Word: youssef
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1950-1959
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
From the moment his plane touched down at Nice airport last week, Morocco's ex-Sultan Sidi Mohammed ben Youssef made clear he was not returning as a suppliant, grateful to be allowed to return from remote Madagascar to a more congenial clime. Two hundred Moroccans stood in the drizzling rain to cheer him as he descended, svelte in grey djellabah and white pointed slippers, and followed by his two sons, four daughters, two wives and 19 veiled concubines. The Foreign Ministry had ordered a Riviera hotel specially reopened for him. But after only one night, Ben Youssef abruptly...
Foreign Minister Antoine Pinay flew back from the foreign ministers' conference in Geneva especially to confer with him. At the end of two hours' talk, Ben Youssef was graciously understanding. He spoke soberly of "a Franco-Moroccan interdependence," and dispatched a "message of hope, of wisdom and of reconciliation" to the Moroccan people...
...next few days, one Moroccan notable after another hustled to the Hotel Henri IV to pay his respects. Ben Youssef summoned his old enemy Hadj Thami El Glauoi to Paris, and 80-year-old El Glaoui took ship to comply. The four-member throne council so painstakingly created by the French to preclude the return of Ben Youssef now declared that the council's sole purpose was to reinstall him on the throne, and offered their resignation in a body...
...backed down from its previous stand, issued a meekly worded statement saying that the question of the throne was "for Moroccans only." Meanwhile, Sidi Mohammed ben Moulay Arafa, the man the French had chosen to be Sultan, then exiled, renounced all rights to the throne in favor of Ben Youssef...
...Rabat, newspapers carrying the hitherto forbidden photograph of Sultan ben Youssef were being snatched from newsstands by happy purchasers, many of whom ostentatiously kissed the image of the Sultan. At week's end, as the Sultan was flown from exile in Madagascar to a Riviera villa, it did not require a great gift of prophecy to forecast his early return to Morocco...