the reactionary Islamite faction, who accused Abd-el-Aziz of
having sold his country to the Christians. Abd-el-Aziz was defeated in a
battle near Marrakech, and retired to Tangier, where he still lives in
futile state. Abd-el-Hafid, proclaimed Sultan at Fez, was recognized by
the whole country, but he found himself unable to cope with the factious
tribes (those outside the Blad-el-Makhzen, or _governed country_). These
rebel tribes besieged Fez, and the Sultan had to ask France for aid.
France sent troops to his relief, but as soon as the dissidents were
routed, and he himself was safe, Abd-el-Hafid refused to give the French
army his support, and in 1912, after the horrible massacres of Fez, he
abdicated in favour of another brother, Moulay Youssef, the actual ruler
of Morocco.
VIII
NOTE ON MOROCCAN ARCHITECTURE
I
M. H. Saladin, whose "Manual of Moslem Architecture" was published in
1907, ends his chapter on Morocco with the words: "It is especially
urgent that we should know, and penetrate into, Morocco as soon as
possible, in order to study its monuments. It is the only country but
Persia where Moslem art actually survives; and the tradition handed down
to the present day will doubtless clear up many things."
M. Saladin's wish has been partly realized. Much has been done since
1912, when General Lyautey was appointed Resident-General, to clear up
and classify the history of Moroccan art; but since 1914, though the
work has never been dropped, it has necessarily been much delayed,
especially as regards its published record; and as yet only a few
monographs and articles have summed up some of the interesting
investigations of the last five years.
II
When I was in Marrakech word was sent to Captain de S., who was with me,
that a Caid of the Atlas, whose prisoner he had been several years
before, had himself been taken by the Pasha's troops, and was in
Marrakech. Captain de S. was asked to identify several rifles which his
old enemy had taken from him, and on receiving them found that, in the
interval, they had been elaborately ornamented with the Arab niello work
of which the tradition goes back to Damascus.
This little incident is a good example of the degree to which the
mediaeval tradition alluded to by M. Saladin has survived in Moroccan
life. Nowhere else in the world, except among the moribund
fresco-painters of the Greek monasteries, has a formula of art persisted
from the seventh or eighth century to the present day; and in Morocco
the formula is not the mechanical expression of a petrified theology but
the setting of the life of a people who have gone on wearing the same
clothes, observing the same customs, believing in the same fetiches, and
using the same saddles, ploughs, looms, and dye-stuffs as in the days
when the foundations of the first mosque of El Kairouiyin were laid.
[Illustration: _From a photograph from the Service des Beaux-Arts au
Maroc_
Marrakech--a street fountain]
The origin of this tradition is confused and obscure. The Arabs have
never been creative artists, nor are the Berbers known to have been so.
As investigations proceed in Syria and Mesopotamia it seems more and
more probable that the sources of inspiration of pre-Moslem art in North
Africa are to be found in Egypt, Persia, and India. Each new
investigation pushes these sources farther back and farther east; but it
is not of much use to retrace these ancient vestiges, since Moroccan art
has, so far, nothing to show of pre-Islamite art, save what is purely
Phenician or Roman.
In any case, however, it is not in Morocco that the clue to Moroccan art
is to be sought; though interesting hints and mysterious reminiscences
will doubtless be found in such places as Tinmel, in the gorges of the
Atlas, where a ruined mosque of the earliest Almohad period has been
photographed by M. Doutte, and in the curious Algerian towns of Sedrata
and the Kalaa of the Beni Hammads. Both of these latter towns were rich
and prosperous communities in the tenth century and both were destroyed
in the eleventh, so that they survive as mediaeval Pompeiis of a quite
exceptional interest, since their architecture appears to have been
almost unaffected by classic or Byzantine influences.
Traces of a very old indigenous art are found in the designs on the
modern white and black Berber pottery, but this work, specimens of which
are to be seen in the Oriental Department of the Louvre, seems to go
back, by way of Central America, Greece (sixth century B.C.) and Susa
(twelfth century B.C.), to the far-off period before the streams of
human invention had divided, and when the same loops and ripples and
spirals formed on the flowing surface of every current.
It is a disputed question whether Spanish influence was foremost in
developing the peculiarly Moroccan art of the earliest Moslem period, or
whether European influences came by way of Syria and Palestine, and
afterward met and were crossed with those of Moorish Spain. Probably
both things happened, since the Almoravids were in Spain; and no doubt
the currents met and mingled. At any rate, Byzantine, Greece, and the
Palestine and Syria of the Crusaders, contributed as much as Rome and
Greece to the formation of that peculiar Moslem art which, all the way
from India to the Pillars of Hercules, built itself, with minor
variations, out of the same elements.
Arab conquerors always destroy as much as they can of the work of their
predecessors, and nothing remains, as far as is known, of Almoravid
architecture in Morocco. But the great Almohad Sultans covered Spain and
Northwest Africa with their monuments, and no later buildings in Africa
equal them in strength and majesty.
It is no doubt because the Almohads built in stone that so much of what
they made survives. The Merinids took to rubble and a soft tufa, and the
Cherifian dynasties built in clay like the Spaniards in South America.
And so seventeenth century Meknez has perished while the Almohad walls
and towers of the tenth century still stand.
The principal old buildings of Morocco are defensive and religious--and
under the latter term the beautiful collegiate houses (the medersas) of
Fez and Sale may fairly be included, since the educational system of
Islam is essentially and fundamentally theological. Of old secular
buildings, palaces or private houses, virtually none are known to exist;
but their plan and decorations may easily be reconstituted from the
early chronicles, and also from the surviving palaces built in the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and even those which the wealthy
nobles of modern Morocco are building to this day.
The whole of civilian Moslem architecture from Persia to Morocco is
based on four unchanging conditions: a hot climate, slavery, polygamy
and the segregation of women. The private house in Mahometan countries
is in fact a fortress, a convent and a temple: a temple of which the god
(as in all ancient religions) frequently descends to visit his
cloistered votaresses. For where slavery and polygamy exist every
house-master is necessarily a god, and the house he inhabits a shrine
built about his divinity.
The first thought of the Moroccan chieftain was always defensive. As
soon as he pitched a camp or founded a city it had to be guarded
against the hungry hordes who encompassed him on every side. Each little
centre of culture and luxury in Moghreb was an islet in a sea of
perpetual storms. The wonder is that, thus incessantly threatened from
without and conspired against from within--with the desert at their
doors, and their slaves on the threshold--these violent men managed to
create about them an atmosphere of luxury and stability that astonished
not only the obsequious native chronicler but travellers and captives
from western Europe.
[Illustration: _From a photograph from the Service des Beaux-Arts au
Maroc_
Rabat--gate of the Kasbah of the Oudayas]
The truth is, as has been often pointed out, that, even until the end of
the seventeenth century, the refinements of civilization were in many
respects no greater in France and England than in North Africa. North
Africa had long been in more direct communication with the old Empires
of immemorial luxury, and was therefore farther advanced in the arts of
living than the Spain and France of the Dark Ages; and this is why, in a
country that to the average modern European seems as savage as Ashantee,
one finds traces of a refinement of life and taste hardly to be matched
by Carlovingian and early Capetian Europe.
III
The brief Almoravid dynasty left no monuments behind it.
Fez had already been founded by the Idrissites, and its first mosques
(Kairouiyin and Les Andalous) existed. Of the Almoravid Fez and
Marrakech the chroniclers relate great things; but the wild Hilalian
invasion and the subsequent descent of the Almohads from the High Atlas
swept away whatever the first dynasties had created.
The Almohads were mighty builders, and their great monuments are all of
stone. The earliest known example of their architecture which has
survived is the ruined mosque of Tinmel, in the High Atlas, discovered
and photographed by M. Doutte. This mosque was built by the inspired
mystic, Ibn-Toumert, who founded the line. Following him came the great
palace-making Sultans whose walled cities of splendid mosques and towers
have Romanesque qualities of mass and proportion, and, as M. Raymond
Koechlin has pointed out, inevitably recall the "robust simplicity of
the master builders who at the very same moment were beginning in
France the construction of the first Gothic cathedrals and the noblest
feudal castles."
[Illustration: _From a photograph from the Service des Beaux-Arts au
Maroc_
Fez--Medersa Bouanyana]
In the thirteenth century, with the coming of the Merinids, Moroccan
architecture grew more delicate, more luxurious, and perhaps also more
peculiarly itself. That interaction of Spanish and Arab art which
produced the style known as Moorish reached, on the African side of the
Straits, its greatest completeness in Morocco. It was under the Merinids
that Moorish art grew into full beauty in Spain, and under the Merinids
that Fez rebuilt the mosque Kairouiyin and that of the Andalusians, and
created six of its nine _Medersas_, the most perfect surviving buildings
of that unique moment of sober elegance and dignity.
The Cherifian dynasties brought with them a decline in taste. A crude
desire for immediate effect, and the tendency toward a more barbaric
luxury, resulted in the piling up of frail palaces as impermanent as
tents. Yet a last flower grew from the deformed and dying trunk of the
old Empire. The Saadian Sultan who invaded the Soudan and came back
laden with gold and treasure from the great black city of Timbuctoo
covered Marrakech with hasty monuments of which hardly a trace survives.
But there, in a nettle-grown corner of a ruinous quarter, lay hidden
till yesterday the Chapel of the Tombs: the last emanation of pure
beauty of a mysterious, incomplete, forever retrogressive and yet
forever forward-straining people. The Merinid tombs of Fez have fallen;
but those of their destroyers linger on in precarious grace, like a
flower on the edge of a precipice.
IV
Moroccan architecture, then, is easily divided into four groups: the
fortress, the mosque, the collegiate building and the private house.
The kernel of the mosque is always the _mihrab_, or niche facing toward
the Kasbah of Mecca, where the _imam_[A] stands to say the prayer. This
arrangement, which enabled as many as possible of the faithful to kneel
facing the _mihrab_, results in a ground-plan necessarily consisting of
long aisles parallel with the wall of the _mihrab_, to which more and
more aisles are added as the number of worshippers grows. Where there
was not space to increase these lateral aisles they were lengthened at
each end. This typical plan is modified in the Moroccan mosques by a
wider transverse space, corresponding with the nave of a Christian
church, and extending across the mosque from the praying niche to the
principal door. To the right of the _mihrab_ is the _minbar_, the carved
pulpit (usually of cedar-wood incrusted with mother-of-pearl and ebony)
from which the Koran is read. In some Algerian and Egyptian mosques (and
at Cordova, for instance) the _mihrab_ is enclosed in a sort of screen
called the _maksoura_; but in Morocco this modification of the simpler
plan was apparently not adopted.
[Footnote A: The "deacon" or elder of the Moslem religion, which has no
order of priests.]
[Illustration: _From a photograph from the Service des Beaux-Arts au
Maroc_
Fez--the praying-chapel in the Medersa el Attarine]
The interior construction of the mosque was no doubt usually affected by
the nearness of Roman or Byzantine ruins. M. Saladin points out that
there seem to be few instances of the use of columns made by native
builders; but it does not therefore follow that all the columns used in
the early mosques were taken from Roman temples or Christian basilicas.
The Arab invaders brought their architects and engineers with them; and
it is very possible that some of the earlier mosques were built by
prisoners or fortune-hunters from Greece or Italy or Spain.
At any rate, the column on which the arcades of the vaulting rests in
the earlier mosques, as at Tunis and Kairouan, and the mosque El
Kairouiyin at Fez, gives way later to the use of piers, foursquare, or
with flanking engaged pilasters as at Algiers and Tlemcen. The exterior
of the mosques, as a rule, is almost entirely hidden by a mushroom
growth of buildings, lanes and covered bazaars, but where the outer
walls have remained disengaged they show, as at Kairouan and Cordova,
great masses of windowless masonry pierced at intervals with majestic
gateways.
Beyond the mosque, and opening into it by many wide doors of beaten
bronze or carved cedar-wood, lies the Court of the Ablutions. The
openings in the facade were multiplied in order that, on great days, the
faithful who were not able to enter the mosque might hear the prayers
and catch a glimpse of the _mihrab_.
In a corner of the courts stands the minaret. It is the structure on
which Moslem art has played the greatest number of variations, cutting
off its angles, building it on a circular or polygonal plan, and
endlessly modifying the pyramids and pendentives by which the
ground-plan of one story passes into that of the next. These problems of
transition, always fascinating to the architect, led in Persia,
Mesopotamia and Egypt to many different compositions and ways of
treatment, but in Morocco the minaret, till modern times, remained
steadfastly square, and proved that no other plan is so beautiful as
this simplest one of all.
Surrounding the Court of the Ablutions are the school-rooms, libraries
and other dependencies, which grew as the Mahometan religion prospered
and Arab culture developed.
The medersa was a farther extension of the mosque: it was the academy
where the Moslem schoolman prepared his theology and the other branches
of strange learning which, to the present day, make up the curriculum of
the Mahometan university. The medersa is an adaptation of the private
house to religious and educational ends; or, if one prefers another
analogy, it is a _fondak_ built above a miniature mosque. The
ground-plan is always the same: in the centre an arcaded court with a
fountain, on one side the long narrow praying-chapel with the _mihrab_,
on the other a classroom with the same ground-plan, and on the next
story a series of cell-like rooms for the students, opening on carved
cedar-wood balconies. This cloistered plan, where all the effect is
reserved for the interior facades about the court, lends itself to a
delicacy of detail that would be inappropriate on a street-front; and
the medersas of Fez are endlessly varied in their fanciful but never
exuberant decoration.
M. Tranchant de Lunel has pointed out (in "France-Maroc") with what a
sure sense of suitability the Merinid architects adapted this decoration
to the uses of the buildings. On the lower floor, under the cloister, is
a revetement of marble (often alabaster) or of the almost indestructible
ceramic mosaic.[A] On the floor above, massive cedar-wood corbels ending
in monsters of almost Gothic inspiration support the fretted balconies;
and above rise stucco interfacings, placed too high up to be injured
by man, and guarded from the weather by projecting eaves.
[Footnote A: These Moroccan mosaics are called _zellijes_.]
[Illustration: _From a photograph from the Service des Beaux-Arts au
Maroc_
Sale--interior court of the Medersa]
The private house, whether merchant's dwelling or chieftain's palace, is
laid out on the same lines, with the addition of the reserved quarters
for women; and what remains in Spain and Sicily of Moorish secular
architecture shows that, in the Merinid period, the play of ornament
must have been--as was natural--even greater than in the medersas.
The Arab chroniclers paint pictures of Merinid palaces, such as the
House of the Favourite at Cordova, which the soberer modern imagination
refused to accept until the medersas of Fez were revealed, and the old
decorative tradition was shown in the eighteenth century Moroccan
palaces. The descriptions given of the palaces of Fez and of Marrakech
in the preceding articles, which make it unnecessary, in so slight a
note as this, to go again into the detail of their planning and
decoration, will serve to show how gracefully the art of the mosque and
the medersa was lightened and domesticated to suit these cool chambers
and flower-filled courts.
With regard to the immense fortifications that are the most picturesque
and noticeable architectural features of Morocco, the first thing to
strike the traveller is the difficulty of discerning any difference in
the probable date of their construction until certain structural
peculiarities are examined, or the ornamental details of the great
gateways are noted. Thus the Almohad portions of the walls of Fez and
Rabat are built of stone, while later parts are of rubble; and the touch
of European influence in certain gateways of Meknez and Fez at once
situate them in the seventeenth century. But the mediaeval outline of
these great piles of masonry, and certain technicalities in their plan,
such as the disposition of the towers, alternating in the inner and
outer walls, continued unchanged throughout the different dynasties,
and this immutability of the Moroccan military architecture enables the
imagination to picture, not only what was the aspect of the fortified
cities which the Greeks built in Palestine and Syria, and the
Crusaders brought back to Europe, but even that of the far-off
Assyrio-Chaldaean strongholds to which the whole fortified architecture
of the Middle Ages in Europe seems to lead back.
[Illustration: _From a photograph from the Service des Beaux-Arts au
Maroc_
Marrakech--the gate of the Portuguese]
IX
BOOKS CONSULTED
Afrique Francaise (L'). Bulletin Mensuel du Comite de
l'Afrique Francaise. Paris, 21, rue Cassette.
Bernard, Augustin. Le Maroc. Paris, F. Alcan, 1916.
Budgett-Meakin. The Land of the Moors. London, 1902.
Chatelain, L. Recherches archeologiques au Maroc: Volubilis.
(Published by the Military Command in Morocco).
Les Fouilles de Volubilis (Extrait du Bulletin Archeologique,
1916)
Chevrillon, A. Crepuscule d'Islam.
Cochelet, Charles. Le Naufrage du Brick Sophie.
Conferences Marocaines. Paris, Plon-Nourrit.
Doutte, E. En Tribu. Paris, 1914.
Foucauld, Vicomte de. La Reconnaissance au Maroc. Paris, 1888.
France-Maroc. Revue Mensuelle, Paris, 4, rue Chauveau-Lagarde.
Gaillard. Une Ville d'Islam, Fez. Paris, 1909.
Gayet, Al. L'Art Arabe. Paris, 1906.
Houdas, O. Le Maroc de 1631 a 1812. Extrait d'une histoire du Maroc
intitulee "L'Interprete qui s'exprime clairement sur les dynasties de
l'Orient et de l'Occident," par Ezziani. Paris, E. Leroux, 1886.
Koechlin, Raymond. Une Exposition d'Art Marocain. (Gazette
des Beaux-Arts, Juillet-Septembre, 1917).
Leo Africanus, Description of Africa.
Loti, Pierre. Au Maroc.
Migeon, Gaston. Manuel d'Art Musulman, II, Les Arts
Plastiques et Industriels. Paris, A. Picard et Fils, 1907.
Saladin, H. Manuel d'Art Musulman, I, L'Architecture.
Paris, A. Picard et Fils, 1907.
Segonzac, Marquis de. Voyages au Maroc. Paris, 1903.
Au Coeur de l'Atlas. Paris, 1910.
Tarde, A. de. Les Villes du Maroc: Fez, Marrakech, Rabat. (Journal de
l'Universite des Annales, 15 Oct., 1 Nov., 1918).
Windus. A Journey to Mequinez. London, 1721.
INDEX
Abdallah-ben-Aissa
Abd-el-Aziz
Abd-el-Hafid
Abd-el-Kader
Abd-el-Moumen
Abou-el Abbas ("The Golden")
Abou Hassan
Abou-Youssef
Agdal, olive-yards of the
Ahmed-Baba
Ahmed-el-Hiba
Aid-el-Kebir, the
Aissaouas, the, of Kairouan
dance of
Algeria, French conquest of
Almohads, the, invasion of Morocco by
architecture of
Almoravids, the, invasion of Morocco by
destruction of architecture of
Andalusian Moors, the, mosque of
Arabs, conquest of Morocco by
Architecture, Moroccan, four basic conditions of
four groups of
of the Almohad dynasty
of the Cherifian dynasties
of the Merinid dynasty
the Saadian mausoleum
the collegiate building
the fortress
the mosque
the private house
Art, Moroccan, sources of influence on
disappearance of treasures of
and Moorish art
Ba-Ahmed, builder of the Bahia
Bab F'touh cemetery, at Fez
Bahia, the, palace of, at Marrakech
apartment of Grand Vizier's Favourite in
Bazaars, of Fez
of Marrakech
of Sale
Beni-Merins _See_ Merinids
Berbers, the attack of, on Fez
origins of
dialects of
nomadic character of
heresy and schisms of
Bernard, M. Augustin
Black Guard, the Sultan's
uniform of
Moulay-Ismael's method of raising
Blue Men of the Sahara, the
Bou-Jeloud, palace of
Bugeaud, Marshal
Carthage, African colonies of
Casablanca, exhibitions at
port of
Catholics, in Morocco
Cemetery, El Alou
Bab F'touh
Chatelain, M. Louis
Chella, ruins of
Cherifian dynasties, the
architecture of
Children, Moroccan,
in the harem
negro
training of, for Black Guard
Chleuh boys, dance of
Christians, captive, and the building of Meknez
religious liberty to, in Africa
Clocks, in Sultan's harem at Rabat
Cochelet, Charles, his "Naufrage du Brick Sophie"
Colleges, at Fez
at Sale
Moslem
architecture of Moroccan
Colors, of North African towns
Commerce, Moroccan
Conti, Princesse de
Convention of Fez, the
Courts of Justice, Moroccan
Crowds, Moroccan street
Culture, in North Africa
Dance, of Chleuh boys
of the Hamadchas
Dawn, in Africa
Djebilets, the
Doutte, M.
Dust-storm, at Marrakech
Education, in Morocco
Elakhdar, mosque of
El Alou, cemetery of
El Andalous, mosque of
Elbah (Old Fez)
harems of
Eldjid (New Fez)
palaces of
founding of
El Kairouiyin, mosque of
the praying-hall of
the court of ablutions of
legend of the tortoise of
El-Ksar
El-Mansour, Yacoub
Elmansour, palace of
Empress Mother, the
English emissaries,
visit of, to Meknez
Exhibitions, planned by General Lyautey
Ezziani, chronicler of Moulay-Ismael
Fatimites, the
Fez, the approach to
unchanged character of
ruins of Merinid tombs of
the upper or new
old summer-palace at
night in
antiquity of
palaces of
the inns at
streets of
a city of wealth
the merchant of
bazaars of
a melancholy city
twilight in
the shrines of
mosque of Moulay Idriss at
mosque of El Kairouiyinat
the University of
Medersas of
mosque of El Andalous at
Bab F'touh cemetery of
the potters of
art and culture of
the Mellah of
harems of Old
the Convention of
uprising in
attack of Berbers on
exhibitions at
Moslem college at
founding of
Almoravid conquest of
centre of Moroccan learning
Catholic diocese at
massacres at
Fez Elbali
Fez Eldjid
Fondak Nedjanne, the
Fortifications, Moroccan, architecture of
Foucauld, Vicomte de
Franco-German treaty of 1911
French Protectorate in Morocco, work of
French, conquests in Morocco
at Fez
Furniture, disappearance of Merinid
Ghilis, the
Gouraud, General
Hamadch, tomb of
Hamadchas, the, ritual dance of
Harem
in old Fez
an Imperial
in Marrakech
in old Rabat
Hassan, Sultan
Hassan, tower of, at Rabat
Hassanians, the, rule of
Holy War, the, against France
against Spain and Portugal
Hospitals, in Morocco
Houses, Moroccan,
architecture of
color of
plan of
rich private
Ibn-Toumert
Idriss I
Idriss II
Idrissite empire, the
Inns, Moroccan
Jews, of Sefrou
treatment of North African
Kairouan, the Aissaouas of
Great Mosque of
Kairouiyin, mosque of _See_ El
Kairouiyin
Kalaa, ruins of
Kenitra, port of
Koechlin, M. Raymond
Koutoubya, tower of the
Lamothe, General
Land, area of cultivated, in Morocco
Louis XIV, and Moulay-Ismael
Lunel, M. Tranchant de
Lyautey, General
at Sultan's court
appointed Resident-General in Morocco
military occupation of Morocco by
policy of
economic development of Morocco achieved by
summary of work of
Maclean, Sir Harry
Mamora, forest of
Mangin, General
Mansourah, mosque of
Market, of Marrakech
in Moulay Idriss
of Sale
of Sefrou
Marrakech, the road to
founders of
tower of the Koutoubya at
palace of the Bahia at
the lamp-lighters of
mixed population of
bazaars of
the "morocco" workers of
olive-yards of
the Menara of
a holiday of merchants of
the Square of the Dead in
French administration office at
fruit-market of
dance of Chleuh boys in
Saadian tombs of
a harem in
taken by the French
Catholic diocese at
Chapel of the Tombs at
Medersa, the, of the Oudayas
Attarine
at Fez
at Sale
architecture of
Mehedyia, Phenician colony of
Meknez, building of
the Kasbah of
palaces of
stables of
entrance into
ruins of
sunken gardens of
visit of English emissaries to
Mellah, of Fez
of Sefrou
Menara, the, in the Agdal
Mequinez _See_ Meknez
Merinids, the, tombs of, at Fez
conquest of Morocco by
architecture of
Mirador, the Imperial
Moorish art
Mosque, of Elakhador
of El Andalous
of El Kairouiyin
of Kairouan
of Mansourah
of Rabat
of Tinmel
of Tunisia
architecture of Moroccan
Moulay Hafid
Moulay-el-Hassan
Moulay Idriss I, rule of
tomb of
Moulay Idriss II, tomb of
rule of
Moulay Idriss, Sacred City of
Street of the Weavers in
feast of the Hamadchas in
market-place of
whiteness of
founding of
Moulay-Ismael, and Louis XIV
exploits of
mausoleum of Moulay Idriss enlarged by
Meknez built by
the Black Guard of
description of
palaces of
and English emissaries
death of
rule of
successors of
Moulay Youssef
Nedjarine, fountain and inn of
Night, in Fez
Oases, Moroccan
Marrakech
Sefrou
Settat
Oudayas, the, Kasbah of
Medersa of
Palaces, Moroccan, the Bahia
Bou-Jeloud
at Fez
at Meknez
of Moulay-Ismael
Phenicians, the, African explorations of
Pilgrimage to Sale, a
Population, Moroccan, varied elements of
Ports, Moroccan
Portugal, the Holy War against
Pottery, Berber
Potters' Field, the
Rabat
Tower of Hassan at
ruins of mosque at
called "Camp of Victory"
Sacrifice of the Sheep at
Sultan's harem of
visit to a harem in old
exhibitions at
port of
Moslem college at
Central Laboratory at
Railways, Moroccan, built by French Protectorate
Rarb, the
Roads, Moroccan, built by French Protectorate
Romans, the, African explorations of
Saadian Sultans, the, history of
tombs of
rule of
Sacrifice of the Sheep, the
Saint-Amand, M. de
Saladin, M. H., his "Manual of Moslem Architecture"
Sale, first view of
type of untouched Moroccan city
bazaar of
Medersas of
market of
colors of
Schools, in Morocco
Sedrata, ruins of
Sefrou
market-place of
men and women of
Jewish colony of
Senegal
Settat, oasis of
Sheep, sacrifice of the
Sidi-Mohammed
Slaves, Moroccan
trade in white
_Sloughi_, bronze, at Volubilis
Soudan
Spain, the Holy War against
Spanish zone, the, German intrigue in
Stables, of Meknez
Stewart, Commodore
Street of the Weavers (Moulay Idriss)
Streets, Moroccan
Tangier
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