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The End of Domestic Slavery in Fes, Morocco
R. David Goodman
Submitted to the faculty of the University Graduate Schoolin partial fulfillment of the requirements
for the degreeDoctor of Philosophy
in the Department History,Indiana University
October, 2009
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UMI Number: 3386679
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Accepted by the Graduate Faculty, Indiana University, in partial fulfillment of the requirementsfor the degree of Doctor of Philosophy.
Doctoral Committee John Hanson, Ph.D.Claude Clegg, Ph.D.
Phyllis Martin, Ph.D.
Ruth Stone, Ph.D.
Date of Dissertation Defense – November, 20th 2008
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© 2009R. David Goodman
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
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In spite of all those who preserve benefits through double standards which degrade life and
obstruct people’s basis of well-being—yet far, far more so— in honor of all those who somehow
create previously unavailable means to our greater humanity…
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R. David Goodman
The End of Domestic Slavery in Fes, Morocco
This dissertation examines how the social institution of domestic slavery declined and ended in
Fes, Morocco. This very gradual and complex twentieth-century historical transformation is
approached through attention to the limited influence of French Protectorate (1912-1956) policy
forms of economic and social change as experienced through Fasi household labor and family
life, and relevant personal registers within the lives of slaves and their children. The extensive
archival and field research which it is based upon (supported by a Fulbright-Hays doctoral
dissertation research fellowship, a grant from the American Institute of Maghribi Studies, andseveral awards from Indiana University) assembles and analyzes a range of distinct original
sources, including colonial documents, Fasi court records, and oral interviews with former
slaves, slave owners and their descendants. The historical contours of this social change have
been reconstructed through a critical interpretation of French colonial documents, alongside a
careful consideration of the substantial detailed evidence of Islamic court records, and
compelling oral testimony representing intimate power relationships and their transformations
over time. This work is an effort to contribute an innovative and thorough case study of
relevance to Moroccan and North African history, as well as to the study of slavery within Arab
and Islamic contexts and beyond.
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CHAPTER ONE: Introduction
Introduction 1
Introductory Historical Background 5
Questions, Approaches and Relevant Literature 11
Sources and Methods 31
Note on Organization of Chapters 37
Note on Language 38
CHAPTER TWO: The Contours of Protectorate Era Official Sources and the End ofDomestic Slavery 39
Protectorate Policies and Slavery 45
Fasi Families Use of Muslim Law and the Decline of Slavery 67
Protectorate Era Attitudes toward Slavery and Blackness 76
Conclusion: Limits of Formal Sources 102
CHAPTER THREE: Fasi Domestic Slave Labor and Beyond 107
Economic Change and Fasi Domestic Slavery 108
Protectorate Economic Policies and Slavery108 Socioeconomic Changes in Fes116 Fasi Socioeconomic Changes and Women127 Post-Independence Changes and Continuities130
Experiences of Fasi Domestic Slave Labor and Shifting Power Relations 134
Fasi Domestic Slavery and the Organization of Household Work136 Work Conditions and Slave’s Experiences145 Controls and Punishments153Slave’s Responses162 Sources and Patterns of Household Change176 Working Beyond Slavery181 Socioeconomic Continuities and Changes187Struggles for Meaningful Freedom Beyond Slavery195
Conclusion 200
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CHAPTER FOUR: Familial and Personal Changes in the Decline of Fasi Domestic Slavery202
Social Changes and Slave Owning Fasi Families 203
Education, Nationalism and Elite Moroccan Women205 Shifting Contexts of Material Culture216 Reorganization in Patterns of Marriage and Family Life223 Post-Independence Changes and Continuities229
Fasi Family Legal Practices During the Decline of Domestic Slavery 236
Marriage, Concubinage and the Recognition of Children240 Property and Inheritance249 Housing258
Continuities and Changes in Social Attitudes and Personal Relations263 Slaves, Former Slaves and their Descendents: Experiences and Changes in Relations,Recognition and Belonging 272
Slave’s Experiences of Fasi Family Holidays273 Marriages and Color277 Familial Assimilation and Tensions285 Power and Sexual Relationships291 Children and Recognition302 Childhood and Slave’s Families306 Dada322 Old Age and Funerals328 Meaningful Familial Relationships Beyond Slavery331
Conclusion 342
CHAPTER FIVE: Conclusions 344
BIBLIOGRAPHY 350
APPENDIX 1 Selected Glossary 369-371
APPENDIX 2 Maps (Moroccan Cities, Fes Jdid and Fes El-Bali) 372
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FIGURES AND TABLES
Figure 1. References to Immediate Liberations. 70Figure 2. References to Liberations Upon the Death of Owners. 71Figure 3. Frequency of References to Slaves in Fasi Family Legal Documents. 75
Figure 4. Offical Annual Population of Fes 1921-1960. 115Figure 5. References to Former Slave Wives and Concubines. 243Figure 6. Legal Recognition of Children. 245Figure 7. Housing Inheritance for Slaves and Former Slaves. 260Figure 8. Frequency of References to Slaves from another Generation in Fasi
Family Legal Documents. 271
Table 1. Official Annual Population of Morocco 1921-1960. 114Table 2. Official Estimates of the Working Population of Fes Medina Organized by
Class. 117Table 3. 1938 Five Fasi Family Budgets. 122-124
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CHAPTER ONE
Introduction
The questions forming this PhD dissertation emerged from my long interest in and experiences
with Afro-Maghribi expressive culture and the historical construction of slavery in Morocco. I
the early nineteen-nineties I became enthralled by a particular form of Moroccan music—
Gnawa—and pursued information about its performers and practitioners, eventually writing an
MA thesis about the form. While undertaking this research, I came to increasingly question
historical assumptions and representations surrounding Gnawa music and its performers,
deciding to further explore Afro-Maghribi history in Morocco. My pursuit inevitably led tohistorical questions of slavery and abolition, the focus of this PhD dissertation.
Gnawa music and related North African forms have long presented highly recognizable
examples of Afro-Maghribi culture. One popular myth— or at least a distorted and incomplete
historical representation— woven into the promotion, socialization and consumption of the
Gnawa form as it underwent expanded commoditization and festivalization, gaining wider
national and international recognition (particularly from the early nineteen-nineties onward), ha
been the notion that the Gnawa were the descendents of slaves captured in the 1591 Saadian
transaharan military expedition. This historical account of the Gnawa form is readily disputed
by the various comparable North African forms beyond the plausible impact of Saadian
Morocco’s imperial presence in West Africa. From the Fezzan in Libya to Tunisia and Algeria
there were and continue to be Afro-Maghribi-based forms and practioners of “Gnawa” musical
culture. While the history of these cultural forms and their particular relationship to slavery
remains unclear, durable and vague historical assumptions are maintained through a traditional
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generalized intellectual de-emphasis reflected in a lack of scholarship from which to address th
significant reality of human geographical blackness in the Maghrib.
Though widely known of and readily conceded to have an historical role, my initial
investigations uncovered little conceptual or historical clarity concerning Afro-Maghribi
contributions to North African history. Well beyond the scope of any single event, the vast
temporal and geographic history of the trans-Saharan trade networks entail essential features of
Afro-Maghribi related migrations. Furthermore, blackness across the longue durée of North
African history encompasses even more complex dynamics than the challenges of retracing and
assessing the historical migrations of West African slaves and their descendents in the region. Ithe longue durée of regional interaction and color, in addition to pre-Saharan population factors
are those of the Saharan world and its fringes, of which “haratin” communities within North
Africa comprise an important example.1 To be certain, multiple factors call for a more inclusive
and nuanced treatment of neglected and closely intertwined dimensions of North African histor
otherwise dominated by attention to Arab and Berber peoples, rendering an insufficient
recognition and reconstruction of this regional and inter-regional heritage.
As my continued survey of this problematic area made me cognizant of its daunting
breadth, I sought to establish relevant questions with which I could undertake manageable
research. My pursuit of severalras l’khite(the loose head of threads) in this process led me to
the pivotal historical context of slavery, and very specifically a focus upon the end of domestic
slavery in the city of Fes. In the early nineteen-nineties I began traveling to Morocco as a
merchandise buyer for a London-based instrument manufacturer. Summertime travel and work
1 For a concise summary of the historical problems raised by the term Haratin, see Rita Aouad-Badoual, “Esclavage et situation des “Noirs” au Maroc dans la première moitié du XXe siècle”in Les relations transsahariennes à l'époque contemporaine - un espace en constante mutation (Paris: Karthala, 2004).
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in several Moroccan locations gave me opportunities to pursue my interests in Gnawa music an
further my acquaintance with the country’s divergent socio-economic landscapes. Once during
lunch with a Professor from Meknes I accepted his invitation to visit Fes. That afternoon we
drove directly to the palatial Dar Mokri in the Fes medina. In retrospect, it is clear that my
entrance into the enormous, ornate, declining and outright empty interior implanted the space
within my larger curiosities. At the time I wondered how my observations of the power relatio
among domestic servants and the nouveau riche Moroccan elite of Rabat connected to the
interior surroundings of zelij work and architectural detail which evoked historical differences
and uncertainty for me. My slow walk throughout the rambling rooms of the long structureeventually translated into my questioning what the dynamics had been within slave owning Fas
households, how the Fasi elite and the domestic slaves and servants who worked within such
houses had lived their lives, and what changes their descendants had lived through. I came to
wonder what historical forces had swept through what clearly had been until recently a way of
life which confidently projected itself as fully developed, all encompassing and stable— What
happened to this internal world? How had this household functioned? Had slaves worked in the
household? Who were they and what were their experiences? Though at the outset such
questions seemed disparate from my Afro-Maghribi concerns, they nevertheless continued to
prove evocative and constructive points of return for approaching slavery in Morocco.
Several years later, with the generous support of a Fulbright-Hays doctoral dissertation
research award as well as a research grant from AIMS and various awards from Indiana
University’s history department, I began to fully operationalize my research interests. My
preliminary bouquet of proposed questions— stalwartly themed around furthering our
knowledge of Afro-Maghribi cultural production and the end of slavery— again forced my
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return to sorely needed foundational historical research. As I confronted the practical difficulti
and real complexities of reconstructing the end of domestic slavery in a single relatively small,
but truly dense urban location, Fes as a specific case study, posing great challenges yet offering
immense promise, was progressively settled upon and reckoned with. A schedule initially
budgeted for three months gathering data within Fes as one location among several others came
to require over two years of daily work.
An extended period of constant sustained efforts to track down archival and legal
documents eventually produced sources which were steadily relevant or even indispensable,
occasionally fascinating or even inspirational, and at times pierced into the heart of questions propelling my research. Ultimately however, informants and their shared oral histories made th
most meaningful personal and intellectual impact of all the features and experiences of this
doctoral research. Perseverance and good fortune helped me through the arduous process of
developing interested and competent contacts. Acquiring useful interviews grounded my
understanding and approach to an interconnection of relevant topics in surprising and evermore
realistic ways. My efforts to reconstruct the end of the social institution of domestic slavery an
the slow and generally unclear forms of related social change that occurred were repeatedly
refuted, refined, thrust into perspective and enriched by my slowly growing relationships and
greater access to oral histories reflecting intimate personal perceptions and experiences. As gre
as my initial attraction had been to sweeping, interdisciplinary and eventually comparative
scholarship, my certainty became even greater that advancement upon the kinds of research
questions which had long stirred and sustained my interests demanded highly original and
detailed foundational historical work.
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I hope that any readers of this study might recognize ways in which larger research
interests I continue to share have been channeled into the present treatment of particular and
worthy questions within twentieth-century Fasi and Moroccan history. It is also my hope that
this study serve as a contribution to areas deserving further painstaking research including the
reconstruction of slavery along with its end and aftermath in North Africa, a more
comprehensive twentieth-century history of Fes and Morocco, the development of Afro-
Maghribi historical and social scientific concerns, and diverse comparative possibilities. Along
with my nod to the custom of an author’s complete claim of responsibility for the doubtless
persistence of faults and shortcomings within their work, it must be duly acknowledged that fulcredit for this dissertation extends far beyond myself. In addition to the abovementioned
institutional sources of financial support, I acknowledge my lifelong appreciation to all the
friends, associates, contacts, family and strangers within and beyond academia who contributed
to the formation, undertaking and completion of this study.
Introductory Historical Background
For many readers some broad relevant historical background will be useful at the outset of
considering the original historical detail developed throughout this dissertation. Contemporary
Morocco occupies the most western lands of North Africa, bordering the Mediterranean sea,
Atlantic ocean, and Sahara desert in an immediate geographical proximity to Iberia. The
complex long-term overlap and interaction among peoples within this area is often glossed over
with vague imagery of a crossroads producing a cultural and human geographical mosaic.
Indeed there are multiple dimensions to consider. In the larger Mediterranean world of North
Africa prior to Muslim presence, the control of Mediterranean cities and coastal plains from
Alexandria to the Straits of Gibraltar historically changed hands many times among Africans,
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Middle Easterners and Europeans including Berbers, Phoenicians, Romans, Vandals, and
Byzantines. To the south, the Sahara was a well traveled “sea of sand” throughout and followin
the gradual desiccation of its prehistoric pasturelands which culminated around 2000 B.C.E. In
the first centuries C.E., the well-suited camel became extensively used for Saharan trade
transport allowing for caravans and oases marketplaces to link settlements and cities across
North Africa with those throughout the sahel (Arabic for ‘coast’) region stretched along the
southern end of the desert from present day Senegal bordering the Atlantic Ocean to Sudan (fro
the Arabic “bilad al-sudan” or “land of the blacks”) bordering the Red Sea.
A major organizing force within Moroccan history was initiated with the westwardMuslim expansion across North Africa. It is often noted that Islam moved westward across
North Africa at a remarkable pace, advancing into Spain by 711. A more inclusive description
takes into account that religious conversion and Arabization moved at a more gradual pace than
Islamic military and political control. Local non-Arab peoples were variously incorporated
throughout this expansion, the majority of which initially remained non-Muslim subjects. Fes
itself was founded in 789 by Middle-Eastern-Arab-in-exile Idris I, amid Arab military expansio
and Berber resistance and alliance, intermarriage and conflict. Though Arabization in North
Africa still continues to unfold in an historical patchwork of reciprocal adaptation, conformity
and contention, it can be broadly noted of this early period that sedentary coastal Christian
Berber peoples converted to Islam and adopted the Arabic language and Arab culture more
rapidly and thoroughly than traditionally resilient Berbers who were nomadic or lived in remote
mountainous areas. It should also be noted that in its first centuries Islam spread throughout
North Africa in very different forms. The Sunni caliphs of the Umayyad dynasty (C.E. 661-75
centered in Damascus, then relocated and continued from C.E. 755 to 1042 in Cordoba, Spain)
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and the ‘Abbasid dynasty (C.E.750-1258 centered in Baghdad) were challenged by Khariji
Muslims who rejected the Middle Eastern caliphate entirely and Shi’i Muslims who sought to
reformulate the rightful basis of Muslim authority and leadership. In the eighth century Khariji
refugees from the Middle East aligned themselves with Berbers who resisted Arab dominance
and founded small communities in North African mountains and Saharan oases. A network of
Khariji merchants traded extensively across the Sahara desert and along the Sahel regions of
West Africa, often introducing Islam through their commercial contacts. By the eighth and nint
centuries Muslim merchants from the Sahara were exposing and converting West Africans
through commercial interactions in the interregional trade in gold, slaves, salt, cloth, horses andother goods.
A relevant middle historical period of North and West African Islam was initiated by
Western Saharan Berbers. With the influences from the Islamic presence in regional commerci
centers, religious pilgrims returning from Mecca, and North African Islamic scholars, they
became highly organized around a strict adherence to the Maliki Islamic legal school and
founded the Almoravid empire (1042-1148) stretching from Mauritania to central Spain and int
western Algeria. However, unyielding Almoravid doctrines along with military controls were
challenged by another Berber initiated movement from southern Morocco, the Almohads (1148
1269). The Almohads briefly controlled the entirety of Muslim Spain, Tunisia, Algeria and
Morocco, promoting a broad and influential “Unitarian” understanding of Islam across the regio
which helped consolidate Sunni religious authority with strong local influences. By this time
period the Maliki legal school became the North African norm, and within societies of North
Africa, urban Islamic universities such as Al-Qarawiyyin in Fes, which were dedicated to the
study of Quranic scripture, Islamic law, the natural sciences, philosophy, history, and geography
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co-existed alongside Islamic sufi associations (tariqas) often centered around rural lodges
(zawiyas) and the shrines of patron saints, as well as the predominate popular cultural traditions
and beliefs entailing local, regional, and pan-Islamic rituals and celebrations.
During the periods of these empires and of subsequent Moroccan states, domestic slaver
was integral to the ordinary functioning of Moroccan elites and fell heavily upon enslaved dark
skinned and Sudanese-origin peasants. Though regional forms of “slavery” predated the Islam
presence in North and West Africa, being of a non-Muslim status and the stipulations of Islamic
law came to have considerable and enduring meaning within the reproduction and social
organization of the institution. Enslavement and slavery long continued alongside the Trans-Saharan transmission of values and knowledge. West African Sunni legal thinking adapted
strong influences from the same Maliki school predominate in North Africa, developing local
legal traditions which combined community involvement and customary officials with the
concepts and administration of Islamic law. By the sixteenth century hand-written books, often
on paper from North Africa, were greatly valued trade items, with rare works being more
expensive than the average price of a slave. In 1594 leading Timbuktu scholar Ahmad Baba w
captured by Moroccan troops who had invaded the region and was forced into exile in Morocco
for over a decade. Ironically Ahmad Baba himself was a great advocate against the enslavemen
of West Africans, arguing forcefully for the basis of their recognition and freedom as fellow
Muslims.
European-Moroccan involvements, both indirect and direct, define another complex and
extended layer of historical influence within Morocco. The geopolitical turns of the Reconquis
led to the migration of many Sephardi Jews from Portugal and Spain into Morocco, where they
rapidly established communities. Another byproduct of the European expansion of this era was
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the establishment of various Iberian coastal colonial footholds such as Ceuta and Mellila. Yet,
must be noted that despite the closeness to Europe, repeated military incursions remained of
limited impact. Rather, as experienced elsewhere, deepening Moroccan ties with and eventual
dependence upon expanding European economic interests led to the culmination of more
profound political consequences. When the current Alaouite monarchy consolidated political
control of the Moroccan state (Dar al-Makhzan) in the mid-seventeenth century with the initial
support of a black slave army (Abid El-Boukhari), trade with Europe remained restricted. By t
mid-eighteenth century commerce and finance had grown significantly, leading to the 1760
construction of the port city Mogador, and an overall increasing presence of commercial agentsand European consuls.
European imperial pressures became more dramatic over the course of the nineteenth
century. In 1830 when the French began decades of violent colonization in Algeria, the core of
Algerian self-defense was politically and militarily organized around a zawiya controlled by
‘Abd al-Qadir (d.1883). Official Alaouite support for the widely admired ‘Abd al-Qadir ended
following a military excursion from the French in1844 at the Battle of Isly, after which the
Moroccan state re-charted its lasting course of self-preservation. While French colonists worke
systematically for much of the nineteenth-century to disintegrate the political potential of
Algerian tariqas, they remained popular and often transnational networks. One such tariqa, the
Tijaniyya, was founded by Ahmad al-Tijani (d.1815) of the western Algerian Sahara and
extended an influence far across West Africa; Al-Tijani was buried in Fes at what continues to b
a major center for pilgrimage from Tijaniyya Muslims.
Amid decades of Spanish, French and eventually German efforts to extend their
influences within Morocco, Alaouite monarchs preserved their political independence into the
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twentieth century. The Dar al-Makhzan responded to combined external and internal pressures
including fears of disgruntle Berber peoples, through costly attempts to modernize and reform
the military and economy while not altering the socio-political and religious basis of their powe
within Morocco. In this context of limited reforms, there was no intension to dismantle the
ruling elite’s basis or symbols of power, and the slave trade and institution continued
unencumbered within Morocco. When economic and military dependence led to a formal
Protectorate relationship in 1912 with the lion’s share of Morocco falling under French authorit
and a far smaller area ceded to Spain, domestic slavery remained an acknowledged and routine
feature of Fasi life.Alongside the lofted principals of the French Revolution which led to the abolition of
slavery in 1794, nineteenth France remained divided and often officially accommodated slavery
This is reflected in the legal reinstitution of slavery in 1802, followed decades later by the legal
emancipation of slaves in French colonies in 1848. To be certain French colonial expansion in
North and West Africa in the nineteenth century did not axiomatically end or even substantially
challenge slavery. In fact, in the nineteenth century and throughout the first decades of Europe
colonial ruleincreasing numbers of slaves labored within West Africa to produce the resources
and cash crops sought by industrial European powers that condemned though vastly expanded
the use of slave labor. Prior to the Protectorate, Moroccan merchants principally from Fes, took
advantage of expanded French controls within the Senegal River and Niger Valley to establish
coastal West African business networks. These limited channels of expanded North and West
African regional interconnections coincided with the late nineteenth century increase in slave
sales within Moroccan markets. Though it was a pillar of rationalization within the mission
civilisatrice and the Algeciras Conference (1906) referred to the need to end slavery within
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Morocco, French colonial policies and practices of accommodating Islam and aligning with
elites fostered and supported an operational acceptance of domestic slavery.
The unheralded and dateless end of domestic slavery in Fes marks a major shift in
modern Moroccan history, one which remains to be fully conceptualized and recorded. Despite
historical assumptions and historiographic conventions, the end of this social institution was no
the direct legal byproduct of a colonial tutelage. In 1956 the Moroccan monarchy and the
national economic elite emerged reformulated from Protectorate colonialism with a stronger,
more centralized state and basis of economic power than prior. Within and surrounding the dee
continuities of power relations and identities comprising domestic slavery, there was also anirrevocably reinvented world— there amid multiple shifting dimensions of Moroccan social
change domestic slavery ended as an institution. In recent decades important efforts have been
made to overcome the tendency of Moroccan historiography to uncritically reflect elite Arab
historical dominance. Despite the a notable entrance of histories dedicated to emphasizing
Moroccan Jews, Berbers, women and peasants, as mentioned, many complex and important
contexts of the Moroccan past have yet to be historically synthesized and written. What follow
is an effort in that direction.
Questions, Approaches and Relevant Literature
The central question of this study—how did domestic slavery end in Fes?, has been
approached through treating numerous related themes of inquiry including how did the
Moroccan encounter with Protectorate colonialism influence this social institution?, how were
forms of social, economic and legal change implicated in this historical shift?,andhow was the
end of domestic slavery experienced by slaves and their children? In turn each of these themes
has entailed many further questions addressed and developed throughout the chapters of this
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dissertation, which are outlined below. In order to further clarify the significance of the central
and subsidiary directions undertaken within this research, as well as how they have been
approached, it is useful to review relevant literature.
Amid Morocco’s overlap of historiographic worlds— including African, Arab, Berber,
Mediterranean, Muslim, and Saharan—the Atlantic border provides an ironic reminder of the
often arbitrary conceptual emphases and geographic practices among which regional and world
historical paradigms develop and function. Recent decades of growth in the historiography
addressing slavery and the African diaspora have been dominated by literature deemed to
comprise an Atlantic system or an Atlantic world, yet North African slavery and its relatedcontexts have remained scarcely integrated or investigated.2 In part this intellectual tendency
2 This underrepresentation is noted in Bernard Lewis’ Race and Slavery in the Middle East: an Historical Enquiry (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), which organized and narrated a pioneering aggregate of primary sources within limited and problematic assumptions tied to agrandiose scope and a full disengagement from historical constituencies. John Hunwick’swritings have brought similarly rigorous textual attention, contributing translations of relevanttexts focused on Islamic Africa. Hunwick has repeatedly asserted the import of color and slavein North Africa and published the call for further study of these themes within North Africanhistory, most recently in a co-edited compilation of sources reflecting the “Mediterranean landsof Islam”. Yet Hunwick’s scholarship has focused neither on relevant in-depth case studies norupon developing the carefully grounded historical reconstruction and interpretation of theseconcerns. See “Black Africans in the Mediterranean World: Introduction to a Neglected Aspecof the African Diaspora,” in Elizabeth Savage ed.,the Human Commodity: Perspectives on theTrans-Saharan Slave Trade (London: Frank Cass, 1992), “Islamic Law and Polemics over Raceand Slavery in North and West Africa (16th-19th Century)” in Shaun E. Marmon ed.Slavery inthe Islamic Middle East (Princeton: Markus Wiener Publishers, 1999), and John Hunwick andEve Troutt Powell eds.The African Diaspora in the Mediterranean Lands of Islam(Princeton, NJ: Markus Wiener Publishers, 2002). Indeed, a key point about the state of such broadlyrelevant scholarship is that the prospering reiteration that, “(f)or every gallon of ink that has beespilt on the trans-Atlantic slave trade and its consequences, only one very small drop has beenspent on the study of the forced migration of black Africans into the Mediterranean world ofIslam,” (Hunwick 2002, p.ix), has itself remained couched among generalized questions andapproaches. The lack of in-depth case studies has been consistently accompanied by a strongtacit or direct tendency toward a sweeping frame of reference and/or a recurrent dominantorganizational feature which strives to examine and illuminate an assumed essentially “Islamicslavery”. The relevance of this point has been recognized in a self-reflexive manner by William
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was an unconscious or uncritical bequest of modern era European geopolitical and racial
approaches to slavery and sub- versus supra- Saharan Africa. Despite the fact that much of West
Africa shares greater direct historical connections and commonalities with the Kingdom of
Morocco than the Kingdom of Lesotho, ideological projections and excessive divisions have
rendered the rich intersections, multiplicities and contingencies of North African history
unnecessarily disconnected and betwixt and between. Throughout long periods of the expandin
and contracting reach of empires, systems of belief, and trade networks, slavery formed a
charged and complicated area of historical relations among and between North and West Africa
Our fuller foundational understanding of such interactions and the character of their contexts anconsequences requires further specific reconstructions, resources and collaborative scholarly
interests needed for example, to produce a Braudelian quality of historiographic synthesis for th
Saharan world.3 While denoting grand requests, colossal authorities and teaming masses of
scholars might also exceed the limitations of Braudel and tendencies within large-brush-rendere
regional historical understandings through further establishing the undeniable basis of an
expanded representation of North African history within Mediterranean and early modern
Gervase Clarence-Smith who recently noted in the Envoi to his sweeping Islam and the Abolitionof Slavery (India: Oxford University Press, 2006), “(d)eeper studies of religious attitudes towardservitude and abolition are urgently needed, because the subject has generated so much vulgar polemic,” (p.233). In fact, serious case studies related to slavery, its end and aftermath in theArab and Islamic world have been slow to emerge amid the burgeoning early twenty-firstcentury vested political and military interests in Islam. Perhaps a recent book by Ehud Toledananticipates a shift in its effort to engage concerns of contemporary scholars working on slaverywithin the history of Muslim communities through bringing detail and nuanced focus to the largterrain of nineteenth-century Ottoman slavery intent to recover “voice”, As if Silent and Absent: Bonds of Enslavement in the Islamic Middle East (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007).3 Drawing heavily on British archival sources John Wright has produced an ambitiouscontribution, seeThe Trans-Saharan Slave Trade(London: Routledge, 2007). For a discussionuseful for comparing the development of the field relative to the Indian Ocean world see GwynCampbell,The Structure of Slavery in Indian Ocean Africa and Asia (London: Frank Cass,2004).
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Atlantic worlds. Beyond representing a sheer fantastic wish list, these vast and at times comple
lacuni, areas of de-emphasis, and ambiguous boundaries form the world historical backdrop
against which the present study joins the relatively few historical studies of slavery in Morocco
Proceeding from chronological and thematic interests periodized by the seventh-century
Islamic presence in North Africa onward we begin with the work of Fasi historian Abdelilah
Benmlih. Benmlih’s pioneering doctoral research drew very heavily upon Islamic law in a fairl
straightforward manner to examine slavery in North Africa and Andalusia, particularly during
the eleventh to thirteenth-century period of the Almoravid dynasty, and became the basis of thre
recent publications in Arabic.4
His first book provides a relatively brief overview of socialhistorical conditions of slavery within the Almoravid Empire. His second book is a similar
survey, with a somewhat widened period and themes, and his most recent related publication is
an extension of themes based upon his dissertation research. Benmlih’s interpretative
approaches have steadily fused a range of concerns and insights culled from medievalist
scholarship in Europe and the Arab world with the broader conceptual and geographical studies
of slavery. For example, his interest in Charles Verlinden’s historical reconstruction of slavery
within Europe is paired with gleanings from Claude Meillasoux’s anthropology of slavery based
in West Africa. His scholarly contributions to expanding the study of Moroccan and North
African slavery would be greatly complimented by a dialogue of further related study of this
time period as well as works which bridge the significant gaps prior and following his period of
interest.
4 Abdelilah Benmlih,Zahirat al-riqq fi al-Gharb al-Islami, (Rabat, Morocco: Manshurat al-Zaman, 2002), Al-Istirqaq fi al-gharb al-Islami bayna al-harb wa-al-tijarah (Oujda, Morocco:Jami‘at Muhammad al-Awwal, Kulliyat al-Adab wa-al-‘Ulum al-Insaniyah, 2003), Al-Riqq fibilad al-Maghrib wa-al-Andalus (Beirut, Lebanon: Mu’assasat al-Intishar al-‘Arabi, 2004).
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Allen Meyers’ doctoral research on the ‘Abid al-Bukhari produced another highly
innovative and provocative contribution to an underrepresented related area of study— military
slavery in Morocco.5 Meyer’s examination of the history of Moulay Isma’il’s 'Abid al-Bukhari
troops, formed in the later part of the seventeenth-century and remaining directly consequential
for the Maghzan until the mid-eighteenth-century, entails an important attention to ethnicity.
Using a core of evidence from Makhzan sources he establishes convincingly that these “black
troops” were enslaved from within Morocco, drawn particularly from haratin communities,
overturning assumptions that such slaves were Sudanese born.6 Along with ethnicity and color
within Moroccan history, his work also attempts to contextualize slave soldiers as a significantvariable within larger Moroccan political contexts during the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries.
Several scholars deserve mention for their attention to sources reflecting the historical
contention stirred amongst Islamic religious authorities concerning Moroccan enslavement.
Arabist John Hunwick has examined in detail and published translations of broadly relevant
primary sources, for example concerning Ahmed Baba’s forced sojourn, and produced writings
which reflect a mixture of awareness, interest and caution concerning color and slavery in North
5 Allan R. Meyers "The 'Abid 'L Buhari: Slave Soldiers and Statecraft in Morocco,"(Unpublished Ph.D. Dissertation, Cornell University, 1974). Also see “Class, Ethnicity, andSlavery: The Origins of the Moroccan 'Abid,”The International Journal of African HistoricalStudies, (Vol. 10, No. 3. 1977), “Slave Soldiers and State Politics in Early 'Alawi Morocco, 1668 – 1727,”The International Journal of African Historical Studies, (Vol. 16, No. 1. 1983).6 Meyers analyzes European sources to suggest that 18th and 19th century writers embellishedearlier sources and provide our first record of the claim that the slaves of the Moroccan ‘Abidarmy were originally “Bambareens” or from the “Coasts of Guinea”. Such an embellishmentwould coincide with these and other terms and categories circulating within the trans-Atlanticsystem. 1977 (p.430-431). Elsewhere (2002) I have expanded upon this line of interpretation positing “Bambara” as an historical continuum of varied identities and identifications inMorocco concerning the Gnawa.
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African history.7 Aziz Abdalla Batrán, wrote an essay in John Ralph Willis’Slaves and Slavery
in Muslim Africa which addresses the issues confronting the ulama and haratin in Fes during the
Moulay Isma’il period.8 More recently Moroccan-born American Professor Chouki El Hamel
has added awareness to these themes and drawn upon sources reflecting the religious debates a
the awkward social and legal status of the haratin during this time period and beyond.9 Another
notable feature of El Hamel’s ongoing research interests and interpretive orientation is the effor
to illuminate and widen connections among interest areas of color and social stratification in
Moroccan history through engagement with current dialogues within the African diaspora
literature. This has brought attention to Moroccan and North African experiences of “internaldiaspora” within the Atlantic-centered diaspora literature.10
The nineteenth-century has received the most well-known treatment of Moroccan slaver
in Mohamed Ennaji’sSoldats, Domestiques et Concubines.11 Ennaji’s pioneering contribution
draws upon a vast and rich selection of Moroccan and European archival materials, including
those gathered from his rural sociological background in collaboration with seminal scholar Pau
Pascon (a Fes-born Frenchman who adopted Moroccan nationality after Independence). The
central feature of the study is Ennaji’s effort to broadly survey how slaves were a part of
7 See 1.8 "The 'Ulamá of Fas, Mulay Isma'il, and the Issue of the Haratin of Fas," in John Ralph Willis,ed.,Slaves and Slavery in Muslim Africa, Vol.I: Islam and the Ideology of Enslavement ,(London: Frank Cass, 1985) pp.125-59.9 “`Race’, Slavery and Islam in the Maghrebi Mediterranean Thought. The Question of the Haratinin Morocco” in Journal of North African Studies (London: Frank Cass, Vol. 7, No. 3,2002) pp.29-52.10 Michael Gomez’s recently included Chouki El Hamel’s essay “Blacks and slavery inMorocco: the question of the Haratin at the end of the seventeenth century” in his edited volum Diasporic Africa: a Reader (New York: New York University Press, 2006) thus stretching thedominant attentions of African Diaspora studies.11 Mohammed Ennaji,Soldats, Domestiques et Concubines: l'esclavage au Maroc au XIXe siècle (Casablanca, Maroc: Editions EDDIF, 1994).
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nineteenth-century Moroccan life, noting a wide range of occupations. Although the work is
ostensibly about soldiers, servants and concubines, rural workers are also given considerable
mention. Numerous estates with dozens of slaves and several estates with hundreds are noted,
including the house of Iligh, near Tiznit in southern Morocco where seven-hundred slave
households were claimed by the family.12 In fact it is crucial to note of the period he covers, a
remarkable rise in world historical terms of the overall volume of slaves sold in Moroccan
markets in the early 1890's exceeded six thousand slaves annually, as corroborated by urban tax
records.13
This dissertation shares principal concerns with Ennaji’s work, but differs repeatedly inapproach, leading to particular differences in emphasis and interpretation. Ennaji’s
interpretations are consistently driven by an interest in contextualizing and illustrating the
variations of slavery throughout Morocco. In one example of an area of methodological and
interpretive difference, Ennaji shows how concubines have been treated well– “(m)any of these
women enjoyed love, admiration, and the highest consideration in their master’s houses.”14 This
enduring generalized image will be challenged and detailed in this study. In another theme in
which the present study differs in emphasis, the violence of slavery is situated amid broader
12 Ennaji, 1994 p.8. It should be noted that in addition to domestic labor in this region, anenduring plantation system which once produced sugar through slave labor was located insouthern Morocco. See Paul Berthier,Un Episode de L’Histoire de la Canne a Sucre: Les Anciennes Sucreries du Maroc et leurs Reseaux Hydrauliques. Etude Archeologique etd'Histoire Economique. (Rabat: Imprimeries Françaises et Marocaines, 1966). Paul Lovejoyrightly suggests several regions where slavery appears to be have been linked to overall levels o production in surveying “the Frontiers of Islam, 1400-1600,” pointing to the need for furtherevidence. SeeTransformations in Slavery: A History of Slavery in Africa (Second Edition)(U.S.A.: Cambridge University Press, 2000) p.24.13 See Daniel Schroeter, "Slave Markets and Slavery in Moroccan Urban Society," inSlaveryand Abolition: The Human Commodity. Perspectives on the Trans-Saharan Slave Trade, edited by Elizabeth Savage, (London: Frank Cass & Co. 1992).14 Ennaji, 1994 p.25. Here he also notes in passing the extreme image of slaves having theirhands kissed, which risks distorting the accuracy of his survey.
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social forms of abuse. As suggested, “…in 19th c. Morocco violence spared neither slave nor
free… it was everywhere… husbands mistreated wives, landlords –sharecroppers and bosses
their employees.”15 This line of argument culminates in the conceptualization that,
…in nineteenth-century Morocco, no sharp line divided freedom and slavery. A fine setof gradations marked the continuum running from one to the other even if theytheoretically remained polar opposites.16
This perspective is succinctly echoed through his sweeping generalization that “liberty had its
slavish side.”17 Interestingly, Ennaji also summarily deemphasizes the overall historical
significance of color in Moroccan slavery.18 Though it strongly seems that these interpretive
lines of emphasis are intended to distinguish the specific dynamics of Moroccan slavery fromdominant models of the Atlantic world, Ennaji does not directly engage this literature or fully
clarify an orientation. In the present case study of slavery within Morocco there has also been
intention to directly develop a sustained engagement with the Atlantic literature, which has bee
a function of the development of an analysis of this historical context based upon its own terms
even so, the evidence and contexts considered in this research repeatedly resulted in analytical
differences. Where Ennaji works through a panorama of examples to confirm variations, a maj
feature of this study is its effort to engage variation in order to describe dominant patterns and
experiences. An example of the consequences of Ennaji’s emphasis upon extreme
contextualization, or what is perhaps best understood as a deployment of relativity within his
analysis, he asserts a blanket rejection to any possibility of ‘primitive rebels’ or ‘organic
intellectuals’ among the former slaves turned bandits. He argues in fact that many times master
can ‘seem almost unfortunate,’ and reads bandit actions as personal matters,
15 Ibid. pp.28- 30.16 Ibid. p.81.17 Ibid. p.57.18 Ibid.p.60.
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It would be difficult to argue that all these individuals were really victims of society,avenging the humiliation of their condition through crime, since neither poverty norconsciousness of the inhumanity of their status grounded their career choice. Rather,they were men at arms, accustomed to power and used to looking down on the masseswith the parvenu arrogance of the servant.19
The present study has approached the “arrogance of the servant” as a point of entry and inquiry
not as a conclusive distinction. Ennaji’s study represents a decisive— though in some ways
inchoate— turning point with major limitations regarding the fully detailed, clear historical
reconstruction of slavery and slave’s lives within nineteenth-century Morocco. His contextual
approach often confronts and complicates reductive images and assumptions surrounding varie
forms and contexts of slavery throughout Morocco. However, his orientation is combined witha broad survey approach, sparse sustain attention to relevant processes of historical change, and
deliberate commitment to outlining slave’s roles in society and how slaves were understood by
non-slaves while not pursuing documentation and interpretations of nineteenth-century
Moroccan slave’s experiences and perspectives, all of which represent areas of limitation.
Several historians have researched and addressed slavery in twentieth-century Morocco,
offering texts which have served as a reference point.20 Moroccan scholar Rita (Ghita) Aouad-
Badoual’s graduate work in France included archival work in Aix-en-Provence and Nantes,
Morocco and Mali to produce a Memoire de Maitrise, on Moroccan slavery between 1880-1922
and a dissertation on French colonization and Moroccan-West African relations. She has
published two important though brief essays outlining themes of the end of slavery in Morocco
The first of these brings particular attention to the role of the Protectorate, while the more recen
represents widened interests including a cautious engagement with the historical consciousness
19 Ibid p.44.20 Edouard Michaux-Bellaire, “L’esclavage au Maroc.” in Revue du Monde Musulman, VolumeIX, Paris: Éditions E. Leroux, 1910.
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of color in Morocco.21 Aouad-Badoual’s Moroccan-wide and often tentative interpretations have
increasingly found relevance in the questions posed within the wider literature concerning
slavery, and in articulating questions and areas of inquiry for further research. Several features
of her work, particularly her provocative essays have been expanded upon in this dissertation.
American Madia Thompson has represented her extensive doctoral research drawing upon
interviews and archival work related to slavery in Southern Morocco in a dissertation ostensibly
framed by “modernization” within the colonial period and attempting to address a complex
regional context of rural social transformations including the end of slavery.22 Sudan born
American Professor Ahmed Alawad Sikainga has published a brief article representing hisresearch into Moroccan legal archive sources concerning the end of the domestic slavery
nationally.23 Like Aouad-Badoual’s work his piece attests to the very gradual changes in slavery
in Morocco that occurred during and following the Protectorate. A distinguishing feature of hi
piece— which has been expanded upon here— is his attempt to critically consider slave and
former slave women’s expressions of historical agency in representing their own legal interests
Canadian Ann McDougall has conducted oral historical research in southern Morocco and
published a path breaking article which examines identity and very personal meanings within th
transformations entailed beyond slavery in the postcolonial era.24 An overlap of provocative
21 Ghita Aouad, “L’esclavage Tarid Au Maroc Sous Le Protectorat,” Revue Maroc-Europe : Histoire, Economies, Societes, vol.1 (Rabat, Maroc: 1991), Rita Aouad-Badoual, (Paris:Karthala, 2004).22 Madia Thompson, "Modernization, Slavery, and the Transformation of Social Hierarchy inSouthwestern Morocco, 1912-56." (Unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, Boston University, 2005).23 Ahmed Alawad Sikainga, “Slavery and Jurisprudence in Morocco,”Slavery & Abolition (19(2), 1998) pp.57-72.24 E. Ann McDougall, “A Sense of Self: The Life of Fatma Barka”Canadian Journal of AfricanStudies / Revue Canadienne des Études Africaines, (Vol. 32, No. 2, 1998) pp.285-315.
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issues which McDougall has addressed repeatedly surfaced and developed through the ongoing
oral histories collected and analyzed in this study.
The relative paucity of literature addressing slavery in Morocco is underscored by the
vast and often rich literature concerning numerous other variously related contexts, as is given a
brief outline here. Throughout the research process and during the analysis and writing, such
works, however flawed, proved entirely invaluable for developing a thorough historical
framework with which to organize the gathering and interrogation of evidence. Before
considering wider areas of Moroccan scholarship and thematically relevant studies of slavery
including other locations, we first turn to pre-Protectorate and Protectorate era predominatelyFrench writings focusing on Fes. As Edmund Burke has recently noted of francophone North
African intellectual history, “In 1900, France possessed little reliable ethnographic knowledge
about Morocco other than elite gossip and anecdotal details. Thirty years later, an extensive
colonial archive on Moroccan society had been compiled.”25 He rightly interprets that in the
process there was an invention or projection of “traditional Morocco” which had a pervasive
influence upon Protectorate era attitudes and the dialogical construction of a political and social
status quo, which in turn entailed Moroccan domestic slavery. Orientalist French scholars’
dominant and calculated preoccupations with Islam, the elite, and amassing insights into politic
and economic life facilitated a matter of fact acceptance of domestic slavery as an enduring and
embedded feature of the Moroccan social order. Joining the widening, ongoing stream of
traveler’s accounts were the academic writings to emerge from the 1903 founding of the Missio
25 Edmund Burke III, “The Creation of the Moroccan Colonial Archive, 1880-1930,” History and Anthropology, (Volume 18, Issue 1 March 2007) p.1. For an earlier representation of some ofthese ideas see Edmund Burke III, “The Image of the Moroccan State in French EthnologicalLiterature: A New Look at the Origin of Lyautey’s Berber Policy.” in Arabs and Berbers, ed.Ernest Gellner and Charles Micaud (Lexington, Massachusetts: Lexington Books, 1972).
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scientifique du Maroc, the Archives marocaines (1904), and the Revue du monde musulman
(1906), within which Fes became a focal site for varied European intellectual interests, resonan
across areas of mutual overlap among scholars, policy makers and inquisitive entrepreneurs.
Late nineteenth and early twentieth-century English and French pre-Protectorate era
travel writings and scholarship concerning Fes anticipated and shaped how slavery within Fes
and across Morocco would be approached, understood, responded to and represented in
specialized and popular writings of the Protectorate era.26 Certainly from the time of Pierre
Loti’s highly descriptive account in Au Maroc (1890), recurrent orientalist attitudes toward
slavery in Fes can be found, appearing similarly in Eugène Aubin’s Le Maroc d’aujourd’hui (1904) and Gabriel Veyre’s Au Maroc. Dans l’intimite du Sultan (1905).27 To the extent to
which travel writings were to remain distinct from the increased presence of systematic
scholarship such as undertaken by Edouard Micheaux-Bellaire, a shared feature can be found in
that any expected impulses toward an abolitionist condemnation of domestic slavery were mute
by the greater force and proximity of both general political concerns and specific ethnographic
details.28 It has been succinctly noted that, “By 1912 the picture was all but complete: thereafter
the literature largely fills in the blanks, adding detail and colour, rather than developing new
categories of analysis.”29 Thus in the heart of Protectorate era the brothers Jerôme and Jean
Tharaud’s extended period of observations in Fes ou les bourgeois de l’Islam produced
26 See for example P. D. Trotter,Our Mission to the Court of Morocco in 1880 under Sir John Drummond Hay (Edinburgh, 1881) and Stephen Bonsal, Morocco as it is. With an Account of SirCharles Euan Smith’s Recent Mission to Fez(London: Allen, 1893).27 Pierre Loti, Au Maroc (Paris: Calmann-Levy, 1890), Eugène Aubin, Le Maroc d’aujourd’hui (Paris : A. Colin, 1904), Gabriel Veyre Au Maroc. Dans l’intimite du Sultan (Paris: LibrarieUniverselle, 1905).28 See for example Edouard Micheaux-Bellaire, Description de la Ville de Fès (Paris: Leroux,1907).29 Edmund Burke III, “Fes, the Setting Sun of Islam: a Study of the Politics of ColonialEthnography,” Maghreb Review (Vol.2 IV, 1977).
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extensive, matter of fact, even cynical passages about the centrality of domestic slavery.30
Likewise, slavery is again observed repeatedly from the vantage of a selective relativism in wha
still remains the single most important and rigorous effort of Fasi history and urban studies—
Fes avant le Protetorate was defended at the Sorbonne in 1949 by Roger Le Tourneau, some
four years after having joined the Centre des Hautes Etudes d’Administration Musulmane as an
administrator and researcher.31 A capstone to this tradition came after independence with the
German scholar Titus Burckhardt’s Fes, Stadt des Islama work which marshaled an even greater
orientalist and ahistorical gilding of the medina, resonant within the ongoing campaign for the
preservation of the Fes and its traditions,Historically, slavery can be explained by the law of war of nomadic and semi-nomadic people, for whom it was not possible to keep prisoners in camps. When the prisonerswere not ransomed by their relatives, they remained slaves of their captors until theycould redeem themselves by their own work, or until their master accorded them theirfreedom, an act which the Koran and the sunna declare to be particularly pleasing to Godand which constitutes an expiatory sacrifice for a multitude of sins of omission. It wasonly later, with the development of city culture that the obtaining of slaves in BlackAfrica became an end in itself, while the struggle for the propagation of the faith servedas a pretext. Since, however, the Islamic perspective does not permit the despising of anrace, slavery in Islamic countries never assumed the brutal character which it had inancient Rome and, in the nineteenth century, in the southern states of America. The slavwas never considered as a mere ‘object’; if he were treated unjustly, he could ask the judge to order his master to sell him. As a human being, he had a right to respect; the facthat he was not free, did not itself contradict his humanity, since all men are the ‘slaves oGod’.32
This approach was an effective apology for full resignation from and thorough disengagement
with ongoing historical realities and lives, propagating a profound ignorance of and
disconnection from actual lived turbulent contemporary historical realities, deemed far less real
30 Jerôme & Jean Tharaud, Fez,Ou les Bourgeois de l’Islam (Paris: Librairie Plon, 1930).31 Roger Le Tourneau, Fes Avant le Protectorat: Etude Economique et Sociale d'une Ville del'Occident Musulman (Casablanca: SMLE, 1949).32 Titus Burckhardt, Fes, Stadt des Islam (Olten and Freiburg-im-Breisgau: Urs Graf Verlag,1960), quoted from William Stoddart trans. Fez: City of Islam (Cambridge, U.K.England: Islamic Texts Society, 1992) p.106.
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or valuable than the pursuit of grand “traditions”. The lasting intensity of the historical force o
orientalist mystifications is registered through such literary and academic efforts in which
slavery was repeatedly obscured and rationalized while being plainly acknowledged.
Other Moroccanist urban and rural studies concerned with socio-economic changes in
various locations leading up to and during the colonial era have specifically informed the lines
inquiry taken here concerning European involvements. Daniel Schroeter has provided a detaile
study of Essaouira covering four decades of the forces of nineteenth-century European expansi
with careful attention to the roles of Jewish merchants.33 Kenneth Brown’s study of the former
crafts center of Sale was innovative in its tracing the forces of change and perseverance among both formal social and economic structures and identifiably distinct patterns of social
relationships throughout the nineteenth-century until the watershed Berber Dahir of 1930.34
Stacy Holden has advanced an important dissertation emphasizing issues of shifting socio-
economic formations and negotiations of power and tradition between Fasi tradesmen and the
monarchy, also considering the late nineteenth and early twentieth-century.35 Other scholarship
examining Protectorate urban development have proved highly informative. Yvette Katan has
studied the northern crossroads of Oujda specifically probing how its social formations were
recast during the Protectorate period.36 Janet Abu-lughod’s deeply penetrating and standard
setting work Rabat: Urban Apartheid in Moroccodocuments the politics of urban planning and
33 Daniel J. Schroeter, Merchants of Essaouira: Urban Society and Imperialism in Southwestern Morocco, 1844-1886(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987).34 Kenneth L. Brown, People of Sale: Tradition and Change in a Morocco City 1830-1930 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1976).35 Stacy Holden, “Modernizing a Moroccan Medina: Commercial and Technological Innovationat the Workplace of Millers and Butchers in Fez, 1878-1937,” (Unpublished Ph.D. dissertation,Boston University, 2005).36 Yvette Katan,Oujda, une ville Frontière du Maroc (1907-1956): Musulmans, Juifs etChrétiens en milieu colonial . (Paris: Histoire et Perspectives Méditerranéennes. Editions L’Harmattan, 1990).
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development. Though her study examines colonial era transformations, her analysis so clearly
unveiled the ramifications of urban power relations so as to have undeniable significance for th
post-colonial Moroccan elite.37 Andre Adam sheds light upon Casablanca’s marginality prior to
the early twentieth-century, underscoring that contemporary Casablanca is inseparable from the
protectorate and Moroccan proletarianization.38 Such works aided in formulating an informed
examination of the multiple, complex dimensions of twentieth-century Moroccan urban
historical changes Fasis lived through.
Often directly and nearly always indirectly tied with urban transformations within
Morocco, many very outstanding rural cases studies have greatly increased our knowledge ofregional experiences and national-scale historical reconstructions. Several works have been
influential for connecting processes of urban change with larger regional and national forces. I
southern Morocco Protectorate era scholar Robert Montagne produced an influential, detailed
examination of socio-cultural contexts through which political power underwent
transformations.39 Paul Pascon also offered key contributions to the study of Moroccan
peasantry, with remarkable insight into the Haouz region.40 David M. Hart was another
exceptional scholar of rural Morocco, setting a significant standard with his rigorous analysis an
37 Janet L. Abu-Lughod, Rabat: Urban Apartheid in Morocco (Princeton, N.J.: PrincetonUniversity Press, 1980).38 Adam, André, Histoire de Casablanca, des origines à 1914 (Aix-en-Provence, France: Gap,Éditions Ophrys, 1968). For a very different analysis of the city see Susan Ossman, PicturingCasablanca: Portraits of Power in a Modern City(Berkeley: University of California Press,1994). Also see Hassan Radoine, “An Encompassing Madina: Toward New Definition of City Morocco,” (Unpublished Ph.D. Dissertation, University of Pennsylvania, 2006).39 Robert Montagne,
(Groupe Chleuh) (Paris: F. Alcan, 1930).40 Paul Pascon and Mohammed Ennaji, Les paysans sans terre au Maroc (Casablanca, Maroc:Editions Toubkal, 1986), also see Paul Pascon, Ed. John Hall, Trans. C. Edwin Vaughan andVeronique Ingman,Capitalism and Agriculture in the Haouz of Marrakesh (U.S.A.: Routledge:1986).
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ethnographical research examining Rifi and Southern Moroccan culture and history.41 Directly
focused on the national scope, Will Swearingen’s study of the history of water access, irrigation
and dam construction is particularly exciting due its interest in the continuities from the
Protectorate developmental policies to the first decades of independent Morocco.42 The temporal
focus of this study investigates a similar periodization spanning from the introduction of the
Protectorate era to the first decades following independence.
Acceptable surveys of Moroccan power relations broadly conceived, and their historical
changes within the twentieth-century, have been a major challenge for Moroccanist scholarship
within history and social sciences. Two major historigraphical reference points have been provided by Abdallah Laroui and Jamil Abun-Nasr, both of whom are occupied with much
longer-term historical transformations.43 Laroui proposed challenging interpretations about the
nature of synthesis among Morocco’s historical encounters with colonial forces, and provided a
very suggestive perspective for periodizing Moroccan nationalism within the nineteenth-century
Perhaps balking at conceptual directions represented by Laroui’s scholarship for being an overl
Cartesian pursuit, by contrast Abun-Nasr stresses an entirely empirical, detailed approach
spanning across North Africa. In addition to their shared emphasis upon the state, there are
several highly notable complimentary studies to the extent of either scholar’s treatment of
twentieth-century history and the Protectorate period. Richly anecdotal and at times scathing o
41 David M. Hart,The Aith Waryaghar of the Moroccan Rif: an Ethnography and History (Tucson: Published for the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, Universityof Arizona Press, 1976),The Ait 'Atta of Southern Morocco: Daily Life & Recent History (Cambridge, U.K.: Middle East & North African Studies Press, 1984).42 Will D. Swearingen, Moroccan Mirages: Agricultural Dreams and Deceptions, 1912-1986 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1987).43 Abdallah Laroui, trans. Ralph Manheim,The History of the Maghrib: an Interpretive Essay (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970, Jamil Abun-Nasr, A History of the Maghrib in the Islamic Period (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987).
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French colonialism, Jacques Berque’s classic study of the interwar period is intimately well
informed about socio-political currents and shifts across the sweep of the Maghrib.44 Albert
Ayache contributed foundational studies of Moroccan labor history, and numerous scholars hav
offered major works on Moroccan nationalism.45 More recently, indispensible works by Daniel
Rivet and C.R. Pennell each fuse their respective impressive archival experiences into
subsequent surveys, both of which strive toward a synthesis of a vast range of secondary source
in an effort to further assemble and clarify challenging general features of modern Moroccan
historical transformations.46 While Rivet’s research focused initially on documenting and
interpreting with intense detail the historical role Resident-General Lyautey played withinProtectorate history, and followed with a thematically organized survey rich in interpretive
suggestions; Pennell initially focused upon the complex historical implications of a nationalist
movement and war in the Rif and followed with a remarkably lucid chronologically organized
survey. Though both historians concentrate upon political history they are fairly successful at
attempting to offer consistent wider insights into Moroccan social and cultural changes.
Adding to the disciplinary concerns of history many scholarly works have been
provocative for approaching power relations within the end of slavery in Fes and larger
Moroccan history. John Waterbury’s classic study of the Moroccan elite remains dated yet not
fully superseded, and contains many remarkable historical insights into the national role played
44 Jacques Berque, Le Maghreb Entre Deux Guerres (Paris: Ed. du Seuil, 1962).45 See Albert Ayache, Le Mouvement Syndical au Maroc (Paris: L'Harmattan, 1982), CharlesJulien, Le Maroc Face aux Imperialisms: 1415-1956 (Paris: Editions J.A. 1978), John P.Halstead, Rebirth of a Nation: the Origins and Rise of Moroccan nationalism, 1912-1944.(Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1967).46 Daniel Rivet, Le Maroc de Lyautey à Mohammed V: le Double Visage du Protectorat (Paris:Denoël, 1999), C.R. Pennell, Morocco since 1830: A History (New York: New York UniversityPress, 2000).
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by Fasis.47 Through distinct projects and approaches beyond the present scope of discussion
Abdellah Hammoudi, Dale Eickelman, Clifford Geertz, and Vincent Crapanano have presented
engaging conceptualizations of power relations in which attention to belief practices and socio-
political order are mutually illuminating, and frequently suggestive for historical interpretation.48
Lawrence Rosen has offered another resonant anthropological contribution in considering the
social construction of kinship and other organizational elements of Moroccan realities.49 Also it
must be noted that a major shift away from the symbolic and semiotic interpretive lens has take
place in the last two decades, bringing significant attention to women and gender.50 Stalwart
scholar and activist Fatima Mernissi has been generationally succeeded by a growing number ocritical scholars and women activists.51 Earlier straightforward feminist claims have been built
47 John Waterbury,The Commander of the Faithful: The Moroccan Political Elite. (New York:Columbia University Press, 1970). Also see Pierre Vermeren’s inspired comparative history of North African schooling and the elite, La Formation des Élites Marocaines et Tunisiennes: des Nationalistes aux Islamistes, 1920-2000 (Paris: Découverte, 2002).48 See Abdellah Hammoudi, Master and Disciple: the Cultural Foundations of Moroccan Authoritarianism(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), Dale F. Eickelman, Knowledgeand Power in Morocco: The Education of a Twentieth-Century Moroccan Notable (Princeton:Princeton University Press, 1985), Clifford Geertz, Meaning and Order in Moroccan Society:Three Essays in Cultural Analysis(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979) and IslamObserved: Religious Development in Morocco and Indonesia(Chicago: University of ChicagoPress, 1973), Vincent Crapanzano,The Hamadsha; a study in Moroccan Ethnopsychiatry (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973) andTuhami, Portrait of a Moroccan (Chicago:University of Chicago Press, 1980).49 Lawrence Rosen, Bargaining for Reality: the Construction of Social Relations in a MuslimCommunity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984),The Anthropology of Justice: Law asCulture in Islamic Society(New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989),The Culture of Islam:Changing aspects of Contemporary Muslim Life(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002).50 See the overviews “North Africa: Early 20th Century to Present,” Donna Lee Bowen and“History Middle East and North Africa,” Mary Ann Fay in the ambitious Encyclopedia ofWomen & Islamic Cultures Joseph Suad, General Editor (Boston, Massachusetts: Brill, 2003-).51 A leading scholar and activist based in Fes, who is representative of this generation and itsgendered turn is Fatima Sadiqi. For an example of her ranging work seeWomen, Gender, and Language in Morocco (Boston: Brill, 2003). For an earlier perspective also see Amal Rassam,“Women and Domestic Power in Morocco,” International Journal of Middle East Studies, (Vol.12, No. 2., 1980). Some of the relevant contours of these debates are outlined by Alison Baker
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upon by attention to the more multifaceted dynamics of gender within varied social and religiou
movements, and their respective, collective interests and pursuits of influence upon laws and th
state, particularly concerning the Mudawana, or family code of Maliki law in Morocco.
Beyond scholarship directly addressing Morocco the most relevant literature influencing
the questions and approaches of this study directly concerns slavery. Several landmark African
historical studies have examined the roles played by colonial authorities in influencing
emancipation processes. Paul Lovejoy and Jan Hogendorn produced an important monograph
detailing the gradual twentieth-century end of slavery in Northern Nigeria.52 Their collaboration
represents both scholars’ long-term research, providing well conceived and detailed analysis, particularly provocative for their engagement with issues of accommodation and social change
within colonial rule. More recently Martin Klein published the generous and in many regards
invitingly incomplete culmination of over two decades of research, examining colonialism and
the end of slavery in French West Africa.53 Benjamin Bower’s doctoral dissertation drew upon
extended archival work in Aix-en-Provence to examine the theme of colonial policies and
practices toward slavery in Algeria.54 Frederick Cooper’s writings on East African plantation
slavery, slavery and Islam, and approached to slavery within African studies have formed
repeatedly useful reference points, helping frame and treat varied questions in the field, with
in Voices of Resistance: Oral Histories of Moroccan Women(Albany: State University of NewYork Press, 1998).52 Paul Lovejoy and Jan Hogendorn,Slow Death for Slavery: the Course of Abolition in Northern Nigeria 1897–1936(New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993).53 Martin A. Klein,Slavery and Colonial Rule in Africa (New York: Cambridge UniversityPress, 1998). Also see Klein’s volume co-edited with Suzanne Miers, Slavery and Colonial Ruin Africa (Portland, OR: Frank Cass, 1999).54 Benjamin Claude Brower, “A Desert Named Peace: Violence and Empire in the AlgerianSahara, 1844-1902,” (Unpublished Ph.D. Dissertation, Cornell University, 2005).
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particular nuance concerning labor.55 Also among the many important and helpful models for
addressing the end of slavery are volumes edited by Klein and Howard Temperley,56 and works
by Ehud Toledano and Y. Hakan Erdem concerning the Ottoman world,57 Sikaninga’s work on
colonial Sudan,58 and Urs Ruf’s impressive research in Mauritania.59 Where several of these
works have drawn variously upon colonial and European documentation, this study attempts to
push for further legal and oral historical evidence.
Finally, thematic attention to women, gender and marriage within slavery has been
suggestive for this study. For example, Sandra Lauderdale Graham’s study of the transitional
lives of of slaves and servants and masters in late nineteenth-century Rio de Janeiro illuminatesawkward and unanticipated paths toward freedom.60 Elizabeth Fox-Genovese’s classic
scholarship on plantation households in the southern United States offers an intimate and
suggestive consideration of various women’s positions and psyches within complex domestic
55 See Frederick Cooper, Plantation Slavery on the East Coast of Africa (New Haven: YaleUniversity Press, 1977), “Review: the Problem of Slavery in African Studies,”The Journal of African History (Vol. 20, No. 1, 1979), pp.103-125, From Slaves to Squatters: Plantation Laborand Agriculture in Zanzibar and Coastal Kenya, 1890-1925. (New Haven: Yale UniversityPress, 1980), “Islam and cultural hegemony: the ideology of slave-owners on the East Africancoast,” in Paul Lovejoy, Ed.,The Ideology of Slavery in Africa, (Beverley Hills: Sage, 1981),Co-author with Rebecca Scott and Thomas Holt, Beyond Slavery: Explorations of Race, Labor,and Citizenship in Postemancipation Societies(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press,2000).56 Howard Temperley Ed., After Slavery: Emancipation and Its Discontents (London: FrankCass, 2000), Martin A. Klein Ed., Breaking the Chains: Slavery, Bondage, and Emancipation in Modern Africa(Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1993).57 Ehud R. Toledano,Slavery and Abolition in the Ottoman Middle East (Seattle: University ofWashington Press, 1998), Y. Hakan Erdem,Slavery in the Ottoman Empire and Its Demise,1800-1909. (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1996).58 Ahmad Sikainga,Slaves into Workers: Emancipation and Labor in Colonial Sudan (Austin:University of Texas Press, 1996).59 Urs Ruf, Ending Slavery: Hierarchy, Dependency and Gender in Central Mauritania (Bielefeld: Transcript Verlag, 1999).60 Sandra Lauderdale Graham, House and Street: the Domestic World of Servants and Masters in Nineteenth-Century Rio de Janeiro (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1992).
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spaces, identities and power relations.61 Verena Martinez-Alier’s pioneering treatment of color
and class within Cuban marriage strategies and patterns, and Winthrop Wright’s solid analysis o
the subtle historical dynamics of color in Venezuelan national identity offered useful reference
points.62 Also the well-conceived comparative scholarship on women and slavery in the New
World represented in the edited volume by David Barry Gaspar and Darlene Clark Hine served
as an initially useful orientation for posing questions and locating sifting patterns of Afro-
Maghribi domestic life, engendered social spaces, and engendered forms of labor.63
Sources and Methods
In further introducing this dissertation, it is useful to note the archival and oral sources it has been based upon and how relevant research materials have been worked with in analyzing the
end of domestic slavery in Fes.64 Several archives were extensively consulted in France and
Morocco. The Centre des Archives Diplomatiques de Nantes (CADN) offered the most
abundant wealth of records in France for developing an overview of the Protectorate and served
as a major window into pertinent features of colonial encounter examined here. The Centre
d'études d'histoire de la Défense (CEHD) at Château de Vincennes - Pavillon du Harnachement
held numerous helpful materials, particularly for shedding light on early Protectorate military
relations in Fes. Despite the ostensible advantages of official French archival holdings, greater
61 Elizabeth Fox-Genovese,Within the Plantation Household: Black and White Women of theOld South within the Plantation Household(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press,1988).62 Verena Martinez-Alier , Marriage, Class and Colour in Nineteenth-Century Cuba: A Study of Racial Attitudes and Sexual Values in a Slave Society(New York: Cambridge University Press,1974), Winthrop R. Wright,Café con Leche: Race, Class, and National Image in Venezuela(Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1990).63 David Barry Gaspar and Darlene Clark Hine Eds., More than Chattel: Black Women andSlavery in the Americas(Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 1996).64 The Fes al-Bali and Fes Jadid areas of the medina were overwhelming organizational focus othis study, with no considerable focus given to either the Palace or the Mellah (Jewish quarter) omedina.
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budgets and larger facilities and staff in no way superseded the accessibility and helpfulness of
the Bibliothèque Générale et Archives du Maroc (BGAM) in Rabat for the end results of this
study. Ironically, the lion’s share of the documents which turned out to be the most valuable fo
reconstructing the relationship between the Protectorate and slavery were found inadvertently in
my first afternoon working there. After having made myself a fixture there, several mornings I
helped cleaning women as they mopped, moving unmarked cardboard boxes filled with
Protectorate era documents out of their way, so they could clean without getting the boxes wet,
and I could then probed their contents. The labyrinthine process of getting access to historical
legal documents from Islamic courts in the Fes medina (principally Rcif and Smat) wasultimately made possible by the dedication of an intrepid assistant and an intractable retired
notary who assisted me while these records underwent a major move to another location outside
the medina. Further access to many private and personal collections of family records,
documents, photos and material culture (often clothing), materialized and served as mnemonic
devices during the process of gathering oral historical interviews. These latter Fasi documents
proved an exciting compliment to Protectorate-sources and oral historical evidence.
The chief challenge of gathering oral historical data was to find and work with willing
and able informants. This was largely achieved through what then seemed endless social
interaction, waiting and visits to suggested friends and relatives who might offer further
suggested friends and relatives throughout the Fes medina. I almost always worked directly wi
an assistant in setting up and conducting the body of the over one hundred and twenty semi-
structured open-ended interviews which this research is based upon. I am particularly grateful
a loose network of interested, helpful and resourceful Fasi women who gradually generated
many useful contacts. In my research experience there were far more visits and conversations
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than formal interviews and it became clear that many informants appreciated knowing that
someone had a sincere interest in connecting to their lives and stories. Repeated visits often
allowed for my questions, as well as forms of rapport to develop. The majority of informants
were paid for giving formal recorded interviews, which averaged one and a half hours. Further
background details about who informants were are addressed within the following chapters.
Before describing the methods followed to address important conceptual issues which
arose during archival and oral historical research it is necessary to explain how “domestic
slavery” has been understood within this study. Firstly, domestic slavery has been understood
here as a social institution. This is significant because in the historical absence of a tenablemoment or patent periodization based on an outstanding official authority from which to
reconstruct the end of slavery in Morocco it has been crucial to evaluate and temporalize
collective social patterns alongside nuanced consideration of individual cases.
To further specify how this social institution has been defined and approached, several
features of how “slavery/slave” are understood are useful to consider. During the Protectorate
the Tharaud brothers questioned the adequate use of the term “slave,” 65 a point recently
reiterated by contemporary scholar Aouad-Badoual.66 Despite drastic, perhaps diametric,
differences in their respective historical backgrounds, these authors share concerns with the
potential limitations which the term “slave” may impose upon the Moroccan domestic context,
yet ultimately proposed no substitution.67 To an extent their concerns stem from challenges to
meaningful comparative history due to the conceptual supremacy surrounding Western
plantation slavery, however even more important for the present study is the problematic entaile
65 Jerôme & Jean Tharaud (1930) p.21.66 Rita Aouad-Badoual (2004).67 Toledano (2007) has recently advocated and employed the term “enslaved”.
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