Black Morocco_ElHamel_Ross review

Title: Black Morocco: A History of Slavery, Race, and Islam
Author: Chouki El Hamel

Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Date: 2013
ISBN: 978-1-107-02577-6
“There was no slavery/there is no racism in Morocco because Islam is against slavery/racism.”

“Contrary to the chattel slavery of American plantations, slavery in Morocco was mostly
domestic in nature and thus benign.” “Racism was introduced to Morocco by the French
colonizers.” These are the most common responses of students when the issues of slavery and
racism are raised in a Moroccan classroom. Morocco’s long history of slavery is not covered in
public school curriculum, and the issues of slavery and racism are rarely broached in the media
or the arts. Over the past decade, as the number of sub-Saharan migrants in Morocco has
increased, the populist press has even fanned reactionary racist sentiment through sensationalist
articles and scare-mongering headlines about the “Black peril.”1 Chouki El Hamel’s Black
Morocco: A History of Slavery, Race, and Islam (Cambridge University Press, 2013) could not
be timelier. For its author, slavery is “unfinished business.” Not only does the unresolved legacy
of slaveries-past permeate mainstream Moroccan culture, society and politics, slavery is
resurgent in our post-modern present, with explicit public acts of enslavement, of women in
particular, being committed by DAESH/ISIS and its affiliates from Iraq to Nigeria.
Black Morocco—a reference to Martin Bernal’s Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of
Classical Civilization (Rutgers University Press, 1987)—is the first thorough rethinking of the
role of slavery in Moroccan history. Previous historical studies: Mohammed Ennaji’s Serving the
Master: Slavery and Society in Nineteenth Century Morocco (Palgrave Macmillan/St. Martin’s
Press, 1999) and Madia Thomson’s The Demise of Slavery in Southwestern Morocco 1860-2000:
Economic Modernization and Transformation of Social Hierarchy (Edwin Mellen Press, 2011)
in particular, have dealt with the last era of officially condoned slavery—the nineteenth century
through to early twentieth century. This is in large part due to the relative abundance of primary
sources for that late period. These include official and private archives, the testimonials of
enslaved and self-liberated people, European eye-witness accounts and media reports. By adding
other types of sources, including texts of Maliki jurisprudence, actual legal rulings and political
correspondences, El Hamel is able to analyze the wax and wane of slavery as far back as the
Arab conquest. The author places this Moroccan experience of slavery within the wider
Mediterranean context by comparing it with Egypt, Tunisia and Mauritania. What emerges from
the pages is a plurality of slaveries intersecting with articulations of religious authority,
configurations of political economy, and conceptions of class, gender and, increasingly as of the
sixteenth century, race.
El Hamel begins his analysis with the religious foundations of the institution. In the
Qur’an, slavery is recognized as an existing human condition yet the main thrust of its
prescriptions on the subject clearly calls for the freedom of humans, not their enslavement.
However, the second authoritative religious source, the sunna (traditions) of the Prophet
Mohammad fixed for good in the ninth century CE, reflects the class and state structure of the
‘Abbasid Empire. Rather than promoting freedom, the Islamic legal system which ensued wove
slavery into the fabric of Muslim families and societies, and of the states that ruled them.
Turning from the Islamic sources and heartlands to developments in Morocco, El Hamel
demonstrates the continuity between the “othering” of blacks in the Classical Mediterranean and
Judeo-Christian traditions and the flourishing of racist attitudes in the medieval Muslim era—
where blackness was equated with servitude and concubinage—independently of the
aforementioned Islamic sources.
While blackness was equated with slave status in Medieval times, the reverse equation;
i.e., slaves = blacks, developed later, in the early modern era, first under the Sa’dian dynasty
(1554-1659) which needed labor for sugar plantations, then under the ‘Alawi sultan Mawlay
Isma‘il (reigned 1672-1727), who endeavored to create a slave army on the Ottoman janissary
model. Prior to then, slaves could be procured from many horizons, including of course from
Slavic lands though Mediterranean commerce. With the strengthening of modern European
nation-states and the decline of slave procurement in eastern Europe, slaves could really only
reliably be obtained through trans-Saharan commerce. In the process of equating blackness with
slavery, and despite the opposition of Islamic jurists such as Ahmad Baba al-Timbukti (1556-
1627) and Shaykh Jassus (d. 1709), sub-Saharan Muslims were imported as slaves and the free
indigenous Muslim blacks of southern Morocco (the “Haratin”) were socially and legally
redefined as slaves by the state. Mawlay Isma‘il’s 1705 registry of enslaved Black Moroccans
and the flurry of legal arguments and counter-arguments which accompany it constitute some of
the most important sources explored in this book.
Readers may be surprised to learn that slavery has never been officially abolished in
Morocco. Rather, it has slowly gone out of fashion. British and French pressure to end the trans-
Saharan trade began in the 1840s. Tunisia abolished trade in slaves in 1842 and ownership of
slaves in 1846, two years before France did. In Morocco, the trading of slaves was only
abolished in 1923, and then only by a “circular” (administrative instruction) issued by the French
Protectorate authority, not by any full-fledge royal decree. Clandestine trading in persons
continued for another two decades. Cases involving slave ownership and inheritance were still
being heard in civil courts as late as 1950. By this time the slaves were almost exclusively female
domestics and concubines.
El Hamel concludes Black Morocco with a discussion of the Gnawa, an ethnic group
which descends from enslaved West Africans and which is distinguished by its spiritual and
musical traditions. The Gnawa are the most important cultural legacy of Morocco’s slaving past.
Long a marginalized subaltern group, the Gnawa are now well known and integral to the tourist
“product” of cities such as Essaouira. Their importance for the author lies in their voice. Gnawa
music and spirituality, rooted south of the Sahara and still echoing the horrors of the middle
passage, gives voice and agency to Morocco’s racially and sexually oppressed. Here the author
positions the Black Moroccan experience within the wider African diaspora of enslavement,
comparing Gnawa music not only to the better studied African-American spirituals and blues
traditions, as well as Candomble (Brazil), Santeria (Cuba), and Voodoo (Haiti), but also to the
Bilali (Algeria), Stambouli (Tunisia), Sambani (Libya) and Zar (Egypt) traditions of the Afro-
Mediterranean.
Black Morocco belongs on the shelf of any library of slavery-as-global-phenomenon. It is

also a valuable contribution to the study of the African diaspora. It will certainly be seminal to
the next generation of research on slavery in Morocco.
Reviewed by Eric Ross, Al Akhawayn University in Ifrane, Morocco, [email protected]
1
This was the cover story headline of weekly magazine Maroc Hebdo on 8 Nov. 2012.
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Title: Black Morocco: A History of Slavery, Race, and Islam

Author: Chouki El Hamel

“There was no slavery/there is no racism in Morocco because Islam is against slavery/racism.”

Black Morocco belongs on the shelf of any library of slavery-as-global-phenomenon. It is

View publication stats

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