The MELA Social Justice Committee will host a lecture with Dr. Chouki El Hamel as part of the Middle East Librarians Association (MELA) Social Justice Lecture Series 2020-2021 season, Stories and Silences: Research on Race in the Middle East. The lecture will be on December 17th, 2020, at 11AM EST (UTC -5).
**This lecture will not be recorded. We hope you can join us in person!**
Please register for the lecture here: https://bit.ly/MELAElHamel
Slavery, Race and the Archives in Morocco: The Epistemology of Silence
This paper explains how the archives are used and how silences can happen regarding controversial issues such as slavery and racism. The archival silence creates an intentional gap in the production of history. I raise political and epistemological questions to challenge the archival power in the production and transmission of knowledge on slavery and racism. My previous book Black Morocco was an attempt to place slavery and black Africans (Haratin and black people of West African origins) in the national narrative. It highlighted the Moroccan heritage in the collective cultural memories. My current project focuses on the agency and resistance of black Moroccans and the continual insistence of their freedom. The story will start from events occurring in the 1700s at the time of the creation of the black army to the present. When he came to power in 1672, Mawlay Isma‘il had to face a fragmented society and a political instability in Morocco. He decided to organize a strong army, initially recruiting Arabs, but when he consulted with an influential Muslim scholar, al-‘Ayyashi, who was one of his loyalist officers, this latter suggested that the slaves who came from West Africa after the 1591 Sa‘di invasion of Songhay and who formerly had been in service to the government, might serve well as they were still slaves belonging to the state. The Sultan regarded the idea so highly that he made al-‘Ayyashi a supreme judge acting on his behalf in all the legal matters related to their collection. Although Mawlay Isma‘il’s decision to forcibly conscript all black people into his army was political, he invoked racial distinctions conflated with heathenism to justify his enslavement of Moroccan blacks. His avowed intention was to convince influential Islamic scholars that the needs of the state – to create a formidable army to defend the land of Islam – provided the warrants for enslaving free black Muslims whom he believed had all formerly been slaves. As a consequence of this mass forced conscription, the perception of blacks was radically altered. The creation of the black army reinforced prejudices and determined the future image of blacks in Morocco at the margins of freedom. Indeed, there are some entire villages in Morocco that are still considered as outcast groups deprived from basic social and administrative services. The Moroccan government is still acting as the pre-colonial establishment of the old regime of slavery and denies them any claim to legal ownership of their lands. The dominant culture in the region and the political administration do not recognize them and invoke memories which connect the group’s past to an origin of slavery and racial discrimination. I succeeded to trace the origin of one particular group of maroons to the ‘Alawi ruling dynasty. Many primary sources attest to the fact that the dispersion of the blacks in all Morocco happened during the period of the ‘Alawi sultan Mawlay Isma‘il (1672-1727). Mawlay Isma‘il ordered the enslavement of all black Moroccans to serve his army. The collection of black Moroccans reached 240.000 and were scattered all over Morocco. This enslaved population gradually separated themselves from the government and claimed their original status of freedom, as a great number of them (such as the Haratin) were indeed free upon their enslavement by Mawlay Isma‘il. I intend to underlay the factors that created maroonage and maintained social and legal identities in Morocco. I examine the historical roots of this marginalized group that led to the present dilemma of racial identity and discrimination in Morocco.
Dr. Chouki El Hamel is a professor of history in the School of Historical, Philosophical and Religious Studies at Arizona State University, specializing in West and Northwest Africa. His training and doctoral studies in France at the Centre de Recherches Africaines (University of Sorbonne, Paris I & VII) were in African history and Islamic societies. He taught courses in African history at North Carolina State University in Raleigh and at Duke University in Durham, N.C. He was a scholar in residence at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in New York City. In the year 2017, he was awarded a Fulbright grant for research in Morocco. His research interests focus on the spread and the growth of Islamic culture and the evolution of Islamic institutions in Africa. He is particularly interested in the subaltern relationship of servile and marginalized communities to Islamic ruling institutions. His research into these relationships revolves around issues of slavery, race/ethnicity/color, gender, power/class, and social justice. He published two books and many scholarly articles in academic journals and popular magazines. His most recent book is Black Morocco: A History of Slavery, Race, and Islam (Cambridge University Press, 2013), which has won Honorable Mention for the L. Carl Brown American Institute for Maghrib Studies Book Prize. The book was translated into French in 2019. He is now working on a new book project entitled “The Hidden Story of Maroons in Morocco and the Epistemology of Silence.”