Morocco in Historical Layers
By Nick Tassone
Towards the end of our first full day, I was standing on the ramparts of the Kasbah of the Udayas, looking across the Bou Regreg river where it meets the Atlantic Ocean toward Salé, and I was mesmerized by the surreal walled city. The array of small white buildings looked incredible against the Atlantic and the cloudless blue sky. It was incredible to think that that was where, in the 17th century, the Republic of Salé’s pirates raided Spanish ships and brought European captives back along the Barbary coast. Beautiful and so historically rich at once.
Our guide for the day, Abdul, spent the morning walking us through Rabat’s layered history. At our first stop at the Hassan Tower, we stood looking at the unfinished pillars of a mosque that the Almohad sultan Yaqub al-Mansur commissioned in the late 12th century but didn’t live to finish it. After his death, the city was left ignored for centuries as “Rabat the ghost city,” until the French made it their administrative capital in the early 20th century. We went directly opposite the tower to the Mausoleum of Mohammed V, commissioned by King Hassan II and designed by a Vietnamese architect. The site was a deliberate choice as it is where the royal family first prayed when they returned from French-imposed exile. Mohammed V, grandfather of the current king, led Morocco to independence in 1956. The decision to entomb him on the grounds of an Almohad ruin is noteworthy as it connects the unfinished vision of one dynasty to another’s founding story.
One of our readings for today, by Dan Jones on the Arab conquests, had prepared us for more of the layers of Rabat. We learned of Islamic expansion, including the 7th century push west into al-Maghrib (a region of Northern Africa that includes Morocco) and the crossing of Gibraltar into al-Andalus (Spain and Portugal) under the Umayyad Caliphate. This layered history is clearly uncovered at the aforementioned fortress Kasbah: there is an Almohad gate at the entrance, an Andalusian wall built by Moriscos expelled from Spain, a British designed canon battery, and a Moorish café in which we enjoyed mint tea and pastries. The medina surrounding it is a neighborhood with winding streets and many vendors selling various items. A few blocks beyond, as we made our way to the hotel, French architect Henri Prost’s neo-Moorish Rabaville sits primly on the other side of the wall. This French colonial area preserves the traditional Moroccan aesthetics but is strikingly separate from the medina it borders. The separation between the two also connects to what Professor Rabinovitch taught during our afternoon class on Moroccan colonial history. One thing we learned is that a fixed “capital city” is a Western idea and that in the traditional Arab and Amazigh tradition, the capital is wherever the Sultan’s court resides. So, when the French made Rabat the administrative capital, it mirrored the prominence it briefly had under Yaqub al-Mansur when he wanted it as a major center for the Almohads before his death cut that vision short.
In the afternoon, Aimane Cherragui, a social innovator who works for the Foundation Abdelkader Bensalah, deepened my understanding of Morocco’s richness through his lecture about civil societies and Morocco’s dual system of monarchy and democracy. He spoke about the “three P’s,” the public, private, and civil society sectors working in partnership toward societal development. This tells a more complex view of Morocco’s government as it is more than just as a constitutional monarchy. As a history and political science major, the whole talk fascinated me, but what I found most compelling was the section in which Aimane compared AI today to the invention of the printing press, and how such technologies produce more learned populations and therefore can threaten any government still establishing itself. It was, he noted, why a monarchy with this much history takes history very seriously.
In and around Rabat, there is so much to uncover, and learning about all the layers of its history is important for understanding the beautiful sites.
