About in the rain

Though the reins of Moorish power are already firmly in the hands of the French Resident-General at Fez, there is no reason to believe that the French expect, for the present at least, to depose the Sultan, it being to their interests, for obvious reasons, to maintain the pleasant fiction that Morocco is still an independent empire to which they have disinterestedly lent their protection, In August, 1912, Sultan Mulai-abd-el-Hafid, appreciating the emptiness of his title under the French régime, abdicated in favour of his brother, Mulai Youssef, who is known to be friendly to France.

The new Sultan, who is the seventeenth of the dynasty of the Alides and the thirty-seventh lineal descendant of Ali, uncle and son-in-law of the Prophet, is known to his subjects as Emir-el-Mumenin, or Prince of True Believers, and as such he exercises a spiritual influence over his subjects which the French are far too shrewd to disregard. The position of the Sultan of Morocco has, indeed, become strikingly similar to that of his fellow-ruler in the other corner of Africa, the Khedive of Egypt, for, like him, he must needs content himself henceforth with the shadow of power. Even if the imperial form of government is permanently maintained (and this I very much doubt, for it is characteristic of the Latin races—as Taine puts it—that they always want to occupy a “sharply defined and terminologically defensible position”), its real ruler will be the Resident-General of France, whose policies will be carried out by French advisers in every department of the government and whose orders will be backed up by French bayonets.

[Pg 42] So long as Mulai Youssef is content meekly to play the part of a puppet, with French officials pulling the strings, he will be permitted to enjoy all the honours and comforts of royalty, but let him once give ear to sedition, let him make the slightest attempt to undermine the authority of the French régime, and he will find himself occupying a sentry-guarded villa in Algiers near the residences of the ex-Queen of Madagascar and the ex-King of Annam, those other Oriental rulers who thought to match themselves against the power of France.

The Sherifian umbrella, which is the Moorish equivalent of a crown, is hereditary in the family of the Filali Sherifs of Tafilelt. Each Sultan is supposed, prior to his death, to indicate the member of the imperial family who, according to his conscientious belief, will best replace him. This succession is, however, elective, and all members of the Sherifian family are eligible that the late Sultan's nominee has been elected by public acclamation at noonday prayers the Friday after the Sultan's death, as the nominee generally has obtained possession of the imperial treasure and is supported by the body-guard, from whose ranks most of the court officials are appointed. I might add that all of the Moorish Sultans in recent years have been so extremely bad that no successor whom they could appoint, or who could appoint himself, could by any possibility be worse. The present Sultan knows scarcely half a dozen places in his whole empire, and has spent most of his life in two of them—Marrakesh and Fez—having held, up to the [Pg 43] time of his accession to the throne, the important post of Khalif of the latter city.