All events · Conquest and the Slave Trades

Mawlay Isma'il's Enslavement of Black Moroccans for the 'Abid al-Bukhari

c. 1699–1708 · Middle East & North Africa

Displacement

Displaced

221,000

Chouki El Hamel's research on the sultan's registers (the Diwan al-'Abid) is the basis for the figure of about 221,000 black Moroccans enslaved between 1699 and 1705, a number cited in the endorsement of his book Black Morocco by Timothy Cleaveland and in Wikipedia's account of his 2006 chapter; the registers were drawn up by the sultan's agents and are the only systematic source. The often-repeated figure of 150,000 for the black army at its peak comes from Moroccan chronicle tradition relayed by later works and is not a count. Recruitment had begun earlier: El Hamel, as reported by the Moroccan press, records an official gathering some 3,000 black men in a single year in the 1670s. Not all those registered were moved, but conscripts and their families were concentrated in military camps and garrisons, notably at Mashra' al-Raml west of Meknes.

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What happened

From the 1670s Mawlay Isma'il (r. 1672–1727) built a standing army of black soldiers loyal only to himself, the 'Abid al-Bukhari, so called because they swore allegiance on a copy of al-Bukhari's Sahih. In the late 1690s, as Chouki El Hamel shows in the Journal of African History (2010), he ordered his officials to enslave all black people in Morocco: slaves were to be bought compulsorily from their owners, and free black Muslims, including the Haratin, were registered as slaves under an invented hierarchy of slave categories. El Hamel argues that this violated the central rules of Islamic law on slavery, which forbade enslaving free Muslims, and that the project constructed a slave status for all black people; it provoked open conflict with the 'ulama of Fez, some of whom protested in writing, until the sultan forced them to endorse the register in 1708. Soldiers' families were settled in camps where boys were trained from about age ten in masonry, horsemanship and musketry and enlisted around sixteen. The army became a political force that made and unmade sultans until the nineteenth century. Captives brought across the Sahara into Morocco are counted in 'The Trans-Saharan Slave Trade, 1450–1750'; this entry concerns the enslavement and registration of people already living in Morocco.

Parties

The 'Alawi sultan Mawlay Isma'il ordered his officials to seize, buy or register as slaves black Moroccans, including legally free Haratin, to form a hereditary slave army bound to him by oath on al-Bukhari's hadith collection

Disputed

El Hamel's reading of the project as a racialised enslavement of free black Muslims, and the 221,000 figure drawn from the registers, are the main scholarly account; Moroccan historiography has often presented the 'Abid as a privileged military corps, and the size of the army at its peak is uncertain.

On the death toll

There is no significant documented death toll attached to the registration itself: the project's aim was to acquire people as soldiers and servants, not to kill them. Deaths in the army's many campaigns and in resistance to enslavement are not quantified in any source consulted.

Documented forms of violence

Forced Labour

El Hamel (Journal of African History, 2010, and Black Morocco, 2013) documents the forcible enslavement and registration of free and enslaved black Moroccans for compulsory lifelong military and domestic service.

Countries touched, on present-day borders

Morocco