Word: sultanic
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...French Presence. France grabbed Morocco from the weak Sultan Moulay Habid in that grand African divvy on the eve of World War I in which Britain got a free hand in Egypt, Spain a piece of northwest Morocco, and Germany a slice of Africa south of the Sahara...
...Third Son. Mohammed never expected to be Sultan of Morocco. But when his father Moulay Youssef died in 1927, the French passed over the two elder brothers and settled on shy, retiring 18-year-old Mohammed, had him duly "selected" by the council of Ulemas. Deeply religious, pensive Mohammed said little, always dressed in a flowing djella-bah, spent most of his time in pious ritual. He had been married off at 16 to a girl a year younger. The French mistook his shyness for timidity, his silence for ignorance. Mohammed was neither an intellectual nor a scholar...
...sending faded beauties off to a convent. The French encouraged such distractions from more serious affairs of state (though later, to discredit him, they spread the word that he dealt savagely with servants who seduced some of his concubines, had one whipped to death). He exercised fully the Sultan's traditional right to exact gifts from his subjects, and the saying was that for the Moroccans, there were three possible catastrophes : drought, locusts, and a visit from the Sultan. Once he called on a minor caid and remarked pointedly on the caid's china, saying: "This...
...school for girls did he realize that nonroyal Moslem girls did not go to school, promptly promised, "I will make my daughter Aisha the missionary of feminine emancipation." During the wartime Casablanca Conference, President Franklin Roosevelt invited him to dine. It was the first time Morocco's Sultan had been allowed to meet any foreign head of state, and though he would not agree to declare war against Germany, he got from the meeting an increased sense of his own policical importance...
...Morocco Must Realize." After the war, France sent tough Marshal Alphonse Juin to put the now restless Moroccans in their place. Juin began by arresting scores of Istiqlal (Independence) leaders, announced: "Morocco must realize that at the end of its evolution it will remain tied to France." The Sultan retaliated by always meeting Juin unshaven and by committing himself wholeheartedly to the Istiqlal, smuggling leaders into the palace, sometimes in trucks delivering groceries. In the classic divide-and-conquer style. Juin assiduously cultivated the antagonism of the mountain Berbers for the urban Arabs. He made a special ally of rich...