Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of maps
- Preface
- 1 Introduction: the medieval scene
- 2 Egypt: al-Misr
- 3 Ifriqiya and the Regencies
- 4 The Islamic Far West: Morocco
- 5 The western Sudan and upper Guinea
- 6 The central Sudan and lower Guinea
- 7 Nubia, Darfur and Wadai
- 8 The north-eastern triangle
- 9 The upper Nile basin and the East African plateau
- 10 The heart of Africa
- 11 The land of the blacksmith kings
- 12 From the Lualaba to the Zambezi
- 13 The approaches to Zimbabwe
- 14 The peoples of the South
- Epilogue
- Further reading
- Index
4 - The Islamic Far West: Morocco
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of maps
- Preface
- 1 Introduction: the medieval scene
- 2 Egypt: al-Misr
- 3 Ifriqiya and the Regencies
- 4 The Islamic Far West: Morocco
- 5 The western Sudan and upper Guinea
- 6 The central Sudan and lower Guinea
- 7 Nubia, Darfur and Wadai
- 8 The north-eastern triangle
- 9 The upper Nile basin and the East African plateau
- 10 The heart of Africa
- 11 The land of the blacksmith kings
- 12 From the Lualaba to the Zambezi
- 13 The approaches to Zimbabwe
- 14 The peoples of the South
- Epilogue
- Further reading
- Index
Summary
Morocco is shaped like a broken saucer, with its flat base facing to the Atlantic and its mountainous rim surrounding the coastal plain on every landward side. The plain of Atlantic Morocco rises gently through the undulating foothills of the mountain rim, and supports the settled cultivators and the great cities vital to the country's economy. But until quite recent times it was the wild tribesmen, the herders and high-valley farmers of the great mountains, and the camel people of the desert fringes beyond them, who again and again initiated movements of religious and political renewal which caused the Moroccans to break out of their natural fastness in wars of conquest against their neighbours. During the early centuries of Islam the main direction taken by these wars had been northwards, into the Iberian peninsula, of which the southern tip lay only 9 miles away from Morocco. The original Muslim conquest of Spain, begun in ad 711, had been undertaken as much by Moroccan Berbers as by Arabs. The eleventh-century conquest of Morocco by the Almoravids from the western Sahara had followed through into what had by then become Muslim Andalusia. So had the movement initiated by the Almohads of the High Atlas in the following century.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Medieval Africa, 1250–1800 , pp. 49 - 61Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2001