The Saʿdiyans, 1510–1603

The Moroccan tribal system of government had exhausted itself by the fifteenth century. The major Berber groupings – Sanhaja, Masmuda and Zanata – had all taken their turn in founding states which followed Ibn Khaldun's cyclical pattern of rise and decline. The tribal system had showed its shortcomings by the failure to prevent Christian encroachment on Moroccan territory since the Portuguese occupation of Sabta in 1415. It had demonstrated its inability to face a national challenge when in 1471 the Wattasid claimant to the Marinid throne, Muhammad al-Shaykh, who was a product of this system, made peace with the Portuguese and surrendered Asila and Al-ʿAraʾish (Larache) to them so that he could take Fez from the sharifs.

The sharifian cult had its first flowering in Morocco in the Idrisid period. It went into abeyance when the Almoravids, Almohads, and early Marinids gave Morocco an effective political and religious leadership; then it revived under the last Marinids. By this time the Sufi tariqas had become an important sociopolitical force in the country. In the fifteenth century Sufi shaykhs and sharifs came to the fore as the symbols of disenchantment with tribal leadership and of the determination to resist the foreign enemies of the country and the faith. These religious men still needed tribal support to succeed as political leaders, but no leader was able from this time to establish dynastic rule in Morocco on the basis of the exclusive domination of one tribal element as the Almoravids and the Almohads had done.