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Haratin and Morocco's "Gnawa" slave army
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[QUOTE]Originally posted by Doug M: [QB] There have always been people with "black" skin on this planet. The new world construction you are referring to is the OPPRESSION of people just because they have black or brown skin. And it is not a construction of the new world as it is a construction of Eurasian populations from Europe to Asia, as many of the cultures and civilizations they destroyed were made up of black people, who they subsequently labelled as savages and brutes, while the only savages and brutes in order to justify their destruction or oppression. "Blacks" have always been in Morocco and those who try and act as if Morocco's history is not tinged with racism against BLACKS is going against the facts: [QUOTE] In the Islamic West black slave troops were more frequent, and sometimes even included cavalry -- something virtually unknown in the East. The first emir of Cordova, 'Abd al-Rahman I, is said to have kept a large personal guard of black troops; and black military slaves were used, especially to maintain order, by his successors. Black units, probably recruited by purchase via Zawila in Fezzan (now southern Libya), figure in the armies of the rulers of Tunisia between the ninth and eleventh centuries. Black troops became important from the seventeenth century, after the Moroccan military expansion into the Western Sudan. The Moroccan Sultan Mawlay Ismaili (1672-1727) had an army of black slaves, said to number 250,000. The nucleus of this army was provided by the conscription or compulsory purchase of all male blacks in Morocco; it was supplemented by levies on the slaves and serfs of the Saharan tribes and slave raids into southern Mauritania. These soldiers were mated with black slave girls, to produce the next generation of male soldiers and female servants. The youngsters began training at ten and were mated at fifteen. After the sultan's death in 1727, a period of anarchic internal struggles followed, which some contemporaries describe as a conflict between blacks and whites. The philosopher David Hume, writing at about the same time, saw such a conflict as absurd and comic, and used it to throw ridicule on all sectarian and factional strife: "The civil wars which arose some few years ago in Morocco between the Blacks and Whites, merely on account of their complexion, are founded on a pleasant difference. We laugh at them; but, I believe, were things rightly examined, we afford much more occasion of ridicule to the Moors. For, what are all the wars of religion, which have prevailed in this polite and knowing part of the world? They are certainly more absurd than the Moorish civil wars. The difference of complexion is a sensible and a real difference; but the controversy about an article of faith, which is utterly absurd and unintelligible, is not a difference in sentiment, but in a few phrases and expressions, which one party accepts of without understanding them, and the other refuses in the same manner.... Besides, I do not find that the Whites in Morocco ever imposed on the Blacks any necessity of altering their complexion . . . nor have the Blacks been more unreasonable in this particular." [/QUOTE]From: http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/med/lewis1.html I have posted on this thread more than one eyewitness account of BLACKS in Morocco in historic times, be they called Arabs, Negroes or Blackamoors: [QUOTE] It is usual for Moors, particularly negroes, to sing certain choruses, and thus encourage one another in their work. What, however, is remarkable, these choruses are mostly on sacred subjects, being frequently the formula of their confession, "There is no God, but one God, and Mahomet is his Prophet," &c. These clownish tars were deeply coloured, and some quite black. I found, in fact, the greatest part of the Moorish population of Mogador coloured persons. We may here easily trace the origin of the epithet "Black-a-Moor," and we are not so surprised that Shakspeare made his Moor black; indeed, the present Emperor, Muley Abd Errahman, is of very dark complexion, though his features are not at all of the negro cast. But he has sons quite black, and with negro features, who, of course, are the children of negresses. One of these, is Governor of Rabat. In no country is the colour of the human skin so little thought of. This is a very important matter in the question of abolition. There is no objection to the skin and features of the negro; it is only the luxury of having slaves, or their usefulness for heavy work, which weighs in the scale against abolition. [/QUOTE]From: http://www.gutenberg.org/files/10355/10355.txt Many of the books I have read from the 1800s often depict Morocco as having more blacks than you see among the general population today. The point of this thread is to show that all of these blacks were not just Africans from the South and that some were indeed in Morocco from the beginning. Trying to act as if Morocco was some sort of mixed ethnic population from historic times is to over simplify this issue. The populations there now have been impacted by many migrations of Europeans and Eurasians, but the first migrants to this area were undoubtedly black Africans. The racism in Muslim Africa is as real as it was in America and Europe, but much of Islam's history of slavery, including the role of blacks in the slave trade, is underdocumented, thereby painting a false picture of "racial" harmony in Morocco. As I said before, the official government portraits of the Kings of Alouite are almost all depicted as whites, even though many of them are recorded as being dark skinned. This is no coincidence and it does have to do with black versus white. Some of you need to read your history and stop trying to sugar coat it. What is done is done, you cannot change the past, but it is not necessary to distort it and lie about the bad things that happened, because they did happen and are part of the reason for things being the way they are today. [/QB][/QUOTE]
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