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THE REGISTER OF THE SLAVES OF SULTAN MAWLAY ISMA‘IL OF MOROCCO AT THE TURN OF THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 May 2010

CHOUKI EL HAMEL
CHOUKI EL HAMEL
Affiliation:
Arizona State University
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Abstract

In late-seventeenth-century Morocco, Mawlay Isma‘il commanded his officials to enslave all blacks: that is, to buy coercively or freely those already slaves and to enslave those who were free, including the Haratin (meaning free blacks or freed ex-slaves). This command violated the most salient Islamic legal code regarding the institution of slavery, which states that it is illegal to enslave fellow Muslims. This controversy caused a heated debate and overt hostility between the ‘ulama’ (Muslim scholars) and Mawlay Isma‘il. Official slave registers were created to justify the legality of the enforced buying of slaves from their owners and the enslavement of the Haratin. An equation of blackness and slavery was being developed to justify the subjection of the free Muslim black Moroccans. To prove the slave status of the black Moroccans, the officials in charge of the slavery project established a fictional hierarchy of categories of slaves. This project therefore constructed a slave status for all black people, even those who were free.

Keywords

MoroccoIslamslaveryrace
Type
Research Article
Information
The Journal of African History , Volume 51 , Issue 1 , March 2010 , pp. 89 - 98
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2010

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References

1 ‘Umar Ibn al-Khattab (second caliph of Islamic Arabia) in ‘Abd al-‘Aziz ibn Ibrahim al-‘Umari, Al-Wilaya ‘ala al-Buldan fi ‘Aṣr al-Khulafa’ ar-Ras hidin (Riyadḥ, 1988), I, 81.

2 Rabat, Morocco, Bibliothèque Générale, MS K394.

3 The plural of Hartani, a problematic term that encompasses different meanings or categories such as free blacks and freed ex-slaves; their common trait, however, was freedom.

4 ‘Abd al-Karim b. Musa ar-Rifi (d. 1780s), az-Zahr al-Akamm, ed. Asia Ben‘dada (Rabat, 1992), 153.

5 Ahmad an-Nasiri, al-Istiqsa’ li-Akhbar Duwal al-Maghrib al-Aqsa (Casablanca, 1997), VII, 56.

6 Mithqal is a standard of weight equal to about 4.72 g, usually used for gold. See J. F. P. Hopkins and Nehemia Levtzion (eds.), Corpus of Early Arabic Sources for West African History (Cambridge, 1981), 481.

7 Information in this paragraph comes from Rabat, Bibliothèque Générale, MS D 1577, Ahmad az-Zayani, ‘at-Turjuman al-Mu‘rib ‘an Duwwal al-Mashriq wa ‘l-Maghrib’, 32.

8 Rabat, Bibliothèque Royale, MS 12184, Ahmad Ibn al-Hajj, ‘Ad-Durr al-Muntakhab al-Mustahsan fi Ba‘d Ma'athir Amir al-Mu'minin Mawlana al-Hasan’, VI, 116.

9 Muhammad al-Fasi, ‘A special issue on the Sultan Mawlay Isma‘il’, Hespéris Tamuda (Rabat, 1962), 49.

10 Rabat, Bibliothèque Générale, MS D 1584, Muhammad al-Karkudi, ‘ad-Durr al-Munaddad al-Fakhir bima li-abna’ Mawlay ‘Ali ash-Sharif mina 'l-Mahasin wa 'l-Mafakhir’, fo. 173b.

11 Ibid. fo. 174a.

12 The English translation of this fatwa is in Aziz Abdalla Batran, ‘The ulama of Fas, M. Isma‘il, and the issue of the Haratin of Fas’, in J. R. Willis (ed.), Slaves and Slavery in Muslim Africa (London, 1985), II, 9–13.

13 Ibid. 13.

14 Ibn al-Hajj, ‘ad-Dur al-Muntakhab al-Mustahsan’, VI, 339 and 396. For more information about the Haratin of Fez see Batran, ‘The ulama of Fas’, 1–15.

15 Rabat, Bibliothèque Royale, MS 12598, ‘Kitab Mawlana Nasarahu Allah ila ‘Ulama’ Misr', 60–3.

16 For more information on Mawlay Isma‘il's project, see Chouki el Hamel, ‘Blacks and slavery in Morocco: the question of the Haratin at the end of the seventeenth century’, in Michael Gomez (ed.), Diasporic Africa: A Reader (New York, 2006), 177–99.

17 Rabat, Bibliothèque Royale, MS 11860, by an unknown author, 8 and 18–19.

18 Abu al-Qasim Ahmad az-Zayani, Le Maroc de 1631 à 1812, extrait de l'ouvrage intitulé Ettordjemân elmo‘arib ‘an douel elmachriq ou ‘lmaghribib, published and translated by Octave Houdas (Paris, 1886), 31(French translation; 16 in the Arabic text). Oujda is a city in north-eastern Morocco, near the Algerian border; Oued Noun is in the far south of the country, near the Atlantic.

19 Louis de Chenier, Recherches historiques sur les Maures, et histoire de l'empire de Maroc (Paris, 1787), III, 226. This work is also available in English translation: The Present State of the Empire of Morocco (New York, 1967), I, 297.

20 The paper is 48×33 cm. The number of lines per page is generally 38, although it varies between 36 and 40.

21 ‘Daftar’, 2.

22 Ibid. 3.

23 Ibid.

24 Ibid. 19.

25 I have referred to classical dictionaries such as of az-Zabidi's Taj al-‘Arus (Berlin, 1993) and modern dictionaries such as Reinhart Dozy's Supplement aux dictionnaires arabes (Leiden, 1881) and Edward William Lane's An Arabic–English Lexicon (London, 1863–93, bound in Pakistan in 1982) in order to identify the significance of these terms as accurately as possible.

26 Dozy, Supplément, II, 818.

27 Az-Zabidi, Taj, XII, 524.

28 Ibid. 82.

29 Lane, Arabic–English Lexicon, V, 1935.

30 Az-Zabidi, Taj, XIII, 652.

31 Ibid. XVIII, 464.

32 Lane, Arabic–English Lexicon, III, 1131.

33 Az-Zabidi, Taj, Vol. 13, 172.

34 Brown, Richard H., ‘Cultural representation and ideological domination’, Social Forces, 71:3 (1993), 659CrossRefGoogle Scholar.