Moulay Rachid

By Nadia El-Masri

Before Moulay Ismail the builder, there was Moulay Rachid the founder — the Alaouite prince who reunified Morocco after the anarchy of the seventeenth century and laid the foundations of the dynasty that rules to this day.

The Alaouites were sharifs of the Tafilalt, descendants of the Prophet through Hasan, who had risen as a maraboutic power in the chaos after the Saadian collapse. When the old sultan Muhammad al-Hajj of the Dila'i brotherhood dominated central Morocco and the country was a patchwork of warlords, corsair republics, and foreign-occupied ports, the young Moulay Rachid — second son of Moulay Sharif — began the reconquest from the family base at Sijilmasa.

Rachid's method was relentless and brilliant. In 1664 he seized the strategic fortress of... he took Oujda and the northeast, then marched on Fez — the prize. In 1666 he entered Fez, the spiritual capital, and was proclaimed sultan: the Alaouite dynasty's reign begins, formally, with that entry. Then came Marrakech in 1669, taken from the last Saadian remnants, and with it the south. In six years, a prince from the Tafilalt oasis had reunited a country that had been fragmented for half a century.

Rachid was more than a conqueror; he was a state-builder. He understood that the Alaouite claim — sharifian descent, the oldest legitimacy in Morocco — needed institutions. He rebuilt the makhzen administration, reconstituted the guich armies (tribal military regiments settled on land in exchange for service), tamed the Dila'i brotherhood by destroying their zaouia at Dila in 1668, and restored the trans-Saharan trade routes that financed the state. He moved between Fez and Marrakech, ruling as the heir of the Idrisids and the Saadians alike.

His reign was cut short: in 1672, at forty-two, he died in a riding accident in Marrakech — thrown from a horse, the chronicles say, in the gardens of the palace. He was succeeded by his brother Moulay Ismail, who would reign fifty-five years and build the Alaouite state into its classic form. But Ismail built on Rachid's foundations: the reunified kingdom, the guich system, the destroyed rivals, the restored sharifian legitimacy.

Moroccan memory sometimes overshadows Rachid with his brother's long reign, but the historians know: founders matter more than perfecters. Moulay Rachid took a broken country and made it a kingdom again in six years. The Alaouite dynasty — the oldest reigning dynasty in the Muslim world, still on the throne — starts with him.

Rachid's destruction of the Dila'i zaouia in 1668 deserves emphasis, for it was the decisive act of the Alaouite founding: the Dila'ites — the Sufi brotherhood whose sheikhs had ruled central Morocco as sultans in all but name — represented the alternative future, a Morocco governed by saints rather than sharifs. By razing Dila and dispersing its scholars to Fez, Rachid settled the permanent Moroccan question in favor of the makhzen: the state would patronize the brotherhoods but never be ruled by them, the formula every Alaouite sultan has followed since. His guich system — settling loyal tribes on crown land around the capitals in exchange for military service, the Udaya, the Cherarda, the Ait Idrassen — created the military households that garrisoned the empire for two centuries; the Udaya of Rabat, whose kasbah still bears their name, are Rachid's living institution. He died, the chronicles insist, from a fall during a horse race in the Marrakech palace gardens — a founder's death as abrupt as his rise, leaving the throne to the brother who would make the dynasty eternal.

Impact on civilization