Word: sidi
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Istiqlal. In 1943, during the Casablanca conference, President Roosevelt invited Sultan Sidi Mohammed ben Youssef to join him for dinner. Whether or not Franklin Roosevelt ever made the remark, the report soon spread that he had told the Sultan: "France is finished. Take back your country. We will help." The Sultan's chief interests lay in his harem (40 concubines), his garage (60 cars), and his afternoon game of tennis. Yet, as Imam (Commander of the Faithful), he became the man around whom Moroccans in the new Istiqlal (Independence) Party centered their hopes...
...second anniversary of the dethronement of Sultan Sidi Mohammed ben Youssef as head of some 9,000,000 Moroccan Moslems. On Aug. 20, 1953, the French bundled Ben Youssef aboard a DC-3 and exiled him, ostensibly to "save" him from his own people, actually because he supported their demand for more political freedom. So flimsy a pretext was an insult to North Africa's faithful. Morocco's urgent nationalists flatly refused to accept the weak and wizened old man whom Paris foisted on them in Ben Youssef's place. Ben Youssef, never very popular as Sultan...
...Moslems throughout North Africa, Sidi Mohammed ben Moulay Arafa, the French puppet Sultan, is a false prophet and usurper. Last month the Moroccans served notice that La Date Fatidique would be a day of prayer and demonstrations for Moulay Arafa's removal and Ben Youssef's return. Terrorist tracts, bearing the black crescent sign of the Arab underground, quickly made plain what this might mean. In the sacred name of Allah, the tracts urged all Moroccans to "avenge our dead heroes cut down by Imperialist French bullets...
...France's leading fighter pilot in World War II, a national hero and a Deputy in the National Assembly, Clostermann was a social lion when he first moved to Morocco five years ago to establish a structural-steel concern. Urged on by President Auriol himself, Clostermann befriended Sultan Sidi Mohammed ben Youssef, and advocated a "dialogue" between Moroccans and French. He fought those who engineered Ben Youssef's deposition and replacement with the pitiful French stooge Sultan Sidi Mohammed ben Moulay Arafa. Soon Clostermann was cut out of French business in the colony, found he was no longer...
...happy admirers as strangely mixed as Tunisia itself. Vespa motor-scooters, ridden by sport-shirted youths, skittered among primitive horsemen in burnooses; bare-foot peasant boys dodged fat businessmen in Citroëns and Fords. In the blue-tiled throne room of the palace, old (73) Bey Sidi Mohammed el Amin, hereditary ruler of Tunisia, rose majestically from his place to embrace and kiss Bourguiba, saying softly: "This is a happy day. Joy has replaced suffering." Tears in his eyes, Bourguiba echoed: "A blessed...