Morocco: Origins
“Morocco” in its various European forms is derived from the city of Marrakesh, which was built in the early eleventh century. The oldest surviving mention of it comes in an Italian document dated 1138.
“Marrakesh” is still used occasionally today, in
informal Arabic, for the country as a whole, and Fez (Fas), the other
great city, is the name modern Turks give to the state. In Arabic, the
modern official language and that of most of its inhabitants, the
country is called “Maghrib.” This is a confusing term
since it is also used to describe the whole group of countries in
north-western Africa (Morocco, Mauritania, Algeria, Tunisia and
sometimes Libya). It means “the land of the setting sun,” the furthest
westward point of the great Islamic empire founded by the Prophet
Muhammad in the middle of the seventh century AD.
“Moors,” a rather outdated word now, and one with a
distinct pejorative tinge, was popular in European languages in the late
medieval and early modern periods. To eighteenth-century writers the
Moors were the urban inhabitants of all north-western Africa, and
sometimes all Muslims.
These were the traditional enemies of Christian Europe and, like
Shakespeare’s Othello, most Moors were believed to be black. Finally,
many inhabitants of Morocco are called “Berbers.” The term is largely a
linguistic one, describing people who speak one of several dialects,
spread over the whole of northern Africa, notably Morocco (forty per
cent of the modern population) and Algeria (twenty per cent), with
smaller groups in Tunisia, Libya and western Egypt. The Tuareg nomads of
the Sahara also speak a Berber dialect, the one that is least
contaminated by Arabic. The name itself is not, of course, a Berber
word. It is a Graeco- Roman expression, referring to all those who did
not speak Greek or Latin: they were barbari or “barbarians.” Applied to
the people of northern Africa, it was popularised by the great
fourteenth-century historian Ibn Khaldun. He used it as the title of his
History of the Berbers and again in his great Introduction to History
(the Muqadimma), which was one of the first attempts to explain the rise
and fall of dynasties in theoretical terms.
The Berbers call themselves “Imazighen,” or something similar, depending on the dialect. It means “noble men”
or “free men,” in the sense that they were free of external control,
unlike the inhabitants of the towns, who belonged to no tribe. Those who
could find no protection from kin were at the mercy of the powerful and
were truly servile.
